Building a knowledge base

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I work in the IT department for my company doing IT support. Recently we have hired a number of new people and it has come to my attention that we would greatly benefit from having a knowledge base where we could store the common fixes and solutions we come across. I have web development experience, but it was a couple of years ago. I took several web development classes in college using dreamweaver with access and SQL databases. Despite this, I could use some guidance on where to start. I would like to start with something simplistic, I'm thinking like a google search for our common problems. This is more or less a prototype, so I don't want to complicate things too much since I will be doing most of this on my own. In the future, it would be nice to have the ability to add something like a top 10 searches list, but I'm not looking to go that far yet. Basically, expandability would be nice. My initial though is a single front page with 2 search boxes. One for a title search, another for keywords. Search results would be a dynamic page, listing the results and linking them to another page that would display the info. The database would be a single table with at least 5 columns; Primary key (auto number), Title, Keywords, Text Body and, if possible, a picture of the error. I estimate there would be around 500 entries in the database with the majority of them not having a picture and about 30 total users. The site would be hosted on one of our internal servers so we don't really need to worry about a hosting service. What I am looking for, is some direction on where to go. An access database would be an easy solution I feel like, but I'm afraid it won't be reliable enough. On the other hand, I don't know anything about setting up a SQL database and getting dreamweaver to work with it. I have the coding experience, but a lot of the behind the scenes work was done for me in school (Loading the necessary software, setting up the database, getting dreamwaever to authenticate to the server). Basically, is there a knowledge base building for dummies anywhere ;)?
 
I'll be honest: I skimmed through your post but it seems like a wiki would fit your needs. Look up MediaWiki.
 
MS Access would be bad for multiple users -- years ago my job was porting Access files to Java + SQL Server web apps. 20+ people trying to use an Access file simultaneously is a sad thing, LOL.

But yeah, a wiki probably would do the job nicely. On many wikis you can tag entries with keywords, so both the fulltext and keyword search would be automatic through 1 search box. It's always best to consider similar existing implementations prior to creating your own, you can save a buttload of time and money and headache that way. Of course, depending on your customers' needs and abilities, the in-house solution may be worth it.

I don't know of any knowledge base for dummies books, just a lot of good books on subjects related to that. A well-rated database design book on Amazon would be an excellent investment.
 
I did something similar to this for a FAQ site related to one of our big internal applications. The basic design went something like this:
- we recognized right away that there were different 'categories" of FAQs. i.e. FAQs were usually related to only a specific part of the application, though some could belong to multiple sections of the app. So I created a section for the website admin to enter a list of various categories.
- When a FAQ is entered, the admin selects which categories this FAQ pertains to using check boxes. E.g. This FAQ is related to the categories "Hardware Issues", "System Requirements", "Error Messages". Admin must also enter the name of the person adding the FAQ, contact info, date/time stamp, etc.. There was also a special "Pending" category for FAQs that still needed to be reviewed before being published, users could not see any Pending FAQs until they were assigned to one of the other categories.
- The admin had to option to include a screenshot (JPG or GIF under 2MB in size) file for a given FAQ. All images were automatically scaled to a maximum width of 700px (so as not to completely bork the layout of the site). Any images that did not fit the file type of size were discarded and an error message shown to admin.
- There was also a feature where FAQs could be imported from an Excel file. The project office would often collaborate on new FAQs and add them to a shared Excel document that they would periodically send to the website admin. Instead of manually adding them to the site, the admin could simply upload the excel doc to a special section of the site that would extract the FAQs from the Excel doc and automatically add them to the existing FAQs on the website.
- Users could view FAQs in various ways: 1) view the 10 most recent FAQs entered for all categories or for a specific category. This way they could quickly see what's new. 2) Search for keywords related to all categories or just specific categories. 3) search for a specific FAQ ID.
- there is also a "FAQ subscription" feature, where a user could sign up to automatically receive an email alert when a new FAQ was added for a given category (of course, an "unsubscribe" feature was also added).

hope this helps..
 
On the surface, a wiki sounds appropriate. But the subtlety of the statement, "expandability would be nice." leaves a lot of possible directions on changes/additions. If Mediawiki doesn't completely fit the needs, then I'd suggest getting a content management solution with a wiki addon.
 
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