I hope you’re all doing great. I am currently working on a project using Mattermost and I am wondering if there is a way to create and manage Knowledge Base or Step-by-Step Documentation within the platform.
Are there any plugins or external applications that could help me achieve this? I would prefer an integrated solution within Mattermost if possible.
Alternatively, can the channels within Mattermost effectively replace the need for a separate knowledge base? If so, do you have any tips or best practices for organizing and managing the content within channels to make it easily accessible and searchable for team members?
Your insights and suggestions will be highly appreciated. Looking forward to your responses and learning from your experiences.
I think it depends on what it should look like and how users should interact with it. Mattermost is not a Wiki or anything where multiple people can contribute to the same article f.ex., so I’m not sure if it can or should be used as a knowledge base. You can create multiple channels and dedicate them to a specific topic, but you can not nest them so if you want to have a major topic broken up into a few minor and lastly smaller topics, this hierarchy cannot be created with channels. You can only have channel categories (but they’re actually per-user categories which you can have some influence on, but it’s tricky) and channels. Inside channels, you could use threads for the third level but I don’t think that this is practical.
There are some plugins which allow you to add notes to channels, like the channel notes plugin f.ex. and there are boards which allow you to create task lists and other content that may also be linked to a channel, but I’m not sure if Mattermost is suited for your usecase here.
Maybe I can think of something else if you can describe a bit more of what you would like to do?
My team has been using Mattermost to manage our work through boards, activities, and tasks. It has been a fantastic experience so far.
We are now looking to create a Knowledge Base that would serve as a “go-to” resource for step-by-step guidance to help our team members complete their tasks successfully. I understand that using channels might be a potential solution for this purpose, but I am also considering the idea of creating an app or plugin that functions like “Docs.”
My questions for the community are:
Is it feasible (cost-wise and integration-wise) to create an app or plugin that works like a “Docs” system within Mattermost? If so, what would be the estimated costs and effort required?
Ideally, we would like the Knowledge Base plugin to appear right below the “Boards” section, as shown in the attached image. Is this level of integration possible?
I appreciate any insights, experiences, and suggestions you can provide. Looking forward to hearing from you all!
I personally cannot give a definitive or qualified answer to both of your questions, sorry, but I’d like to leave some comments:
ad 1) It depends on other available options you have, I guess and what the solution should look like then. I think the major problem here will be the parallelity and permissions, who’s allowed to edit a docs post at which time and what happens if two people try to edit the same post? I still don’t think that this should be done in Mattermost to be honest, but I think you could make use of a custom slash command or a docs channel which shows an index overview of all available documentation topics in your environment and allows people to click on the headings in order to open them in a browser then, hosted by an external tool.
ad 2) I’m unsure if you can add a button there from within a plugin, but you will be able to add it to the right hand side “Apps bar” once it’s active.
