V1 Team Knowledge Base For Outlook & SharePoint An add-in for Microsoft Outlook that enables you and your team to use KB articles stored on SharePoint lists to reply to support emails in Outlook seamlessly Help Manual Bahrur Rahman AssistMyTeam SMB Solutions
Team Knowledge Base 2 Index 1. Introduction 2. Requirements 3. Purpose of this add-in 4. Features 5. Installation & Configuration 5.1 Installation for Admin Tool 5.1.1 Administrative Configuration setup KB settings data source 5.1.2 Choosing SharePoint KB Lists and Mappings 5.2 Installation for Users 5.2.1 Client Configuration connect to KB settings data source 6. Accessing KB articles from Outlook and inserting to email replies 7. Publishing new KB articles directly from emails in Outlook 8. So what are the benefits? 9. Removing Team KnowledgeBase 10 Important Links
Team Knowledge Base 3 Why implement a knowledge base? You and your team frequently find yourself solving the same issue over and over. Your end-users send you emails on similar issues repeatedly. You wish you could share your knowledge with team members so that everyone has the same understanding and are communicating the same message when asked about specific issues! Yes, a knowledge management system is what you need, where all the best practices of your businesses, operations and assets are documented, and are accessible at the enterprise level to all your team members. Other factors that demand for a knowledge management system for your organization: Rising rate of innovation and increasing competition in marketplaces To replace informal knowledge with format methods, especially, when the organization is understaffed Competitive pressures reduce the size of workers that holds valuable business knowledge. To help new workers to experience and acquire knowledge in the shortest time. Early retirements and increasing mobility of the work force lead to loss of knowledge. Need to manage increasing complexity as business operations become globalized. Changes in strategic direction may result in the loss of knowledge in a specific area. Retaining knowledge when employees leave or change positions As most of our work is information based, it is imperative that organizations maintain a structured library of information and solutions, such that, the knowledge system provides access to right information, at the right time, to the right workers in need. In brief, knowledge and information have become the medium in which business problems occur. As a result, managing knowledge represents the primary opportunity for achieving substantial savings, significant improvements in human performance, and competitive advantage.
Team Knowledge Base 4 1. Introduction Team KnowledgeBase for Outlook & SharePoint is installed as a COM-addin for Microsoft Outlook 2003/2007/2010, and uses one or more SharePoint lists, for storing and sharing knowledge base articles throughout the organization. Team KnowledgeBase add-in makes it very easy for support staff to search and locate a knowledge base article relevant to a customer issue from within Outlook, and insert it to the outgoing email reply as PDF file attachment, or embed as inline content or as hyperlink URL. All these without requiring switching back and forth between Outlook and SharePoint. Team KnowledgeBase can help your support team to reduce customer support, improve staff productivity and eliminate time wasted searching for information across disparate systems such as shared folders and paper documents, all inside Outlook As your support team all use Microsoft Outlook, every day, all the time, to attend to emails from endusers, Outlook needs to do more than just acting as a simple email-client! Team KnowledgeBase extends your Outlook to provide better interaction between you and your knowledge base, transforming it into an information-based, interaction-driven and easy to use collaboration tool. With such functionalities in Outlook, your team can document best practices and solutions to common problems and reply to timeconsuming and repeated queries from your users in a click, thereby, reducing service response time, enabling effective collaboration and overall productivity for your team.
