Use 3d party Knowledge Base tool

Status

Accepted

Context

A custom solution is used for operating knowledge base. There are 2 concerns for it:

It may be fine with respect to read and update operations, but we don’t know its limits in terms of search functionality. Ticket numbers are growing and we always need to give a good search experience to our experts.
Since the existing solution was developed in-house and not used widely, it may have bugs and cause bugfix needs - We want our developers to focus on the business part

Decision

Since knowledge base software needs (read-write-search) are almost the same for every company, we decided to decommission existing one and to onboard a knowledge base software which is extensively used and proven. Options were Confluence, wordpress with KB plugin, OpenKM. Considering cost, reliability, support, UX aspects, Confluence was selected.

Consequences

The new KB software needs to be installed
Existing knowledge base data needs to be stored/migrated into the new software’s database
Knowledge base references in ticket history data need to be replaced with new KB address