Keeping your knowledge base fresh takes the right mix of habits, tools, and shared ownership.
This guide walks you through simple practices that help your workspace stay accurate and useful over time.
1. Make Slite part of everyday habits
A knowledge base that isn't used by the team becomes outdated very quickly. The first thing you need to do to have a successful knowledge base is to integrate it into people's daily work routines. This will help you in different ways:
You'll be able to get feedback about what works and what does not
You'll understand what content is valuable and what is missing
You'll have multiple people at your disposal to help you maintain the content; either by making updates directly, or by flagging outdated content to subject-matter experts (SMEs).
Here are a few ways to keep Slite part of your team’s daily flow.:
Use our Slack Integration v.2 and/or 🔬Chrome extensionSlack and Chrome are likely two tools that your team naturally uses throughout their day. By integrating Slite into the main tools they use to do their jobs, it gives your team easy access to company knowledge without having to remember to log into Slite.
Set up a dedicated feedback channel for your knowledge base We recommend creating a Slack channel or setting up an email address where people can easily submit their feedback or suggestions for the knowledge base.
Share links to Slite docs when team members ask questions outside of Slite
We've seen great success when knowledge managers or SMEs respond to questions outside of Slite with a link to the documentation in Slite. It really reinforces the habit of checking Slite first, before reaching out to colleagues, and helps your team to work more autonomously. Even though you might feel like a school teacher at first.
2. Monitor adoption and content health with "Usage Analytics"
Via Settings > Usage Analytics all users are able to view the activity of their workspace. It shows you the overall adoption of Slite, the consumption of documentation and gives you insights into if your team is able to find the content they are looking for.
To make sure your content is in good shape you can leverage our Knowledge Management Panel, or have a look at our Knowledge Maintenance Cheat Sheet. Here we gathered 12 clear actions you can take — from quick wins to high rewards — to stay on top of your team's knowledge.
3. Verify and set expiration reminders for important docs
You can verify and set reminders on important documents that should always be up to date (e.g. Company Handbook, SOPs, How-To's, and Help Articles). By setting a reminder the owner of the doc will receive a notification to check the doc periodically and reset the verification.
Learn more about verifying and setting expiration reminders here: Doc Verification
4. Define ownership and create incentives
Maintaining a knowledge base is not a solo sport. It's crucial to share the ownership and set incentives for your team to ensure they keep their content up to date. Even if you have a dedicated knowledge manager in your company, this person can never be an expert on all subjects.
Incentives
With this in mind, adding knowledge management as a team or personal goal can make sense. Make it something you include in your OKRs, job descriptions, and performance reviews.
Ownership
As the admin of Slite you can appoint individual contributors as owners of specific processes or documentation. You can look out for someone with a natural drive or previous experience. But the best remains to identify organic champions. You can use the leaderboard in Usage Analytics for this.
5. Archive unused content regularly
It's tempting to keep creating new documents, especially when it's so easy to do so with Slite, and never remove anything. But we'd like to encourage you to archive any channels or docs that are not being used by the team anymore. To see what content might not be valuable anymore, you can either use the Knowledge Management Panel, or the channel display settings to fade out inactive docs and show archived docs.
Learn how to show archived docs and fade out inactive docs here and here.