Should your knowledge base be private?

As with any website, you should think about your intended audience for your knowledge base, and how they will be using your content, when deciding on its privacy settings.

If it’s meant for your employees and contains sensitive or restricted information, then of course you need to limit access to your content. Knowledge base content should sit behind a password or other authentication device, as you don’t want your employee manuals to be visible to a general audience. 

At the same time, your sensitive internal information should still be online where employees can easily access it. This is where a private knowledge base comes in handy. The right knowledge base software comes with capabilities to restrict access to the knowledge base so only intended users can see content. 

If, however, your knowledge base is intended for your customers, there are lots of pluses associated with having well-indexed content that is visible to search engines.

We’re going to go through some of the pros of keeping your knowledge base private now.

Knowledge base privacy

If you keep your knowledge base private then sensitive information can be shared internally, without being visible to a general audience.

This is useful if your knowledge base is intended for internal staff, including handbooks, manuals, onboarding materials, policies and procedures. You might not want the casual web user to be stumbling across information regarding company secrets, future product plans, or whatnot.

There is also an element of making your products and services more visible to competitors if they can read your knowledge base articles, so keeping your base private means you can keep your trade secrets to yourself. Bear in mind that it can be quite a lot to ask of your customer to log into your knowledge base, and they may just end up firing an email off to support instead. 

You can also restrict access to just some of your content by changing the settings at either an article or category level. But how do you restrict access to your knowledge base? We’re going to go through some of the techniques now. 

How to restrict access to your knowledge base

The right knowledge base software allows you to make content private. 

To make some content on your knowledge base private, in KnowledgeOwl you can create a reader group (or groups), restrict access to the appropriate group and require readers to log in to access the reader group restricted content. 

You could use this option if you have a knowledge base with a mixture of public and private content. For example, you could have a blend of customer-facing self-service content and customer support content for your team. You should require a login to access the customer support content so only your team can see it. 

To make your entire knowledge base private, you can do so in KnowledgeOwl by navigating to the security settings. There are several options you can choose from to access your knowledge base: 

• Restrict by reader logins – Readers need a username and password to log in to your knowledge base. This can be set up by users with full account admin access. 

• Restrict by IP address or shared password – Readers will need to visit the knowledge base from a specified IP address to access the site. You can also select both an approved IP address and a password to log in. 

• Remote authentication – Readers will be required to log in via a third party site, such as your own website application. This method can be used to automatically log readers in through your software. 

• SAML SSO (single sign-on) – Readers will be required to log in through your specified identity provider, such as ADFS, Okta, or G Suites (Google Apps for Work).

• Salesforce SSO (single sign-on) – Readers will only be able to log in through your Salesforce account.

As you can see, there are many options for restricting access to your knowledge base. 

Single sign-on

Using single sign-on means you are using a third party tool to authenticate your accounts everywhere. You can use your Google account to log into KnowledgeOwl, so SSO saves you from creating new credentials and remembering them every time you want to log into an application. 

When users try to access your knowledge base, they are redirected to the login page automatically. You can decide what categories of users will be allowed to view the content. You might want to give access to all users authenticated with your product. 

A benefit of authentication is you can see precisely who is viewing the documentation. 

Knowledge base visibility

Just like a website, your knowledge base has the potential to be a useful marketing tool for your company.

Millions of search requests are made online every day, and if you are selling a useful product like email marketing software, then your articles in your knowledge base can potentially be helpful to a wide audience.

Of course, it takes time for your site’s pages to move up the search engine rankings, but when they do you’ve got free traffic heading to your knowledge base. This is especially useful if you’ve styled it with your company’s brand.

People may read your articles to work out how to do something, notice that your business offers a relevant product that can provide services they need and you’ve got a potential lead. At the very least you’ve built some brand awareness.

A more obvious pro is the fact that your existing customers may well google the answer to their problems with your software. You can really impress them by having the perfect article they need visible near the top of the search results. This lowers the likelihood that a customer will need to contact an agent, and frees your team up for the more complex and demanding customer queries.

Sometimes your customers will want to share your knowledge base articles with their colleagues or friends on social media because they’re so darn useful. You’ll be missing out on free company promotion if you make your knowledge base private.

Summary: Keep public what you can!

The benefits of SEO and catching your customer queries while they’re still at the googling stage are hugely important. The right knowledge base software will be optimized for search so your articles will show up in the search results. 

If the information contained in your knowledge base is not sensitive then there’s no reason to make it private, and web users stumbling across your pages may end up sharing your content if it’s useful, providing free promotion.

So, whether to keep your knowledge base private or not really depends on the nature of the information within it. Internal knowledge bases should be restricted behind a login page, while most customer-facing knowledge bases are generally public. 

If you want to keep your knowledge base private, you can create logins or use IP address verification, so only approved users can access it.

KnowledgeOwl software has the capability to provide passwords or IP address verification for your knowledge base. You can also select different privacy settings for individual pages, so parts of your knowledge base can be publicly searchable, while other pages can still require authorized access. Contact us to learn more about setting up a restricted site.