Knowledge base portlet and FAQ builder

[Raju Uppalapati, modificado 15 Anos atrás.]

Allen is currently implementing the FAQ builder service and portlet to build some knowledge management features into Liferay.
I observed some checks with the name of knowledge base in the plugins dir. So we want to make sure there is no duplication of work.

The LEP related to the FAQ builder is: http://support.liferay.com/browse/LEP-6046

Can you give a brief overview of what is coming the knowledge base portlet? Can there by any synergy between these two features?

thanks,
_raju

[Jorge Ferrer, modificado 15 Anos atrás.]

Hi Raju,

The Knowledge Base portlet is an sponsored development whose purpose
is to allow authoring articles and organize them in a hierarchy of
navigable categories. It'll be possible for users to rate and comment
on articles as well as export them to PDF (and other formats) or
subscribe to changes in the articles or the whole KB. In a sense it's
similar to the wiki but will have a different look and usability plus
a more formal workflow which will require approval to be published.

I'm certainly open to discuss if it would make sense to add a FAQ as a
type of article if you think that's a good idea. In liferay.com we are
currently using the wiki to build FAQs. That way whenever a question
is asked often in the forums you can copy and paste it into the wiki
easily and reword it appropriately. Based on my experience that last
part is very important. More often than not you cannot just take a
question or answer from the forums and add it as it is. You usually
have to reword the question, provide some more context information and
some times even combine the answer from separate replies. In any case
having a link such as "Add to FAQ" that takes the user to a prefilled
form where he can later edit as desired would be very useful.

Even if there are diferent KB and FAQ are portlets I think they can
work well together. Our current plans is to add category trees as a
core service. That includes having a Categories Navigation portlet
that when navigating will generate a shared render parameter with the
chosen category. My plan is to make the KB portlet read that parameter
to show related articles. The FAQ portlet could probably also do the
same thing so that if placed in the same page it'll show complementary
information.

Thoughts?

[Raju Uppalapati, modificado 15 Anos atrás.]

Jorge,
I think both of us are trying to achieve a similar thing. We just named it differently.
Allen has made some progress on this item already.

We intend to build a Knowledge Management (KM) Service with FAQ Portlet being one of the front end for the Service. Here the things that we planned on providing to the user:

User should be able to push/pull Liferay content into the KM Service.
The push actions should be as simple as adding a tag or clicking a button.
KM Service maintains a hierarchy of categories
KM Service can handle content thats pushed from Blogs, Wiki's and Message boards.
KM Service should support interfaces that allow for building data bridges from external sources.
FAQ Portlet is a view of the KM data.
FAQ Portlet will allow users to rate content
FAQ Portlet will allow users to post new questions that need content.
FAQ Portlet provides an interface for content thats pushed by users to be edited by the KM or FAQ owner
FAQ Portlet should provide or Workflow for edits and publish of content.
FAQ Portlet will allow user to navigate the hierarchy.

Can we talk to make sure we can collaborate better on this feature?

thanks,
_raju

[Michael C. Han, modificado 15 Anos atrás.]

Raju,

I think we are definitely working towards similar goals. However, the intent of the KB portlet was to allow us to create "official" product knowledge base articles. This is something like a MSDN KB article and etc. There are definitely similar lines here. I think perhaps at the end of the day, the KB portlet will be a consumer of info out of the KM service and a publisher into KM.

Given we have two different use cases, I think we should definitely discuss to see if we can share early on and we should also revisit once both are complete for refactoring and consolidation.

-m

[Santh Chetan Chadalavada, modificado 15 Anos atrás.]

Hi Raju/Jorge,

We have done little bit of it(Can say < 20%) on the some of the features described in the above posts.

We have focused on FAQbuilder created with knowledge discovered from email archives
Here are few details on what has been done as a POC to start with:

1. Create an email client using javamail to connect to a particular mailing list (Portal Interest for example) where there is lot of information in it.
- With Subject of the mail being the question and the last reply being the possible answer.

