Can I host my internal docs in HelpDocs?

Sure! You can either set 'em up in a separate Knowledge Base all together or keep 'em all in one Knowledge Base and restrict certain content.

Using Multiple Knowledge Bases

If you wanna keep your internal and external articles completely separate having multiple Knowledge Bases is a great option. For example:

If you're an eCommerce business you might want:

• An external Knowledge Base for customer questions about shipping, products, and returns
• An internal Knowledge Base for policies, onboarding new employees, and general company information

You don't need your operations manager updating customer support docs but they probably wanna create vacation policies. Vice versa you don't need your support team updating your hiring processes. What's that saying about "too many cooks in the kitchen?" 👩‍🍳

✨ Pros

• Completely separate articles and categories on each account
• Completely separate user management so you can invite the right people to the right account
• Switch between accounts easily with the account switcher

⛔ Cons

• Support teams aren't able to search for both internal & external docs in one place
• Can't have groups of people with access to different docs
• Higher maintenance cost for multiple accounts because you need to keep them both updated

Hiding your articles from the public

You'll want to restrict your docs from the public to make sure they're only seen internally. There are two ways that you can do this.

1. Invite your whole team to HelpDocs and restrict the frontend to logged in users only You can use the Read Only role if you don't want your team to see the HelpDocs dashboard or edit articles
2. Use shared password protection and, well, share the password with your team You can even cookie your team members in your internal dashboard so they don't need to also log in to HelpDocs

Restricting content in one Knowledge Base

Having all your content live in one Knowledge Base is helpful for organizations with multiple teams or if you need to keep your articles all together in the same place.

If you're a SaaS company you might have multiple teams that need access to specific articles:

• Your marketing team needs to be able to see partner-related documents
• Your development team needs to have access to certain processes
• Your support team needs to update customer front facing docs but also access internal docs to help answer tickets

When there's a lot of moving pieces it's easier to manage by keeping everything in one Knowledge Base. Then you can restrict the content by permission group 👀

✨ Pros

• All internal and external facing articles in one place with one URL for your team to visit
• Greater control over content visibility
• Restrict content to an individual user, a group of users, or a role of user
• Helpful for organizations with multiple teams

⛔ Cons

• Time investment in setting up groups

How to restrict your articles

There are two ways that you can restrict your articles in one account.

1. Use Permissioning to group internal articles while keeping public articles in the same account You can create an internal group and then add users to restrict access just to them
2. Use JWT authentication to restrict access with a token You can customize your JWT token to do some pretty interesting stuff