11|Knowledge Base and FAQ
February 21st, 2006 by Marcel Ursprung
Information Management is a very broad term, encompassing a broad range of applications. This week we will focus on Personal Information Management. While most of these products are intended for business use, the focus here will be on the personal application of each system. For most people the key considerations for a personal use system is price, and ease of use. All the products here are under $150.00 per year. Here are a few different types of Information Management Systems: Knowledge base and FAQ, Content Management Systems (CMS) and Bookmark managers. First we will look at Knowledge Base and FAQ Applications. Some of these products also double as customer support centers, and ticketing systems.
ActiveKB
http://www.interspire.com/activekb/
for $149.00 USD
This is a categorized knowledge base system with FAQ, that also doubles as a customer support center.
User Features:
Intuitive interface, print articles, email articles, rating, search, commenting, and article favorites.
Admin Features:
Article attachments, unlimited subdirectories, RSS feeds, WYSIWYG editor, Word glossary
Verdict:
Overall a nice system, but too pricey for the features offered.
FAQ Manager Pro
http://www.faq-manager-pro.com/
FAQ Manager Pro 3.0, Business License (One installation) for $69.95
This is a basic categorized knowledge base system with a nice FAQ.
User Features:
Plain interface, print articles, email articles, rating, search.
Admin Features:
Article attachments, subdirectories, simple WYSIWYG editor, statistics.
Verdict:
Easy to use system, good FAQ, good price.
KBase Manager
http://www.omnistarkbase.com/
Omnistar KBase Manager $49.95 one time fee (need your own server) or 9.95/month (hosted)
This is an FAQ system with basic categorized articles.
User Features:
Cluttered interface, print articles, email articles, search, commenting, and article favorites.
Admin Features:
Calendar, todo list, address book, subdirectories, simple WYSIWYG editor
Verdict:
Cluttered Interface but a nice overall feature set. The price is just right.
Lore
http://pineappletechnologies.com/products/lore/
Lore is $99.95 per license
Lore is an PHP Knowledge Base solution.
User Features:
Easy interface, print articles, email articles, rating, basic search, commenting, word glossary.
Admin Features:
confusing interface, article attachments, subdirectories, WYSIWYG editor
Verdict:
Nice user front end, but admin section not so pleasant. Too pricey for the features offered.
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09|Direction and Information Management
February 20th, 2006 by Marcel Ursprung
As you can see I have already managed to neglect this blog for a whole week. When I started it 2 weeks ago I promised myself I wouldn’t let that happen this time around. I’m not too hard on myself though, as this past week has been very productive for me. Although I don’t have much to show for it, at least not in the literal sense, since most of the week was spent researching and planning the future of this site. I also had some time for soul searching and just plain thinking. So with all this info and excitement I feel like my head is about to explode. I better start putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), before I lose this great feeling.
With that said, I went and finished the website… or better put, I uploaded all the appropriate construction pages. My plan from here is to start posting a blog, about the same topic, every day of the week. At the end of the week I will combine all the posts into a weekly in-dept article about the selected topic. At that point I will select a new topic and start another week.
After about 2-3 weeks or until I am ready, I will put the articles into a podcast for downloading. The podcast will also be about the same topic that I discussed during the week.
Since this is the first week, the topic will be bookmarking software, knowledgebase tools, and anything else that will make it easier to save and find information in the future. I was inspired to write about this issue after having many difficulties organizing the many links that I have saved during the last week.
Information is the key not just for Internet Marketing, but all aspects of our lives. New developments happen every day and if you can’t keep up, you lose. It’s a key requirement that we all know how to deal with information overload, how to filter out the good and how to retrieve what we want in the future. By the end of the week, it is my goal to present you with a knowledgebase, bookmarking and information management tool that will not only save you time, but also gives you a competitive advantage.
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08|New blog template
February 13th, 2006 by Marcel Ursprung
As you can see I ‘ve made my own template for the blog. It turns out I wasn’t really satisfied with what the predefined templates had to offer so I created my own. Overall I’m fairly happy with the end result, but it did take a little longer to make than I wanted to. I’m sure a lot of web designers will agree with me, that CSS can be tricky business primarily when it comes to browser compatibility. I know there are still a few issues that need to be fixed for IE. I also need to do a comprehensive test of this layout in browsers other than IE and Firefox. But as it stands this new template gives me everything I was looking for. Including scalability for some of the great things I want to add to this blog.
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04|Themes and other good stuff
February 10th, 2006 by Marcel Ursprung
I’ve been searching for 2 hours now… After going through all the themes in the WordPress theme viewer, I have yet to find the theme base that I wanted to use for this site. I never thought it would be so time consuming to find what I’m looking for. Let me show you my requirements:
- flexible width
- center aligned
- 2-3 columns (main column on the left)
- doesn’t break when window is too small, (like many CSS right column designs do)
Doesn’t sound so bad right? Well believe me it doesn’t exist, the only one that came close was the theme “arzel”. However it wasn’t center aligned, but it might be easily done with CSS alone. I haven’t had a chance to look at the source yet. So I might use that as a base for the PHP templates that go along with every theme. We’ll see.
At least I was able to finalize the design in Photoshop last night, so the new theme might be up tonight or tomorrow depending how well everything goes together.
I also found some good plugins that I can’t wait to try out. One for pod casting was particularly interesting, more on this in my next post. Now I’m off to work.
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03|First entry
February 6th, 2006 by Marcel Ursprung
It might be a day or two before I start writing anything interesting as I’m still in the process of testing out this setup.
Things to do:
- Setup my own template
- Make sure permalinks are working (not sure how to test it. yet)
- Check what’s wrong with the RSS feed button…
- Add some blog links
- Think about what this blog will be about
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