You and your team frequently find yourself
solving the same issue over and over. Your end-users send
you emails on similar issues repeatedly. You wish you could
share your knowledge with team members so that everyone has
the same understanding and are communicating the same
message when asked about specific issues!
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Main Highlights: |
TeamKB for Microsoft® Outlook® is an enterprise-grade
knowledge base, allowing you and your team to share
information, reduce customer support, improve staff
productivity and eliminate time wasted searching for
information across disparate systems such as shared
folders and paper documents, all inside Outlook.
With TeamKB, your team can document best practices
and solutions to common problems and reply to
time-consuming and repeated queries from your users
in a click. |
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100%
Microsoft® Office Outlook1
integration. |
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Use an
Microsoft® Exchange shared
mailbox or a public folder. |
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No database
requirement - KB articles are stored in
your exchange server (supports hosted
exchange server too) |
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No file server
requirement - Only a simple client
install |
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Centralize
sharing of knowledge and documents |
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Find
information easily - Keywords and
advanced search options in Outlook
folder views |
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Multi-tier
problem category-problem types
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Custom define
the fields you wish to track within the
knowledge base |
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Workflows
for easy content approval and
publishing |
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Provide
customizable email alerts so that all
your team members are alerted as new KB
articles are posted |
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Use the same
exchange folder permissions to
grant/deny access to the KB articles |
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Use the
in-built access control mechanism in TeamKB to complement the exchange
permissions for enhanced control |
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Publish
KB
articles to your website for providing first level support
to your end-users (Try
a demo of Web KB) |
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Content
formatting with built-in editor
of Microsoft® Word, embed images and any number
of file
attachments |
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Email KB
article as DOC, MHT, PDF or XPS document
in single click! |
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Supports export of
KB articles to the
following document formats:
- Adobe Portable document (.pdf2)
- XML Paper Specification document (.xps2)
- Microsoft® Word document (.doc)
- Web-archive single page (.mht)
- Filtered webpage (.htm)
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1
Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007
2
Requires the 'Save PDF and XPS' add-on
installed for Microsoft® Office 2007
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Version:
2.0
Released: 14th August
2009
License:
30 days trial
Have any questions?
Email us: support@assistmyteam.net
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How does it work?
TeamKB system is installed as a COM-addin
for Microsoft® Outlook® 2003/2007, and uses an Exchange
resource such as a public folder or a shared mailbox, for
storing knowledge base articles and for enabling
collaboration throughout the organization.
Each published article in TeamKB is uniquely identified by a
number. Outlook views are used to arrange these KB articles
in the way, you want it. For example, the above view groups
the articles in multi-tiered categories and their
corresponding types such that it is easy to find the right
article under a problem type.
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As a knowledge base administrator, you can
create a list of authors, who would be allowed to post new
articles. To ease creation of authors list, you can import
users directly from Active Directory. Optionally, you can
specify if each author can have access to TeamKB
administrative settings as well as post new article and
publish it without needing proper approval from the editor. |
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The administrator would also define the problems list, which
is nothing, but a multi-tiered arrangement of categories and
types. Each category can have a list of types. Each type can
have a default editor assigned.
When a new article is posted by an author with non-admin
access, it would be put in the pending list and depending on
the problem selected, TeamKB would assign a default
editor, who will review the pending article and will
decide if to approve or reject. If it is approved,
it is published with a unique KB number. Email notifications
are then sent out automatically to the concerned
author o the status of the article. |
But when does these knowledge
base articles come to practical use?
Suppose, an
end-user send a support email regarding an issue that your
support team are already aware of. Typically, you will try
to compose the solution or would try to navigate to your
existing document libraries, search through the document,
and then copy the contents and paste over the reply email.
This not only waste time and efforts, but also destroys the
formatting of the article and if there were any attachments
or embedded images, they most probably won't make through
the email.
With TeamKB, what all the support staff has to
do, is to just click the 'reply with a KB' button available
in the Outlook toolbar. 
