KnowledgeBuilder 3 has been released. If you haven’t heard what’s new, go ahead and review the list of new features.

I’ll touch on some of the interesting ones here.

Let’s face it. It’s hard to get excited about knowledge base software. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be made into an intelligent, well-designed product. KnowledgeBuilder is just that. The front-end includes a major facelift, and the back-end has been completely re-written for much easier extensibility and ease of maintenance. Not to mention - more control for you, the user.

Themes

Right out of the box, you can customize KB to your liking. We prefer our subtle design (and have spent many hours adjusting the CSS), but we understand that it’s impertive users can change the design to fit their organization’s scheme. Changing the theme of your KB is as simple as creating and maintaining a CSS file.

Interface

Regardless of what styles you use, you can be certain your KB interface will behave in effective ways. KB 3 uses Ajax in many areas, in order to create more usable, flexible interfaces. Ajax allows for live-editing, drag-and-drop, and extremely subtle content processing, to name a few. That means a more fluid experience for you.

Search engines

As well as a better experience for users, we’ve also allowed search engines a better avenue to your KB content. Search-friendly URL’s allow your content to be indexed in a more effective manner.

Exporting

We like to think KnowledgeBuilder helps you organize content in effective ways. However, we know sometimes users want to organize it in their own way (like with custom CSS), and this is why we made exporting an important objective for version 3. Included is enhanced PDF export support, as well as export to HTML. Also, you can use the new RSS feeds to aggregate and organize your KB content in your own feed readers.

Importing

Speaking of export, how about import? You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to bulk import articles into KB. You can also do this for Glossary and Word Index terms.

User controls

You’ll enjoy more fine-tuned user control in KB 3. Creating user groups lets you designate privileges as a whole, or to each individual. This provides a much deeper application, which can handle many users while still maintaining the sensitivity of the articles.