Over the 2012 holiday season, Quandora rolled out an important user role update that was designed to improve knowledge management and facilitate proper user interactions within the Quandora Knowledge Base environment. Understanding the rights and responsibilities associated with each of these roles will allow you to protect the information shared within your community, while also ensuring that participation with your Knowledge Base is a positive experience for all involved.
Currently, Quandora offers four different user roles:
- Reader
- Contributor
- Editor
- Manager
Readers represent the most basic types of Quandora users, as they’re able to read content that’s been added to the Knowledge Base, but not contribute their own insights or edit content shared by others. Contributors, on the other hand, can read all of the community’s content and share their own thoughts, but can’t edit posts made by others within the Knowledge Base.
Editors and Managers hold the most authority within Quandora. Editors have all the same rights as Contributors, but with the added ability to edit any content that’s been shared by other Knowledge Base users. Finally, managers have complete control over the Knowledge Base, meaning that they’re able to read, write and edit content, in addition to managing the shape and structure of the community.
As you create your own Quandora Knowledge Base, it’s important to understand how these different role dynamics interact as well as how they can be used to effectively manage the flow of information within your organization. To better understand these rights and responsibilities, let’s look at a few examples of how these user roles should be put into practice in different situations:
An internal, single department team
Suppose you’ve installed Quandora to help a single department within your company to manage its workflow and tasks more efficiently. In this case, all of the participants stand on relatively equal footing and have something of value to contribute to the overall business conversation.
In this case, the best structure might be to assign a single manager (either the department head or an employee with project management responsibilities), and then to label all other participants as editors. Doing so will enable all employees to contribute and to improve the information shared by others within the Knowledge Base.
A whole-company Knowledge Base
On the other hand, be aware that granting all users the role of editor isn’t ideal in all situations so it’s important that a level of trust exists amongst those who are given this authority.
If you’ll be using Quandora to manage the flow of information across larger organization, or if you’d rather centralize the ability to edit Knowledge Base content with a few trusted users, you might be better off assigning the majority of company users the contributor role, leaving editor and manager assignments for a few key employees with community oversight responsibilities.
A customer Q&A database
In addition, situations exist in which it’s advisable to leave most Knowledge Base viewers at the basic reader user level. In particular, consider the case of a public Q&A customer database that’s provided as a resource for external clients to review your company’s policies and procedures.
Here, you wouldn’t necessarily want customer viewers to be able to add comments or edit the comments made by others as one dissatisfied customer could quickly spiral out of control if given access to your Knowledge Base. Instead, give a single employee or group of employees the editor access that allows them to post common customer questions and responses adding to it only when the proposed content suits the needs of the organization.
Clearly, there are a number of different user role combinations that can be implemented within the Quandora Knowledge Base system in order to exercise the level of control needed to keep your community productive and informative. Take the time to carefully assess your own company’s needs and resources before choosing the user role solution that’s best for your organization.
Comments are closed.