What is a knowledgebase?

[iand]

Hi, I've been asked to look into creating a Knowledgebase for our product.
Unfortunately Knowledgebase seems a very ill defined term. Am I correct in thinking it's basically Webhelp (HMTL or HTML5) with a comment feature? Is there anything else that I am missing, can anyone give a list features that are must haves/nice to haves? Is it essential that comments are displayed for other users or is it sufficient to just have a mechanism to send these comments to the technical author? Madcap's feedback product seems a good fit but my company's security requirements are such that this may not be an option. Does anyone have any experience rolling their own Knowledgebase without using Feedback using e.g Javascript and some server side code. I used to be a developer so can probably throw something together although it's unlikely to be very elegant!
Thanks for your help.
Ian

[RamonS]

A commenting feature is a nice addition, but I don't consider it a necessary feature for a knowledge base. A knowledge base provides procedures and solutions that are not covered by help because these cases are exceptions, appear under special conditions, apply to older/single versions of the application, or document alternative uses for outputs (like Tips & Tricks). Plus anything that might be useful to more than one person and somewhat relates to the product. The main purpose of a knowledge base is to push information and knowledge from those who know to those who don't know but need or want to using a single, long term location.

[iand]

Thanks Ramon, that's a much narrower definition than I had in mind and possibly narrower than my boss had in mind as well. Good to know.
Cheers
Ian

[LTinker68]

If you'd like real-world examples, you can try the following:

Flare v10 Online Help -> http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare10/Default.htm
MadCap Knowledge Base -> http://kb.madcapsoftware.com/

If you compare them side-by-side, you'll see how they differ somewhat in scope, categories of topics, tone used in the topics, and so on. Some content in a KB may eventually make it into the help, but the KB is more incident- or situation-specific than the help, with solutions for those incidents or situations.

[iand]

Thanks for the links Lisa, apologies for the delay in replying.