2. Dump all the emails into database with mail threads referencing back to the original mail.

3. Run Datamining algorithm(We used WEKA) NaiveBayes on it and categorize them based on a selective keywords like SRA, Portal, Portlet, SGD, SSO, WEBSYNERGY etc...
After all the processing, the emails will fall into one of these keyword buckets and they can help us in being the category folder.

4. Portlet side: This is an editor/admin side portlet built on DOJO toolkit + jsr286 features as seen in the screen shot. Data shown is from JSON object constructed from portlet end
- The editor can edit an answer and save it (using dojo inlineeditbox) .
- User can create a new Faq and save it to the one of the existing categories.
TODO: Delete,edit category, Delete an FAQ, move and FAQ to different category or MISC category. Edit, Rename, Delete context menus. Read-only viewer for users.

I am attaching the screen shots on how this poc was done. We can improve the work we have done so far on it.

- Chetan

[Jorge Ferrer, modificado 15 Anos atrás.]

Hi Chetan,

That looks very good, thanks for sharing it with us. What are your plans for it? Will you open source it?

Raju, Mike, the fact that Chetan and his team has implemented a FAQ in a different way to what was suggested shows an interesting situation. No matter how hard we try it'll be always better if we build Knowledge Management features in Liferay through interchangeable building blocks, so that each group of people can add their own blocks (most probably portlets) and hopefully share them in the plugins catalog.

One key part to allow for this is building Category Management right into the core. If all KM portlets use those core services, and intercommunicate with each other it'll be super easier for the end user to build very customized KM portals.

Besides categories, we should probably try to provide some core services or utilities for other common features such as extracting information for different sources.

Thoughts?

[Raju Uppalapati, modificado 15 Anos atrás.]

Jorge/Mike,
I think KM Service will be the key to providing all the other features like FAQ, MSDN type knowledge base, HowTos etc.
Once that service layer is built it can be utilized to build the above features. Can we have an arch discussion about how we should do it to be able to add rest of KM related features easily? If we work independently, it will be difficult or impossible to converge at a later stage in my opinion.

Will you be available for a short 30mins meeting sometime early this week preferably tomorrow. If so can you please send me your availability times to ramak at sun dot com I will send you the conf call numbers and confirm it. BTW Chetan is also from the Sun team so we can all meet and come up with the action item each of us can own.

Thanks for your time.

_raju

[Jorge Ferrer, modificado 15 Anos atrás.]

I think it's a great idea. And tomorrow will work just fine. Drop me an email to talk about the details.

[Jonas Yuan, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

Hi Jorge, Raju and Mike,

Any updates on knowledge base portlet and FAQ portlet?

Looking forward to seeing these two portlets,

Thanks

Jonas Yuan

-----------------
Liferay Books

Liferay Portal 5.2 Systems Development
Liferay Portal Enterprise Intranets

[G P, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

Hi team,
Any new updates on this?

[Jonas Yuan, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

You can check

http://www.liferay.com/web/jonas.yuan/blog/-/blogs/sharing-content-knowledge-base-across-organizations-and-communities

More blogs entries or Wiki Arictles will come out shortly.

Thanks

Jonas Yuan
-----------------
The Author of Liferay Books
Liferay Portal 5.2 Systems Development
Liferay Portal Enterprise Intranets

[G P, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

Thanks jonus, this is what I want.

[James McGovern, modificado 13 Anos atrás.]

You can share content across organizations and communities. I can think of several scenarios where it may be beneficial to share across companies as well.

[Jonas X. Yuan, modificado 13 Anos atrás.]

Good point. Thanks, James,

It is possible to share content across companies as well.

Do you have real use cases?

Thanks

Jonas Yuan

-----------------
The Author of Liferay Books:
Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Intranets
Liferay Portal 5.2 Systems Development
Liferay Portal Enterprise Intranets

[Scott P, modificado 13 Anos atrás.]

Hi Guys,

Great portlet.