That would prompt you with a dialog box, that has all the
knowledge base articles arranged in category/type hierarchy
tree. It would then allow you to search/select a relevant
knowledge base article and then either, insert the content
(along with the attachments and embedded images) directly
into the reply email, or, even better, insert the select
article as a PDF/XPS/DOC document
attachment to the email.
If you select the 'Inline HTML' option, reply email with
the embedded knowledge base article would like this:
If you select other document format, such as PDF, the
selected knowledge base article will be automatically
converted to PDF, and it would be attached to the reply
email, just like below:
So what are the benefits?
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Improved customer support
By having a repository of knowledge,
your team can more quickly respond
to customer questions and issues. By
providing consistent answers to
questions and issues, your customer
is always assured of the right
answer and consistent communications.
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Reduced costs
As TeamKB leverages your existing Exchange and
Outlook resources, there is no extra
hardware/software cost that you will have to
incur in implementing an enterprise-wide
knowledge base for your team. As your team
members are already familiar with Outlook, there
is no requirement for any elaborate training,
further lowering the cost. As you have network
and Exchange administrators in place, you don't
require dedicated personnel for maintenance. And
the bigger advantage, in long-term, is the
reduced number of inbound customer support
questions, which will reduce the amount of time
it takes to respond to support issues. This can
reduce the number of support engineers needed,
thereby reducing costs to your support desk at
the long run.
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Extending the
Knowledge Base to your Customers
To maximize the use of your knowledge base,
TeamKB knowledge base articles can be published
to your company website (hosted under IIS) to
allow your customers to search your knowledge
base before calling in with questions. This can
eliminate unnecessary phone calls and allows
your clients to quickly get answers to
questions. When any of the existing knowledge
base articles are changed, or new ones added,
TeamKB can be set to automatically update the
website such that the changes or the new
articles are updated/published at the same time,
thus keeping the information in both the servers
- Exchange and the IIS, current and
synchronized, on demand.
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Utilizes
Existing IT skills with minimal need for
re-training
As TeamKB is based within the familiar
Microsoft Outlook interface, it is
easier to learn, ensuring a higher
adoption rate and easier integration
into your support structure. It also
allows your staff members to quickly
adapt and start using the system
immediately with little or no training
requirement.
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Flexible
Workflow Rules
In certain cases, knowledge base
articles that have been added or changed
require multiple people in various
departments to approve the new or
changed article. The TeamKB provides a
flexible method for automating and
keeping track of these approval tasks.
By
creating workflow rules on a
per-category/type basis, content
editors can receive email
notifications when an article is added
and/or changed. Approval/disapproval
emails can be sent automatically to
content authors/contributors informing them on
the status of their knowledge item.
The benefit is improved quality and
sharing of knowledge base articles.
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Create
custom variables and assign them to
articles as required
Custom fields are user-defined variables
that can be assigned to articles. Custom
fields can be searched and provide
additional depth and filter options to
articles in your knowledge base. Many
times, articles require more than simply
content. Using custom fields, you can
totally customize TeamKB to your
organizations specific needs and
provides an additional level of
filtration to users of your knowledge
base.
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Fast,
Accurate Search Results
Search through thousands of articles
using powerful full-text search
capabilities. All searches in your
knowledge base run on Outlook's
full-text search capability, which
provides extremely fast and incredibly
accurate search results. Each article in
a search result is ranked based on its
relevance, and results are sortable
based on ID, title, author, contributor,
editor and
date. TeamKB scales extremely well. More
experienced users will find TeamKB's
advanced search options appealing. You
can restrict searches based on
values of drop-down fields such as
problem
category-type, custom fields, author,
editor, created and modified dates.
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Complete
control over user access
You
have precise control over how users
interact with your knowledge base,
depending on the Exchange folder
rights they have. It's easy to
switch a users permissions - simply
change the exchange folder
permission for that user or group.
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Fast reply to
emails
Embed knowledge base article as PDF, XPS,
DOC or MHT documents in email reply with
just a click of a button. |
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