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CIMug > Knowledge Base

Info about the CIM Users Group Knowledge Base

Background

Development of a Knowledge Base has been a goal for the CIM User Group. We want to consolidate valuable documents in a central location where CIM users can sort, filter and search for the information they need. The same goal exists at the UCA International User Group level.

This goal involves two parts. The first is to have consistent document management in place across all the various working groups, projects, and task forces. Fortunately, our Sharepoint environment offers strong content management capabilities, including site-based versioning, checkout, etc. These capabilities are available in every document library on every subsite. Also, Sharepoint functionality must be enhanced in order for the system to collect metadata that is important to a knowledge base application (such as author, working group, keywords, meeting, etc.). Users must also be prompted to indicate whether or not a particular document should be available to other members at the CIMug and UCAIug levels.

The second requirement is a knowledge base application that can automatically retrieve the correct documents by referencing the document metadata and store them in the central document repository. This capability must also be easily configurable so that as new sites and new libraries are built, they can be easily included with minimum administrative effort.

Status

The first part of this functionality is working well. As site users upload documents to the libraries within their sub-sites, they are prompted for the required metadata. They are also prompted to designate whether each document is to be made publicly available on the CIMug knowledge base and/or the UCAIug knowledge base.

More importantly, what is NOT WORKING on this page is the roll-up functionality, by which documents are collected and stored in the central library. We have purchased a KB Roll-up Web Part, which does this roll-up and provides advanced filtering capabilities. Bamboo Solutions is the vendor of this web part. Bamboo is generally recognized as the leading vendor of third-party Sharepoint web parts and works closely with Microsoft to make sure their products perform well.

We are using Bamboo web parts in other parts of our environment. However, we are apparently among the first in their customer base to deploy it for roll-up across multiple Sharepoint sites. When rolling up KB-designated documents from sub-sites (which are different web applications), the links do not work on the rollup - they are using relative URLs instead of absolute. The current release functionality does not support this capability. We are working with Bamboo to build the functionality into an upcoming release.

There are documents showing on this page, but they are not current since the KB application has not been working. Documents in this location are for viewing - editing should occur within the library where the document was originally uploaded, so that those document management capabilities can be applied.

Thanks for your patience while we get this working.