Team Knowledge Base 5 2. Purpose You and your support team frequently find trying to solve the same issue over and over. Your end-users send you emails on similar issues repeatedly. And if you are already aware of the solution, typically, you will try to compose the solution or if you have vague recollection of it, you would try to navigate to your existing document libraries, past emails etc. Just consider, how much time and effort you had wasted in trying to find the right information at the moment of need, not to mention the delayed response to the support request. You wish you could share your knowledge on a centralized information system with other team members so that everyone has the same understanding and are communicating the same message when asked about specific issues. Many IT managers resort to using SharePoint lists to document best practices and solutions to common problems, in the form of KB articles, because of the easy accessibility and collaborative capability. So, when a support request email is received in Outlook, support staffs would generally go to the SharePoint lists and browse or search through the KB articles tier. If a relevant article is found, either the staff would rewrite the solution from scratch into the email, or copy the contents from a SharePoint site to the email reply, in a crude fashion. In the midst of this, the formatting, inline images and other attachments of the particular KB article do not make it to the email. After putting much effort and time, you still don t get the complete KB article inserted into the email reply. Moreover, the frequent switching back and forth between the email client and the SharePoint site tends to loosen focus of the support staff, leaving him or her frustrated. Evidently, organizations and teams that leverage SharePoint as knowledge base would need to reinvent the wheel and implement an efficient way of importing SharePoint based article or document, to outgoing email reply.
Team Knowledge Base 6 Team Knowledge Base is designed to bridge this gap between your email client such as Outlook and your SharePoint lists where all your knowledge base articles are stored, such that you can effortlessly locate a KB article (stored on SharePoint) relevant to an issue from within Outlook itself, and insert it into an outgoing email reply in a single click. All these and more making sure, the outgoing email retains all the actual files and the original formatting of the selected KB article. No more frequent switching between Outlook and SharePoint, no more copy-paste job etc.
Team Knowledge Base 7 3. Major Features Seamless Microsoft Outlook 1 and SharePoint 2 integration. No database requirement - KB articles are stored in your SharePoint server (supports hosted SharePoint such as Office 365) Use any number of SharePoint lists as source repositories for storing KB articles No file server requirement - Only a simple client install Centralized administration, configuration and deployment of SharePoint lists and field mappings for all workgroup users. Find relevant KB article fast - Keywords search options from within Outlook Grouping of KB articles in multi-tier categories and types for easy locating of relevant article effortlessly in Outlook Use the existing SharePoint site or list permissions to grant/deny access to the KB articles Inserted KB article in an email reply in Outlook, preserves the original formatted content, embed images and files attachments, if any. Directly insert chosen KB article as inline content into the email reply Insert the hyperlink URL of the chosen KB article into the email reply Email chosen KB article as file attachment in the following document formats: Adobe Portable document (.pdf) XML Paper Specification document (.xps) Microsoft Word document (.doc) Web-archive single page (.mht) Filtered webpage (.htm) Special MSI installer available for enterprise wide deployment (upon request) Support for Office 2010 and Office 365 1 Outlook 2003/2007/2010 (32 bit) 2 WSS 2, WSS 3, MOSS, SharePoint Foundation 2010, SharePoint Server 2010 (Also supports SharePoint hosted in Clouds such as Microsoft SharePoint Online part of Office 365 etc.)
Team Knowledge Base 8 4. Requirements Team KnowledgeBase is available right inside your Outlook as an add-in process. It can be easily deployed through an installer (manually or via a group policy object with MSI) across the entire organization. Please make sure that your system meets the following requirements before installing Team KnowledgeBase for Outlook and SharePoint: Windows Version For non-office 365 SharePoints Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP. Both 32 and 64 bits are supported For Office 365 SharePoints Windows Vista SP2 or above, Windows 7, Windows 2008 Server (32 and 64 bits) Outlook Version Outlook 2010 (32 bit only), Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2003 (SP2 or above). Team KnowledgeBase operates directly inside the Microsoft Outlook application (using Microsoft's "COM add-in" technology). Outlook Express is not supported. SharePoint Version Microsoft.NET Framework Windows Identity Foundation (required only for use with Office 365 SharePoint) WSS 2.0, 3.0, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010. Office 365 and other Cloud based SharePoints are also supported. 3.5 or above Optional. Only for Office365 based SharePoints. This component is required to be installed on the system if Team KnowledgeBase is interfaced with Office 365 SharePoint lists. You can download and install this component from below: For Vista 32 bit (Windows6.0-KB974405-x86.msu) For Vista 64 bit (Windows6.0-KB974405-x64.msu) For Windows 7 32 bit (Windows6.1-KB974405-x86.msu) For Windows 7 64 bit (Windows6.1-KB974405-x64.msu)
Team Knowledge Base 9 5. Installation Team KnowledgeBase for Outlook & SharePoint is a groupware solution consisting of two portions Admin and User install. The Admin install is for managers and administrators, who would perform the global configuration of the knowledge base, choose and setup SharePoint KB lists, and map fields between Outlook and SharePoint. The User install is for individual staff that will be making use of the KB articles stored in one or more of the Administrator chosen SharePoint lists, from Outlook. Note that, User install is a subset of Admin Install, and hence, if you have installed the admin tool, you need not install the User tool. Before you and other users can start using SharePoint based KB articles in Outlook to insert into email replies, you need to install the Admin tool (for configuring a centralized configuration) and the User tool. You can download it from http://www.assistmyteam.net/teamknowledgebasesp/download.asp NOTE: We also have a MSI version of the installers for both the Admin and the User add-in. You can download these setups from the download page.
