Public and Private Categories

Setup Different Types of Knowledge Bases with PHPKB Software

PHPKB knowledge base software is undoubtedly useful for your internal and external clients. It allows you to set up a public (external) as well as a private (internal) knowledge base and that too with a single copy of the software. While the external knowledge base serves your customers and public users, the internal knowledge base is a great tool for your customer service technicians (internal staff).

Public Categories

You can set a public-facing knowledge base with the help of PHPKB knowledge base software's public categories. The information posted under public categories is available to anyone, i.e. it doesn't require any login to access the information. Therefore, it can be very useful if you want to set a self-help knowledge base for your customers.

Private Categories

PHPKB knowledge base also comes with the support of private categories, which helps you set up an enclosed knowledge base. To access any information posted under these categories, a user must not only login to the knowledge base but should also be assigned to user-groups having access to these categories. These categories are very useful if you want to set up a knowledge base for your internal team, partners, or both (with the help of user groups).

Protected Articles

The software also offers the facility to have protected articles that can only be accessed by logged-in users. It is not mandatory that a user should be assigned to some user group to access these contents just a login is required.

Content Access Rights

The below diagram showcase the access rights of different types of users to different types of content.

• Visitors (Without Knowledge Base Accounts) could access only public articles.
• Logged-in users with no groups could access all public documents and protected articles.
• Group 1 users (logged-in users assigned to Group 1) could access all public documents, all protected documents, and private contents (private categories and articles) associated with Group 1 but can't access the private contents of Group2.
• Group 2 users (logged-in users assigned to Group 2) could access all public documents, all protected documents, and private contents (private categories and articles) associated with Group 2 but can't access the private contents of Group1.

Many businesses use PHPKB knowledge base software for their customers and clients, which gives a huge boon to customer service. However, PHPKB knowledge management software can also be used for improving their internal operations.

What is an internal knowledge base?

An internal company knowledge base (an internal KB) is an employee knowledge base created by an organization for internal use. Organisations have a wealth of information and procedures that employees need to know and follow. For example, a customer support team needs to look for knowledge documents to provide necessary information to customers and they can benefit from an internal knowledge base because the information is centralized in one place and employees can get the correct information they need, right when they need it. This would increase employees' efficiency and customer satisfaction both — definitely a win-win situation for any company.

How to set an internal knowledge base with PHPKB?

You can set an internal knowledge base system by using user groups and private categories. You can create groups of knowledge base users so they can access the private knowledge content assigned to their user group. You can set flexible group-based category permissions (as shown below) for granular control over your entire knowledge base.