You haven't really explained your requirements.
Can clients access the system or just consultants?
Do consultants need to be able to access the content off-line?
All the content or just an answer previous found while on-line?
Can one consultant correct another consultants post? Just supplement /
offer an alternative explanation of the same solution or another solution?
Do you or your staff have the expertise to develop your own simple
application?
Are you primarily / only interested in problem + solution(s)?
Do you need call tracking where you can determine which person at which
company was contacted at each step alon
g the way with more than one intermediate status?
How much data?
How many simultaneous users?
How likely will more than one person want to alter the same text at the same
time?
Do you need to assign a responsible person?
Do you need to distinguish between a possible / proposed solution versus a
confirmed solution?
Do solutions vary substantially according to the version of an evolving
product (e.g., software)?
What resources / tools do you already have?
Do you already run a website? Hosted on your local server?
Will everyone be using the operating system? Which one?
Will you need to support anything besides simple text? Graphics? Images?
Video? Other files?
Not a program but you could do this with phpBB forums. You can set
permissions so that some users have read only access while others have
posting access. Typically with a ticket tracking system, you have the
ability to query for open tickets. I'm not sure how you could
implement that feature in a forum unless you move a thread from one
section of the forum to another. You can see an example of the forums
and post support questions here:
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/
Home page:
http://www.phpbb.com/index.php
In addition to one of the forum solutions, you might prefer a wiki where
someone can alter the current text (or propose an alteration which has to be
approved before becoming effective). Most (all?) of these are intended to
be run from a central server, not to be distributed among multiple users
while sharing data..
If security is not a big issue (and you can deal with the ads and interface)
you might even consider defining a by invitation only group via Yahoo or
Google. For example, see
www.groups-beta.google.com.
You may be able to adapt a bug tracking package to your purposes more easily
than a call tracking one. Take a look at the Bugzilla reference on the
Mozilla page.
Similarly, if you already use a source control, configuration management, or
document management application, you may be more comfortable adapting that
to your use. SourceForge contains a number of possibilities in all of these
areas that may help you refine your list of requirements even if you don't
find a solution there..
Some PIMs that emphasize outlining are available as freeware / liteware for
individual use but offer shareware with multi-user support. A node might
correspond to the problem. Each node might have a few standard fields plus
problem and resolution text fields. Additional materials such as
screenshots, logs, scripts (e.g., to reproduce, to solve, or to verify),
proposed documentation changes, and just about anything else might also be
appended to a node directly (i.e., stored within) or by reference (i.e., an
external file)
The more extensive and complex your requirements, the more likely that you
will need a database solution (or an application sitting on one). For
example, a database solution could allow each consultant to have a complete
or partial copy of the total database that is synchronized periodically with
several pre-defined fields.
You can introduce structure even within unstructured text. We needed to add
some structure within a single large field because the package we were using
did not provide sufficient granularity. We did that by defining several
keyword:value sets. We tracked internal progress using "State:Undefined",
"State
raft", "State:Final", "State
roposed", and finally "State:Approved"
or "State:Rejected" for client review. Each item could have any number of
issues. Each issue always began with "Issue:Open", "Issue:Question" (for
client), "Issue:Closed" (we had a clear answer), "Issue
ecided" (we had
chosen a particular approach from among several reasonable ones -- and
documented the alternatives and primary considerations). We also defined
standard template for each object type that were provided to everyone. Part
of creating a new object was to run the script that populated the single
description field with the predefined structure. The provided indexing tool
treated "keyword:value" pairs as a single token (i.e., discrete word) so we
could easily incorporate them in our search criteria. We could readily
search for objects where:
state:final AND (issue
pen OR issue:question)
Date processing was a constant irritant as the text oriented query language
did not allow date ranges or comparatives other than present or not present.
Each date was an independent token just like any other "word" in the text.
While I don't have a direct answer to your request, I hope this will help
you find a solution.
BillR