Our guys have made some changes/improvements to the display portlet to enable uses to edit the articles and create child pages directly from the display portlet. We found having to use the admin portlet via the control panel was not intuitive for end users as they would search and find information in the display portlet and then if they wanted to edit it or create new content under the article they were viewing they would have to go to the control panel and repeat the whole process.

We would like to share these improvements with the community. As we have developed them in EE and the normal process involves using CE (not even sure if the KB is available in CE) what would you suggest is the best way to contribute the changes. Perhaps we can share them with you and you can decide if you would like to include them in the next release?

Regards,
Scott

[James Falkner, modificado 13 Anos atrás.]

Hey Scott, thanks a lot for improving the KB portlet! It is available for CE, so your imrpovements could be enjoyed by all.

What I suggest is creating a "New Feature" ticket at issues.liferay.com, and attaching your diffs (or the complete sources) to that ticket, and select "Contribute Solution" and then "Accept Contribution", which will put the ticket in the "Community Resolved" state and we can take it from there.

Also, would you be interested in doing a Liferay LIVE webcast in the near future to describe the feature? We had another community member do this yesterday, and it was very imformative and impressive.

[Scott P, modificado 13 Anos atrás.]

Hi James,

Thanks for the info. Kudos to Marc Austria who made the changes.

We'd be happy to put together a short webcast. Will touch base with you offline to discuss.

[Scott P, modificado 13 Anos atrás.]

http://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-15531

[Santh Chetan Chadalavada, modificado 15 Anos atrás.]

Hi Jorge,

I am basically part of Sun team. During the initial discussions we had thought of building FAQBuilder which will be open sourced and integrated to Liferay as a contribution.

Chetan

[Alexander Herrmann, modificado 15 Anos atrás.]

Hi everyone,

the Knowledge base portlet project you are talking about sounds very interresting to me. Because I am searching for this type of FAQ portlet solution. Unfortunately I am new to liferay and portlet development...

It would be great if you can give me some information on the result of your meeting and when you are plannig to release this knowledgebase portlet.
I don't need the exact date but a hint would be very useful.

Thank you very much,

Alex

[Ganesh Ram, modificado 15 Anos atrás.]

An initial version of the LR Knowledge Base Portlet can be found here.

Dont see much features in this currently, but in course of time it would surely improve.

[Thomas Bonney, modificado 15 Anos atrás.]

Any status updates on the Knowledge Base or the FAQ Builder? We're thinking that both of these portlets would be extremely useful and our dev team is beginning to explore these options.

I apologize if this request is a bit terse - I'm the UX designer and while I'm familiar with IDE's I've never compiled a program in my life.

Cheers,
tom

[Steve Van Domelen, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

Any further updates on this? I would like to build a KnowledgeBase and FAQ for our IT intranet site.

[May Tran, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

Hi Raju,

What you have described for the Knowledge Management (KM) Service with FAQ Portlet sounds exactly like what I am looking for. Can you share with us or me ([e-mail]) what you have built so far? Can we leverage the code that your team have built so far?

Thanks,
May :-)

Raju Uppalapati:

Jorge,
I think both of us are trying to achieve a similar thing. We just named it differently.
Allen has made some progress on this item already.

We intend to build a Knowledge Management (KM) Service with FAQ Portlet being one of the front end for the Service. Here the things that we planned on providing to the user:

User should be able to push/pull Liferay content into the KM Service.
The push actions should be as simple as adding a tag or clicking a button.
KM Service maintains a hierarchy of categories
KM Service can handle content thats pushed from Blogs, Wiki's and Message boards.
KM Service should support interfaces that allow for building data bridges from external sources.
FAQ Portlet is a view of the KM data.
FAQ Portlet will allow users to rate content
FAQ Portlet will allow users to post new questions that need content.
FAQ Portlet provides an interface for content thats pushed by users to be edited by the KM or FAQ owner
FAQ Portlet should provide or Workflow for edits and publish of content.
FAQ Portlet will allow user to navigate the hierarchy.

Can we talk to make sure we can collaborate better on this feature?

thanks,
_raju