New Knowledge Base template (Atlas 5.1+)

Atlas 5.1 introduces a new Knowledge Base Workspace template available for provisioning with ConneX. Read on to find out more.

In this article:

• Overview
• Create a Knowledge Base workspace from ConneX
• Edit and populate your Knowledge Base
  • Add documents
  • Add pages
    • Directory pages
    • Subject pages
      
      

Overview

This template introduces specialised content types; "Knowledge Base Page" and "Knowledge Base Document", each enhanced with a "grading" column to provide users with a way to assess the value and accuracy of shared knowledge. For example you might have "Gold" graded knowledge which has been reviewed extensively and can be reused without worries, and "Silver", "Bronze" for information which is less heavily reviewed and may be less accurate or valuable.

Use this workspace template to build one or more centralised hubs for your information, with two new page templates available designed for clarity and ease of access: the Directory template organizes your resources for quick retrieval, while the Subject template allows for thematic grouping of knowledge.

Create a Knowledge Base workspace from ConneX

1. First, ensure that the related ConneX Studio templates are enabled. To find out about enabling and editing templates see here: Manage workspace templates in ConneX Studio. The templates you should consider activating, depending whether you want a Microsoft Team, are:
   • Knowledge Base Template (Teams) - includes a Microsoft Team for discussions
   • Knowledge Base Template (SharePoint) - SharePoint workspace only.
2. Once the desired template is activated, you can now go to ConneX and start creating a new workspace.

Edit and populate your Knowledge Base

Now that you have provisioned your Knowledge Base you can start to add content, edit the homepage and add more pages if needed. Your homepage will be provisioned with some web parts such as a HoverPoint, Search centre using In Focus, ConneX card and Key Contacts:

The HoverPoint gives some context to the Knowledge Base and advice on how to use it. You could add, remove or edit this to your liking. Key Contacts and the Search experience are expected to be empty as you'll need to add content to populate them. You may not want to showcase the specific content types shown in the Verticals (Subjects, Documents, FAQs etc.) so you could remove some of these Verticals to slim down the experience.

For advice on editing Atlas pages you can see here: Editing Atlas pages using the Modern UI, Creating an engaging Atlas page - best practices

Add documents

To add documents, you can get started immediately by clicking the Submit Document button on the top right of the homepage. This will take you directly to submit a document using the Add It experience - at this stage you will not provide a Grading assessment. If you do not want users to submit content directly like this, you could remove this web part.

You can also use Add It to add documents as with any other workspace (as long as you didn't disable this when creating the workspace). You'll notice that as well as the standard Documents option you have a new one called Published. The Published library is the one where you will provide a Grading with each document to rate the quality.

Part of setting up your Knowledge Base is determining how you will manage submitted documents - we expect that users will upload content to Documents, it will then be assessed by someone from your Knowledge team, and if accepted moved to the Published library and given a Grading. This could be done manually using the Move to function in the Documents library, or you could build a Power Automate flow to notify assessors of new documents and deal with the publishing if accepted.

Add pages

To create pages, go to Add It as usual from the top right in the Atlas menu. When selecting Site Pages you will see the usual templates as well as the two new ones:

Directory pages

Directory pages are set up to return search results. This is a basic page which you'll want to configure by setting the Layout and Item Styles for the In Focus Results web part to match the content, and also by configuring additional Verticals to help users find what they are looking for. It is already configured with the Filters web part to save you time. As you add content to the workspace this will be populated into the directory. 

Subject pages

Subject pages are also set up to return search results, but only the results related to a specific Subject that is meaningful to your organisation. This is achieved by tagging the page with a Subject that matches other content, so that all the tagged content is pulled into the search experience on this page. The template provides a number of search components similar to the Directory page, but it also includes a Text box to put a summary of the subject, Key Contacts to highlight subject area experts, and more Verticals by default to filter the content.