Knowledge Base Articles (KBAs) answer a specific issue or question. KBAs contain information about product defects, workarounds for problems, attachments, proposed fix dates, administrative information, white papers, and other types of information that is external to the product documentation.
KBAs are housed in a knowledge database. The knowledge base is used by customer service, customer support, and customer education teams. Knowledge base is a repository of information organized, shared, and utilized by stakeholders, such as customer service, customer support, product management, and technical writers.
KBAs can be aimed at internal or external audiences and can serve different purpose. Let us look at some of the KBA types.
How-to articles describe steps to complete a specific task. These articles explain how to do something and should be focused on a single task.
Known issue articles describe a known product defect. These articles include description of the issue, impact, root cause, and workaround of the issue.
Troubleshooting articles describe a specific issue and provide a solution. These articles should focus on a specific problem.
Informational articles describe a feature or a functionality. These articles provide information to educate the user.
The product team informs you that a High severity issue has been introduced. This issue did not exist in any previous versions. Due to time constraints, the issue resolution must be deferred. In this scenario, you can write a KBA to explain the issue, and include any available workaround. The KBA can also include the possible release when a solution will be implemented.
The product team identifies a high severity defect soon after a release is shipped. Since the product now includes the defect that would be encountered by the user, you can write a KBA to explain the issue, and a possible workaround.
If any files need to be made available to users or services or support teams to use advanced features in a product.
If a feature requires configurations that must be completed by trained support or services staff and by the users themselves. Since these configurations shouldn’t be performed by the users, the instructions cannot be included in the end-user documentation.