Should your knowledge base be private, public, or a mix of both?

When you’re looking for knowledge base software, comparing tools and trying to figure out what your needs are can seem like a daunting task.

Two of the first questions we ask people when they start evaluating KnowledgeOwl are:

• What kind of information are you going to store in your knowledge base?
• Who needs access to it?

While these seem like fairly benign questions on the surface, they can help you start to surface a lot of the nuances in what your requirements might be, so they’re a great place to begin!

For example, if your knowledge base is going to hold information on your internal policies and procedures and be accessed only by your own employees, then you’d want a private knowledge base.

Alternatively, if your knowledge base will share company or product information with your customers, you’ll probably want at least some of it to be publicly available as a marketing tool.

So to start with:

Get really clear on the type of information your knowledge base will contain and who should have access to it.

If your audience is all one group and everyone needs access to the same things, then you’re likely looking at an entirely public or entirely private knowledge base.

But if you have multiple audiences who need access to it–especially if they’ll need access to different information–then you’re probably going to want some more detailed forms of access control.

Below, we dig into more of the nuances of all these scenarios and some of the key features you might want to look for.

Scenario 1: The totally public knowledge base

If your knowledge base will share company or product information with your customers and you’re comfortable having all of that information publicly available, go for a totally public knowledge base.

Public knowledge bases can serve the dual role of offering product or company support AND serving as a marketing tool.

Look for knowledge base providers that have good SEO/accessibility practices or functionality built-in AND allow you to format both the overall knowledge base and individual pages in ways that feel true to your brand.

If this is your scenario, look for knowledge base software that:

• Doesn’t require any type of login to view content
• Makes it easy for you to brand your knowledge base, so that it maintains a consistent look and feel with the rest of your company’s online presence
• Allows you to add a private domain
• Has thoughtful SEO tools, such as generating a sitemap, allowing you to add page title tags, meta descriptions, and/or social media images
• Offers you good ways to control your content layout, formatting, and appearance
• Has good accessibility practices
• Has solid search capabilities so that your public users can find what they need quickly and easily

Other factors that may be important:

• Do you need the knowledge base to integrate with your existing systems or products in some way? Nail down what those requirements are and be sure the providers you’re looking at can meet your needs.
• If your knowledge base includes explicit marketing content, it may mean that you have writers from different areas of your company creating content for it. Be sure to include those writers in your knowledge base evaluations to make sure the tool feels intuitive for all of your authors.

Scenario 2: The totally private knowledge base

If you have information that shouldn’t be available to the general public under any circumstances, then you’ll want to use a totally private knowledge base.

Knowledge bases in this category might contain information like:

• Your internal policies and procedures
• How to help or troubleshoot issues facing customers or your internal teams
• Internal templates for sales materials or marketing collateral
• Detailed information on what your company infrastructure is like or how your product is built/functions

First and foremost, if this is your scenario, look for knowledge base software that allows you to restrict access in a way that makes sense for your company.

This might include:

• Allowing everyone at specific IP addresses to access the knowledge base without having to enter credentials
• Using a single common shared password that everyone at the company shares
• Individual accounts created and administered entirely within the knowledge base software
• Integration with your Single Sign-On (SSO) provider so that employees can use the same credentials they use for your other systems to log in to the knowledge base

Consider what login style(s) seem appropriate for your company and use those as requirements for the tools you evaluate.

If this is your scenario, look for knowledge base software that:

• Supports the login type(s) or integration(s) that make sense for you
• Has solid search capabilities so that your employees can quickly and easily find the things they need
• Allows you to organize content in ways that make sense for your company, whether that’s by product line, team, department, and so on
• Are truly private; you want to be absolutely sure that a search engine can’t somehow index your private content!

