The Fortinet Discussion Forums hold a wealth of information that has been helpful to users of Fortinet products. We would be interested to know which of the posts, both old and new, you feel should be added into the Fortinet Knowledge Base.
Regards,
Admin.
Well, as is occurring within this thread the first step is to clearly define the difference between a general forum post, a sticky post (FAQ list?) and a Knowledge Base article. A KB should be the initial go to resource for any technical query or problem (that the user has not been able to find in standard vendor documentation); obviously I'm excluding the cases where there is a high impact live service issue at hand i.e. outage, and are covered by a support contract, since the TAC will be called. Ideally the KB should follow a, Goal (outcome), Facts (e.g. HW/SW variant, error messages) & Symptoms (e.g. unable to set config, poor performance), structure so that the user can be presented with the most relevant results, subject to a coherent search string being submitted. KB articles are generally objective i.e. there is a clear and (predominantly) singular answer/method. If he answer is not found via the KB then this is where the forum comes into play, since there is a wider freedom of expression in the way a question may be asked, and it is being read and answered by humans, who can seek further clarification of the question. Forums are ideal where answers can be subjective since the resources i.e. other forum members are numerous, and all replies are subject to public peer review. Moving back to the original question... Any technical post that; receives a significant amount of views, AND has a singular unchallenged answer OR one that can be categorised as being 'best practice', should be a candidate for inclusion into the KB. IMO if a KB library has been established then a forum 'sticky post' (if used) should be constrained to information relating to forum administration and general assistance OR technical posts in a sub forum and are highly informative i.e. announcement of a SW release or product alerts. Sticky posts do add to the administrative burden of forums admin's; additionally if not used sparingly you can end up with 10's per sub forum, can be unsightly. Sticky posts should not be there to cater for any flood of posts that would be categorised under the banner of "RTFM".
Rgs,
Graham
Enter your E-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.