Team Knowledge Base 10 5.1 Admin Installation and Configuration Step by step procedure is given below: Step 1. Run the TeamKBSPAdminSetup.exe to start the installation. Click Next to Continue. If Outlook 2003 (SP2 or above) or later is not installed, the setup wizard will not be able to proceed. Please also ensure Outlook is shutdown (if already running or active in the task manager) as the setup has to install an Outlook add-in. Step 2. Select the appropriate destination folder where the application files will be installed. If you change the default folder path, please make sure you have appropriate permission. (Note: by default, it will be installed under your program files folder)
Team Knowledge Base 11 Step 3. Once you have verified the previous steps, click Next to continue the files extraction. It may take a few minutes to complete the whole copying process Step 4. Click 'Finish' to proceed to the server configuration in Microsoft Outlook. This ends the files installation process in your system.
Team Knowledge Base 12 5.1.1 Administrative Configuration The next step is for the administrator to choose a SharePoint site, under which a new list TeamKBSettings would be created, to store the KB metadata, mappings and other configuration data. This special list will act as a central KB settings data source, so that support staffs scattered in different geographical locations can still access the mappings and other administrative defined configurations by all members of the support staffs. Why store the KB settings in a special SharePoint list? Because your team members can be scattered in different geographical locations, and might not have access to the company s local network remotely, using a network database or shared folder won t be feasible. Instead, in Team KnowledgeBase system, the KB configuration and settings data are stored in a special SharePoint list (having the name 'TeamKBSettings') which is accessible to all staffs, on the local network, WAN or via the WWW. In short, this list will act as a KB Settings data source, and other users with their Team KnowledgeBase User add-in would connect to it. Click 'Browse...' to specify the SharePoint site where the 'TeamKBSettings' list will be created (or located, in case it is already been configured or created previously).
Team Knowledge Base 13 Enter the SharePoint URL site to show all available sub-sites and lists. Select the particular site to which the Settings list would be created, and then click Confirm Once you click Save, this KB settings list will be automatically created in the chosen SharePoint site, when the manager configures the admin tool the first time. Team KnowledgeBase user add-in installed on the support staff's system would then connect to it and retrieve the KB mappings and other settings data to the local system automatically.
Team Knowledge Base 14 5.1.2 Choosing SharePoint KB Lists and Mappings Before you and other staffs can start searching and choosing KB articles from SharePoint and insert to outgoing email replies in Outlook, the KB Administrator needs to choose destination SharePoint lists where the KB articles will be collected and shared. It is followed by fields mapping between the Outlook mail and SharePoint list. A mapping is nothing but an association between an Outlook field (e.g., subject of the mail item) to a specific SharePoint list field (e.g., Title). You have complete control over which data goes to the SharePoint list from Outlook. Each KB article can also be tagged with a Category and Type. Typically, administrator will gather all the problem areas that the support team will be attending to and feed them into the categories list. Further, each category can have its own list of types. So, what you have will be nested tiers of categories/types which are complete representation of your organization's support model and act as somewhat of a guiding decision tree for publishing and searching KB articles.
