An in-house knowledge base is tremendously helpful to our job. Nobody can remember all the details of the incidents that have happened in the past 10 years, or all the steps you should follow to finish a routine task. While the official software documentation or some people's blogs offer help, none can replace your own procedures. In 2008, after a one-year stint at one of the biggest e-commerce companies, I was lucky to be able to come back to my previous employer under the same manager. I convinced him of the value of a knowledge base and built it with regular contributions. Now we have more than a hundred notes or articles, most written by me.

* Content
Anything technical (i.e. not purely about humans, e.g. who to contact, etc.). Since ours is a database team, we are used to Oracle's knowledge base articles, so we model on that and split a problem-solving article into three sections, Problem, Troubleshooting, and Solution. (I just finished one today about how to troubleshoot a database problem caused by an ever-elusive firewall.) A procedure type of article of course is different; it describes the procedure.

* How to keep it up to date
This is the biggest challenge. IT moves fast. Much of the content will get outdated in a few years. We do edit the files to reflect the latest technology, but sometimes delete the severely outdated articles to keep the knowledge base clean. Some topics of course will have an apparently unlimited lifetime, such as SQL tuning. Interestingly, my teammates find that sorting the files by last updated date is the quickest way to find the note they want, instead of a keyword search.

* Where to host
We hosted our knowledge base on a Microsoft SharePoint website. It's easy to search and quick to upload. But after the July SharePoint hack, we moved it to Teams, which we're still getting used to.

* File naming convention
Many people like to name a file with spaces between words. I discourage my team from doing that because when you tell others the location of a note, the URL will contain multiple %20's, which look like garbage. Instead, using camel case (e.g. SQLTuningCases.html) or underscores like Wikipedia's article titles (e.g. SQL_Tuning_Cases.html) is recommended.

* File format
Text or HTML is the best. Word format is fine, too. Our team is not so dumb to demand a video! Besides, how can the words in a video be searched?

* Security
Avoid accidentally posting a password. It can happen if you copy a well written email (with analysis and solution of a problem) and post it to the knowledge base, which in our company, is open to every employee because some tips are useful to them.

Last but not the least, a knowledge base is teamwork. I encourage my team to contribute, whatever problem they recently solved and they think is worth sharing. When they own part of it, they find it interesting and will continue to share their experience.

[originally posted on LinkedIn in January 2026]

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