Create Knowledgebases From Email and Newsgroup Messages With askSam

By Chris Michaud, Sr Technical Writer, EasyAsk, Inc.

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My company knows a lot about very sophisticated search engines. That's what we do. Our backend search technology package handles thousands of transactions and events in the e-commerce B2B and B2C world.

An issue that came up last fall, was that our organization had a lot of anecdotal information floating around between our engineers and our customers in email format and corporate newsgroups that was tedious and expensive to replicate into a support system archive.

I was on the mailing list of several of these mailing lists, and I would use simple keyword text search from our mail client to glean information. It was very tedious and didn't work. Our own product seemed to be overkill for this type of search and archive functionality. I tried MS Access and Excel, but that didn't work very well either, without sophisticated data manipulation.

Like other technology companies in this economy, our resources are stretched. Though we've been fortunate the last two years experiencing double-digit growth figures, I couldn't expect to tap our software engineers to spend days customizing an off the shelf program for my personal use.

Then I read an article last year about askSam in PC Magazine, and thought I would download a trial version. I appreciated the opportunity to use a fully functioning version of askSam, without limitations. I imported about 18 months worth of emails in the askSam Email Template. There were several thousand. askSam worked so well, for what I needed, that I couldn't believe it. It was perfect. I could do key word searches, that were accurate. I could filter, and I could sort. I could also eliminate redundant duplicates, which I found extremely helpful.

Now, when I see that a certain topic comes up time and again, I can clarify topics in the documentation set for our product. For me, it helps reduce the need for endless surveys that are costly and time consuming. It has even helped me identify several issues for improvements, based on the number of occurrences of certain topics. The data I have also helps the support group from time to time. In addition, I've found that I need less support from SMEs (Subject Matter Experts), because topics are pretty well discussed through several of these email and newsgroup archives. Therefore, I gain an understanding sooner than I might otherwise by searching through the askSam archives. I update them weekly.

I also use askSam to archive the emails and the minutes of meetings of a non-profit organization, where I am a Trustee. When no one else can find the information, I can, and can do it quickly.

I tell everyone about askSam. It's a great cost-effective way to archive data. I'm thinking about askSam's Web Publisher to use as a documentation knowledge base tool, looking forward to trying it out.

By Chris Michaud

Sr Technical Writer

EasyAsk, Inc.

cmichaud@easyask.com

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