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Maggie,
My response is somewhat late (I'm on digest), but years ago my firm
experimented with building an internal Knowledgebase in Notes. It didn't
work out as expected.... however, most of that was due to a lack of human
resources on the project. But such is the peril of plunging into ANY
knowledgebase product regardless of its format, so I won't get into that.
My concern with Notes as a platform for Online Help, Knowledgebases, and
their ilk is that everything looks and acts, uh.... Notes-y. (It reminds me
of "The Brady Bunch Movie" where Mike Brady's architecture plans all look
like the Brady House.) Notes looks and acts a certain way that is not
web-like, and most people are used to the Web. Notes -- even when it's
published to the web -- just looks and acts like.... Notes! There is no
other way to describe it. If an organization is hooked on Notes, and
employs a bunch of crack Notes Developers, then I s'pose that can be a good
thing. But for those of us who were 'raised' on the WWW and Intranets and
other web-native platforms, working with the Notes platform is more like a
wacky retro trip down memory lane to the cutting-edge technology of 1993.
BTW - my experience is with Notes v5 and earlier; the newest version may be
different.
Anyway, we had our developers build a web-based Kbase for us to use and
that worked out really well (still going strong almost 3 years later.)
This time we have the human resources we need and that has definitely been
a help as well. We are also looking at an inexpensive web-based CMS for
the masses at our company to do our Intranet, called PureCMS by
GlobalScape (no relation to the company, I just like what I've seen so
far.) http://www.purecms.com/purecms/
Good luck!
Abby Klemmer
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