Create a Helpdesk Knowledge Base in SharePoint 2013

Question

I have a requirement to implement a knowledge base for help desk in SharePoint 2013. The help-desk will use this SharePoint app to search quickly and provide the user with a resolution themselves with additional information on the related documentation on the issue and contact details.

Every week the help-desk will generate a list of all the tickets with their resolution with few other details about the application the issue belongs to, severity and few more. This list is consolidated by another team, that removes duplicates and filters the tickets with resolution and sends it to me in an excel. I will upload this excel into SharePoint and this is the input to the SharePoint Knowledge base. I also have two other lists, in which one holds the contact details for an application (for eg: Meeting Booking (Java) - Contact John Smith - Phone xxxxx), the other is the Document Library that holds documentation for the applications (for eg: Meeting Booking (Java) - Document 1, Document 2, DOcument 3..)

When the help-desk gets a user issue, the app that I build will have a comprehensive search that will bring the appropriate results from these three lists and put them together for the help desk personnel to suggest and guide the user with a possible solution.

Now, my approach to build this is to create a separate site called Help Desk Knowledge Base and have these three lists in the site, create a scope in SharePoint 2013 Search, for this site, create a Search App for this scope (configure the results) and have the Help-desk personnel use this SP 2013 Search App.

I would like to know if there is any other approach that I can take (by using SP 2013 search or not) please suggest if anyone has implemented this in a different way. Thanks.

Answer 1

Your approach look ok

1. Create a new site collection (this will be easier to maintain, backup, restore etc)
2. Create those three lists
3. Create result sources at site collection level. These sources will give you the exact results you are looking for (You can use KQL queries)
4. Create display templates to display result in a better format
5. Use Content Search WebPart and apply the display templates

Also try to leverage Managed Terms & Content Types.