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Team Knowledge Base 16 5.2 User Installation and Configuration Step by step procedure is given below: Step 1. Run the TeamKBSPUserSetup.exe to start the installation. Click Next to Continue. If Outlook 2003 (SP2 or above) or later is not installed, the setup wizard will not be able to proceed. Please also ensure Outlook is shutdown (if already running or active in the task manager) as the setup has to install an Outlook add-in. Step 2. Select the appropriate destination folder where the application files will be installed. If you change the default folder path, please make sure you have appropriate permission. (Note: by default, it will be installed under your program files folder)
Team Knowledge Base 17 Step 3. Once you have verified the previous steps, click Next to continue the files extraction. It may take few minutes to complete the whole copying process Step 4. Click 'Finish' to proceed to the server configuration in Microsoft Outlook. This ends the files installation process in your system.
Team Knowledge Base 18 5.2.1 User Configuration Connect to KB settings data source Once installed, the user will be prompted to specify the KB Settings Data Source, which is nothing, but a special SharePoint list having the title 'TeamKBSettings', which was configured previously by your administrator. If the Set KB Settings Data Source panel does not show up, you can invoke from the My Options menu > Set KB Settings Data Source Click 'Browse...' to specify the SharePoint site where the 'TeamKBSettings' list is located Screenshot: The SharePoint list chooser dialog box, where it shows all the available sub-sites and their lists displayed in hierarchical order. Enter the SharePoint URL site to show all available sub-sites and lists. If your administrator had already configured Team KnowledgeBase, there would be a list 'TeamKBSettings' that stores KB configurations
Team Knowledge Base 19 including destination SharePoint lists and their corresponding mapping settings. Select that list to maintain a permanent link between the Team KnowledgeBase User add-in and the KB data source. This list is automatically created when the administrator configures the admin tool for the first time. Team KnowledgeBase User add-in installed on the staff's system would then connect to it and retrieve the KB logic and settings data to the local system automatically. What does the KB Settings Data Source list store? Administrator specified SharePoint KB lists, fields mapping, drop down lists for problem categories and types are some of the settings that are stored in this 'KB Data Source' list.
Team Knowledge Base 20 6. Accessing KB articles from Outlook and inserting to email replies Even though KB articles are stored on your SharePoint list, every technician can make use of it in Microsoft Outlook to reply to emails in a snap. When you navigate to any Outlook mail folder, the Team KnowledgeBase toolbar and ribbon are available in the Outlook explorer and inspector window. With the Reply with a KB button, you can choose one of the relevant KB articles directly for replying to tickets or emails. Here is a KB article that we will choose to insert into an email reply in Outlook. And here is a support request email. If there is a KB article that already addresses the issue, you can simply click Reply with a KB button.
Team Knowledge Base 21 A pop-up dialog box allows you to browse through the existing knowledge base articles, and select the relevant article to be embedded either as attachment, inline or as URL into the email reply.
Team Knowledge Base 22 You can select from which particular SharePoint list the KB articles should show up in the tree view for selection. You can choose the last option All to load KB articles from all the configured SharePoint KB Lists. You can make use of a filter, to refine your search. For example, you can display the KB articles listing by specifying a problem category and/or a type. Alternatively, you can also specify keywords for a full text search such that matching KB articles that meet the criteria are only displayed, for selection. Selected KB article can be applied or inserted into the replied email in varied format. You can choose to insert as attachment in the form of a word document (*.doc), Adobe PDF (*.pdf), Microsoft XPS (*.xps) or as single file MHTML (*.mht). You can also embed the selected KB article directly into the body of the email reply. Any inline images and formatting are preserved in its original state in the reply also.
Team Knowledge Base 23 Alternatively, if your SharePoint site is opened (i.e., accessible via the web), then you can also insert the hyperlink or URL of the selected KB article into the reply, so that the recipient can simply click the hyperlink to open the relevant article in their web browser.