Other factors that may be important:

• If you have multiple teams or departments in a single knowledge base, do you need to be able to restrict access so that those teams can’t see each other’s content?
• If so, look for tools that support this type of content restriction or segregation.
• For example, KnowledgeOwl uses a concept called “Reader Groups” for this.
• If you have multiple teams or departments all sharing information in a single knowledge base, should the people authoring content be able to see and/or edit content belonging to other teams or departments?
• Some tools allow all authors to edit all content; other tools support restricting who can edit some or all pieces of content.
• For example, KnowledgeOwl uses a concept called “Author Teams” for this.
• Do you need to be able to track the history of content changes for compliance or legal reasons? (This is often the case for internal policies and procedures.)
• If so, look for tools that provide full content revision history, tracking of who made which changes, or provide a robust review/approval process so you can better control who can make changes at various points in the content life cycle.
• Do you have requirements on how often certain policies or procedures must be reviewed or updated?
• If so, look for tools that offer features that can automatically flag content that hasn’t been updated in a certain time or set content update schedules or reminders to ensure you’ve updated things on the required schedule.
• If you need your knowledge base to integrate with other tools your employees use, like a helpdesk ticketing system or a company intranet, be sure that the tools you’re considering do offer those integrations.
• If employees need to know when content is updated or published, consider looking for features like Slack or Teams integrations, email notifications of new content, or webhooks that fire when certain events occur. All of these offer various ways to keep your employees informed when updates come out.
• For internal policies or procedures, do you need to track who’s read something as part of a compliance or oversight process?
• If so, look for knowledge base providers that offer this type of functionality.

Scenario 3: The mixed public-private knowledge base

But what if your knowledge base doesn’t fit neatly into either of the previous scenarios? What if you have some content you want to be available publicly, and some that you want to require login?

In this scenario, make sure you have a clear understanding of how much content you have that you want to be available publicly or privately.

For example, some tools allow you to have a public landing page but restrict all other pages. Others allow you to totally control which pages are publicly available.

The most common layout here is to have some sections that are available publicly and others that are totally private. But, for example, if you’re sharing your product information in a knowledge base and you gatekeep features based on plan or product level, you might want to be able to offer “teaser” pages or partial search results to entice people to upgrade. If that’s a need, be sure you’re looking for tools that do this!

If this is your scenario, you’re mostly looking for something that matches a subset of all the above needs. Look for knowledge base software that:

• Makes it easy for you to brand your knowledge base, so that it maintains a consistent look and feel with the rest of your company’s online presence
• Allows you to add a private domain
• Has thoughtful SEO tools, such as generating a sitemap, allowing you to add page title tags, meta descriptions, and/or social media images
• Offers you good ways to control your content layout, formatting, and appearance
• Has good accessibility practices
• Provides login mechanisms that make sense for your company, whether that’s a VPN/IP address, a remote authentication login so that you can integrate the login with your product’s login, Single Sign-On (SSO) integrations to automatically log your employees in, or even the ability for interested prospects to request access to private content.
• Provides content viewing restrictions that make sense for you, whether that’s a simple public vs. private control or a more nuanced restriction that allows you to set which individuals or groups can see specific content.
• Provides authoring restrictions that make sense for you, so that your support team isn’t accidentally editing Human Resources policies.
• Provides integrations to the tools you or your customers use, ways to keep people informed of updates, and so on.

Know what you need–and when you need it

Last but not least: it’s entirely possible that you might “try out” a knowledge base in one form with the long-term goal to use it in other ways, such as starting out with a totally public knowledge base and then gradually adding some restricted content, or beginning with individual logins that the knowledge base manages with a long-term view toward integrating with your Single Sign-On (SSO) provider.

While you don’t need to have a tool that does everything everywhere all at once, if you know for sure that next year you’ll need to integrate with your SSO provider, be sure the tools you’re looking at actually can integrate with that SSO provider so you aren’t repeating this process in a year.

Finding the right tool for the job

To help you with your evaluation, we’ve created a free knowledge base software comparison tool. Use this tool to quickly compare different knowledge base software on features like restricted access control, branding/custom theme, and more. You can access it here: https://www.knowledgeowl.com/private-knowledge-base-comparison-tool

Purpose-built knowledge base software like KnowledgeOwl and others in this comparison tool can offer the flexibility and feature sets that you need to author, edit, and share the information you have with the people who need it most. Don’t let the process itself discourage you; having that single source of truth really does make life better!