Hi ​@sryder! Exciting to hear about your launch, hope everything is going well one month out. :) 

My community has an identical set-up to yours: community on Gainsight CC, help center on Zendesk, and courses on Skilljar. We’ve overall had a good experience with federated search, and totally agree about not wanting to duplicate content. I imagine you’re like us and have established some good practices for what belongs where and don’t want to disrupt those areas of ownership! 

I wanted to chime in with a different take - we have simply chosen to not utilize the knowledge base capability of Gainsight CC. You’ll see in my screenshot below that we’ve created a custom header in our community that unifies the aforementioned platforms as a “hub”, then details community-specific things below (such as the product update and feedback modules) when that’s selected. 

This may be too simplistic of a view, and I am happy to be corrected here if I’m misunderstanding, but I don’t believe there’s any meaningful difference between creating content in the community forum vs knowledge base on Gainsight CC. Search results are sorted by relevance, no longer grouped by source, which means that they wouldn’t be prioritized any differently. In fact, not using this even saves you a filter on the side in search results:

Further, the UX for a knowledge base article is essentially the same as a “regular” post. See this example of an article from Gainsight’s own community.

I don’t believe you’re missing out on anything by not using the knowledge base tool, and may actually simplify things by not - just my two cents. 😁 That being said, I love your content ideas and agree that you should post them, regardless of where!

Hi ​@sryder - I’m with ​@mbuuck1 on this. We also use Zendesk for support, have an Academy with Dochebo and a robust docs site on Docs360. We’re working on the federated search to bring all that to community.

I am thinking of our KB as more of a blog. I can publish posts from our advisors that don’t really belong on our corporate blog or the docs site. Same with things like “featured member” posts we do. 

Thanks ​@Kgastaldo and ​@mbuuck1 ! Appreciate the thoughtful responses.

Call me stubborn, but I’m still seeing potential for a Community Knowledge Base, even apart from having Support & University/Academy content accessible via the Search box. Here’s what I’m thinking from a customer’s experience…

Customer wants to learn all he can about data management, especially (for example) metadata best practices with our software. He uses the search and sees a long list of results: 3+ courses from our University, 7+ articles from our Helpdesk. Maybe a Community discussion or question. The results aren’t ranked in any way, are a pain to navigate one by one, and oftentimes, there is no cross-reference from a piece of content in University to Helpdesk articles and vice versa. Also, they’re still not seeing ALL of our available content because we have a bunch of helpful Guides on our website, maybe a blog post, all publicly accessible but not very easy to find, and the customer doesn’t think to look on our website too.

Instead, the customer could go to the Community Knowledge Base, the category for Data Management, and find a very handy article that contains a brief summary of the overall topic -- and links to ALL of those disparate information sources from one page. We’d use our corporate LLM to create this article for us, so very little prep time for Community Managers.

​@sryder I like the idea you just mentioned, almost like using the Knowledge Base as a directory or index to help guide learning or discovery paths. 

Something we’ve done before is to differentiate the Help Center/Product Documentation/etc. from Best Practices and other similar guides. Use company-written resources as objective, verified technical documentation that applies to all (or the majority of) use cases, and then utilize items in the Community Knowledge Base for more subjective items—use case-specific guides, user-generated content, and other things that may not apply to everyone equally (“your mileage may vary”). This adds more of a “Community” feel to the Knowledge Base and helps differentiate the kinds of resources people will find in each place. 

​@sryder Not stubborn at all! That makes a lot of sense. We create content that’s similar to what you and ​@atwhite described - landing pages on a certain topic with links to all relevant resources, and more specific use case details. In our case, we’ve found the community “article” content type to be sufficient for this with its additional authoring, control, and official labeling abilities.

But, totally love your vision for that content! We face a similar challenge with lots of resources and wanting to provide more guidance through all of them, especially with that unique community “flavor.” I think you have a great approach!

 ​@sryder 

I just wanted to chip in here. The results ARE now unified and ranked against each other.

I wrote the original version of this article so know the search pretty well.

In fact if you notice the search results here in the community.

The results page contains ALL content returned as part of the search ranked alongside each other no matter the Source of the content. 

To filter down on source, you need to use the tabs across the top (unfortunately there is no source filter on the left hand side)

The experience is still a little limited, no sorting options, no time based options, ranking control etc .. 

Now back to your original question.

I have just gone through a very painful migration on knowledge material from SFDC into CC. 

I believe for community experience it is superior to have it within the same platform. Having the KB within CC allows you to directly access the content through widgets and have the nice looking topic cards like the one above when content is internally referenced.

Soon Skilljar will also be integrated and you will be able to have a really nice HUB with all your customer facing content nicely knit together. 

It is not perfect, but I think managing one source of truth over many is a whole lot easier.

I hope that helps.