Knowledge Base Best Practice for Attachments

[JimCheffer]

We are expanding our use of the knowledge base and the discussion about attachment document type comes up. Some people like PDF versus Word document. PDF looks nice but then we need to store the Word document somewhere. Has anyone discovered a best practice in this area. We would like knowledge to be the one source of truth so keeping the Word document with the article makes sense. Our knowledge makers will be about 5 people so control is not a big issue. Anyone out there run across this issue. Also any Knowledge best practices out there as well. Thanks in advance.  

[jeffsmith182]

We've reluctantly used attachments within the Knowledge Base because, as servicenowkevin suggests, it turns the Knowledge Base into a structured repository for all sorts of docs.   Our experience says that the Knowledge Base works, but it becomes a little harder to keep an eye on the details within larger docs.
You have to imagine asking teams to look at their Knowledge Article and then all attachments within it.
We found that this ended up being too much for some teams.  

If each doc/pdf was within it's own Knowledge Article, then this becomes a little easier, but then you have the job of linking one Knowledge Article to another and this isn't a great idea as hyperlinks only really work in one direction.

We have looked at the Managed Documents (MD's) plug in and it looks like it is much more appropriate for document management.

We've figured out that you can relate the Docs from here to Knowledge Articles, and we're hoping to find a way to make an easy dynamic link (m2m???) between Managed Documents from within specific Knowledge Articles (not just as a related list).

If/when we get round to implementing this, I'd be happy to share our experiences with MD's.

Also, if anyone else has already had a go at this, we'd love to hear about it.

[ItzJulia]

I would definitely be interested in your experience with managed docs.   We are just now exploring it's use as we look for a versioning solution.

I agree with you, we found it much easier to create new KB articles and link them as parent /child rather than ask our helpdesk to search through several attachments.   Our attachments are mostly additional forms, approval lists or full manuals from which we pulled smaller bits to create the articles.  

[JimCheffer]

Yes I am looking at managed documents. We are planning to use text as much as possible to hopefully keep the information to the point. Large attachments would be for user manuals and reference material I hope. A one page attachment shoudd go in text. Linking knowledge articles together I never thought of. Our walk to knowledge has just started. Thanks forthe comments.

[colin_streeter]

One item related to attachments that caused us headaches is it's potential impact on the search functionality and search results when Indexing is enabled.

SMEs would send us 30-45 page user manuals, training docs, etc. and we would save them to general support KBs. Because we had indexing enabled, we had an influx of 'white noise' articles (articles that were not related to the searched keywords) due to them containing references to the keywords in the attachments.

Another issues we had was SMEs updating the articles but not reviewing the attachments.

Apologies as these are more policy/setting related and less technical, but felt there were worth mentioning.

[JimCheffer]

We are planning to publish small documents or paragraphes in the knowledge text rather than attaching. Yes we have large documents like user manuals and specifications that we plan to load and some will be available to IT only. Never thought of the noise but we don't have much out there yet. Thanks for comments.