Team Knowledge Base 24 7. Publishing new KB articles directly from emails in Outlook Simply, open the email, and from the Team KnowledgeBase toolbar or ribbon, click the Publish Email to KB menu and from the drop down list, press the particular SharePoint list, to which a new KB article will be published. The published KB article item in the particular SharePoint list will inherit the formatting of the content, any number of inline images and attachments.
Team Knowledge Base 25 8. So what are the benefits? Improved customer support - By having a repository of knowledge, your team can more quickly respond to customer questions and issues. By providing consistent answers to questions and issues, your customer is always assured of the right answer and consistent communications. Reduced costs - As Team KnowledgeBase leverages your existing Outlook and SharePoint resources, there is no extra hardware/software cost that you will have to incur in implementing an enterprise-wide knowledge base for your team. As your team members are already familiar with Outlook, there is no requirement for any elaborate training, further lowering the cost. As you have network and SharePoint administrators in place, you don't require dedicated personnel for maintenance. And the bigger advantage, in long-term, is the reduced number of inbound customer support questions, which will reduce the amount of time it takes to respond to support issues. This can reduce the number of support engineers needed, thereby reducing costs to your support desk at the long run. Extending the Knowledge Base to your Customers - As your knowledge base articles reside in your SharePoint server, you can allow your end-users access to the KB website so that end-users and customers experiencing technical challenges can self-service the answer to their problem by accessing this web-based knowledge base. Once on the Knowledge Base web interface, endusers may click through the tiered problem categories and types to find articles they are looking for. They can even make use of the SharePoint inbuilt search functionality to query KB articles by keywords. This can eliminate unnecessary phone calls and allows your clients to quickly get answers to questions and maximize the use of your knowledge base. Utilizes existing IT skills with minimal need for re-training - As Team KnowledgeBase is based within the familiar Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint interface, it is easier to learn, ensuring a higher adoption rate and easier integration into your support structure. It also allows your staff members to quickly adapt and start using the system immediately with little or no training requirement. Fast, Accurate Search Results - Search through thousands of articles using powerful inbuilt fulltext search capabilities of SharePoint, which provides extremely fast and incredibly accurate search results. As it is based on SharePoint, Team KnowledgeBase scales extremely well. More experienced users will find Team KnowledgeBase's advanced search options appealing. You can restrict searches based on values of drop-down fields such as problem category-type, custom fields, author, and editor, created and modified dates. Complete control over user access - You have precise control over how users interact with the knowledge base, depending on the SharePoint site permission they have. Fast reply to emails - Embed knowledge base article as PDF, XPS, DOC or MHT documents in email reply with just a click of a button.
Team Knowledge Base 26 9. Uninstalling Team Knowledge Base To uninstall the Team KnowledgeBase from your computer, follow the steps outlined below: Step 1: In Windows XP, open Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs. In case of Windows Vista or Windows 7, go to Control Panel > Programs and Features. Scroll down to select Team KB Admin Tool or Team KB User Tool and click Uninstall. Step 2: A dialog confirmation follows asking for confirmation. Click Yes. Step 3: The Issue Tracker setup will now start the un-installation process. Make sure that Microsoft Outlook is not running (even under the task manager). You can click 'Cancel' to exit the current setup.
Team Knowledge Base 27 10. Important Links Team KnowledgeBase for Outlook and SharePoint - Home page Go to the official website of Team KnowledgeBase for Outlook and SharePoint. Video Tutorial clips Watch video tutorials that teach you how to install, configure and work with Team KnowledgeBase Knowledgebase articles Looking for an in-depth understanding of this application? Browse through a series of knowledge base articles on Issue Tracker online. Support Maintenance contract At AssistMyTeam, we're committed to give you the best support for all the products that we offer and more! The AssistMyteam Support Contract helps you use our products more efficiently and work out any issues that you encounter during the course of their use. Submit an online support ticket Use this web form to create a ticket with AssistMyTeam Technical Support. Have any queries? Contact us through Live Chat Now you can receive efficient help faster! Whenever you need support, you can simply visit this particular link and initiate a chat session with our support technicians! You don't need to download and install anything to your system. It doesn't get easier than this.