Hello!
Today, I'll show you how to get answers to your technical questions using the University
of Illinois Technology Services Knowledge Base.
Many IT Professionals on campus use the Knowledge Base or "KB" to find accurate and up-to-date
information about campus services for their users, but you can use it, too!
Once you understand how it works, it's not hard to find solutions on your own.
The Knowledge Base is a part of the Technology Services website - techservices.illinois.edu.
And it's the first choice in this menu bar -- 'Knowledgebase.'
It pops open in a new tab, because it's actually its own full-fledged database.
This main page has some good links, but today, we want to focus on keyword searching to get
the information we need.
You can type whatever keywords you want into this search bar; as you type, the site will
give you a count of how many articles will match that search -- or let you know if there
are no matches at all.
If I type 'password,' I get several results.
Something like 'cupcakes,' there are none.
Pretty neat!
Articles are also organized by Topic, which you can see in this drop-down list.
But it's usually easy enough to find the article you want with good keywords alone.
What's a good keyword, though?
You want your keyword to be specific enough to return mostly relevant results.
You also want a keyword that was likely attached to the article by the person who wrote it
- that is, a technical writer!
Think about which words are accurate and factual, as well as specific to your problem.
Product names are a good place to start!
Think about what product you're really asking about - 'email' is very general, but if the
problem is with your 'Exchange' email account or your 'Outlook' or 'Thunderbird' email client,
you may get to your information quicker with those keywords!
You can also see if your information is answered in a Frequently Asked Questions document by
searching for' FAQ,' with or without another keyword or Topic to narrow it down.
Let's say for this demonstration that I'm struggling with how to set up my email account
on my mobile phone.
I might be tempted to go for the first obvious word - 'email.'
But that returns way too many results.
Maybe instead I go with 'smartphone.'
But that gives me very few results, because 'smartphone' is not a technical term often
used by IT Professionals, especially in writing.
It seems like the article that I'm looking for may be difficult to find with a single
keyword, but you can combine keywords as well - just type them into the search bar with
a space between them.
This will automatically be an "AND"-type search, meaning that the database will only give you
the articles where both your keywords are present.
So for my question, I might search for 'Exchange' and 'phone.'
So, this only returns seven results, which is pretty easy to sift through what's relevant
to me and what's not.
And it looks like this top document is probably the article that's going to help me the most.
The articles are ranked in terms of how relevant the system thinks they are to your search
terms, and over on the right side you can see a little bit of information about the
articles, as well: their ID number, when they were most recently updated, and how many hits
the article has.
Let's click it and see if it has the information we need.
Thanks for watching!
I hope this helps you find the articles you need.
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