People migrating from other knowledge base tools get really excited to import content because it will "save so much time." Then, once the import is done, they begin reviewing content and making a change here, a change there, a slight organizational tweak over here...and then suddenly they end up manually reviewing and updating every single piece of content in the entire knowledge base. The total amount of time may be significantly longer than if they'd manually moved content over from scratch and made changes and edits upfront.
So we recommend a three-step approach:
- If KnowledgeOwl has a prebuilt import tool for your previous provider, test out the import and see how you like it. (Or, if you have developer resources and are working with a different source system, explore using our API to craft your own import.)
- Try importing a few pages manually by hand.
- Review the output of each process and how much you like it. Choose the path forward that makes the most sense for you.
Though it may seem counter-intuitive, sometimes manually migrating your content ends up being faster, since you can do content reorganization, cross-referencing, and fix formatting issues as you go and feel fully confident at how good that content looks.
Regardless of whether you're importing in bulk or manually importing content a la carte, we recommend that you:
- Review your existing knowledge base's organization and structure. Does it meet your readers' needs? Have you always wished it was different? Now could be a great time to make some changes.
- Review content for idiosyncrasies or tweaks that were necessary in your existing knowledge base platform, but unnecessary in KnowledgeOwl. Some differences might be the way categories can be laid out, tables of contents, links, hyperlinks, Link to Article links in KnowledgeOwl, how images or files are referenced, etc.
- Review content to make sure it's up to date. Importing out-of-date content sometimes can cause more headache than just creating new content from scratch.
- Review your content's existing permissions and access. Do you need/want to segregate content by groups? Do you need or want to restrict editing of certain content to particular author teams? If so, setting those groups and teams up in advance of adding your content can allow you to create/import it assigned to the correct access restrictions.
