Software to create a knowledge base/FAQ system

Question

Our company is looking to build a web-based knowledge base system that can be used by our clients/end users to reduce the amount of support calls.

Couple important notes:

• This is aimed at our end users, in other words, non-techies. So the UI has to be easy to use
• Should have the excellent (fast, accurate) search
• Should have ability to rate and comment on articles
• This will only be maintained by one or 2 people, so security isn't a big concern

Something similar to what Microsoft is doing with their Knowledge Base. http://support.microsoft.com/search/

Does anyone have any recommendations on what software I can use?

Thanks,

H.

Edit: I should have made this clear before but I don't mean build as in having our developers build a support/kb system from the ground up. I am looking to use a existing software package/solution that can be used to implement a knowledge base/support site.

Answer 1

I recommend TWiki.

Answer 2

How about using StackExchange?

Answer 3

Ok, I'm going to assume that you have some developers who are chomping at the bit to build a support / Q&A site from the ground up.

This is a really broad question. You could approach it in any number of ways with any number of technologies. Being a .Net developer, I'd opt for using either ASP.Net webforms or MVC with a Lucene.Net backend. Lucene provides very customisable and fast search indexing which would return good results to questions or topics performed by your users.

You could also consider using a pre-packaged content management system such as Oxite to handle all your actual documentation pages.

But regardless of which software you use, perhaps you need to be a little more explicit about your user requirements, UI requirements, editability and hosting platform? As I said, it's a very open question.