➖ 👨🏽‍🏭 👨‍❤️‍👨 YouTrack now with a knowledge base 🗒️ 🖊️ 🌾

Hello, Habr!

Connected Youtrack Team from JetBrains. Our users have long asked us to come up with something that would allow them to store documentation directly in the tracker. And as part of the major release 2020.2, an important event took place: a knowledge base appeared in YouTrack. Now you can collect useful information to work in one place and store internal documentation directly in YouTrack, side by side with projects and tasks, and your external users will be able to find answers to their questions directly in the tracker.

For details, welcome to the post.

What it is?

We did not invent a bicycle: our knowledge base is a collection of articles. Articles are organized into a tree structure, the root of which is the project: thus, each project can have a branched article structure.

For those who like brevity, I’ll list below the main features of the knowledge base, and for those who are interested in looking at scripts and pictures, welcome further.

So, in addition to actually creating articles, you can:
1. Search for the desired article using full-text search.
2. Use WYSIWYG or Markdown editor.
3. Create a variety of content using tables, checklists and ordered lists, as well as attaching or embedding various media - from YouTube videos to Google documents.
4. Discuss articles in the comments, mention colleagues and tasks.
5. Subscribe to notifications of changes and comments in articles interesting to you.
6. View previous versions of the article and, if necessary, restore any of the previous versions.
7. Manage access to articles both using roles (we have added appropriate permissions to control access to articles at the project level) and restrict the visibility of individual articles (or entire article branches) using visibility lists - just like for tasks.

OK, and what to do about it?

According to the experience of our users, there are two of the most popular scenarios for using the knowledge base: internal team documentation (meeting notes, vacation schedules, internal guides) and a public knowledge base for external users (frequently asked questions, product documentation, roadmaps).

Your team's internal documentation

It is difficult to imagine a modern team without any documentation: notes from meetings, checklists for new team members, or even instructions for setting up a VPN. The YouTrack knowledge base will help to collect everything in one place, and, of course, it will be useful not only for development teams.
Let's say you organize team building for colleagues. To plan an event, create an article in the knowledge base and start writing down your ideas there. YouTrack will automatically save the draft and you can return to it at any time.

In the drop-down menu above the title of the article, indicate to whom your articles will be visible. You can restrict access to individual documents and branches in the article hierarchy - just like when working with tasks. By default, the article is available to everyone who has the permission to "read the article" in the project, but you can narrow this visibility at any time. Visibility settings propagate down the knowledge base hierarchy, so sub-articles will be visible to the same people as the upstream article.

Reading a full text is not very easy - and here the capabilities of our editor come to the rescue. For example, remind your colleagues how great the teambuilding went last summer by attaching a video, or structure your content using tables, checklists, and ordered lists.

And after the publication of the article, it's time to invite colleagues to discuss your idea - the mention mechanism works the same way as in tasks. Do not worry, you will not miss anything - notifications will come about comments. If you want to keep track of what’s happening in another author’s article, simply mark it with an asterisk to receive notifications about it too.

An open knowledge base for your users

In the knowledge base it is convenient to store not only documentation and roadmaps. Your users may have questions about using your product. Gathering answers to frequently asked questions and usage guides in one place and making them publicly available is a great way to make life easier for your users.

First allow anonymous access.to your YouTrack server so that external users can enter the knowledge base without registering. Access control is very flexible - you can open separate article branches for a certain circle of people: your team, registered users or for everyone. Now all you have to do is fill your knowledge base! Write articles, add tables, attach files and don't be afraid to make edits - all versions of the article will be available on the history tab, and you can at any time see the difference between the versions and roll back to any of the previous states.

Answer customer questions in the comments to the articles, receive notifications of updates, and link to articles from the knowledge base in task discussions. Mention colleagues in the comments if their help is required, and post links to related articles and tasks - all the necessary information is already at your fingertips.

Knowledge Base Search

Both in open and closed knowledge bases, a full-text search works, which finds all articles that contain the searched word or phrase. It’s easy to move from search results to the right article to find the answer to your question.

Do you use this at JetBrains?

We in the YouTrack team have a rule: we always run on any significant change in the product for ourselves. The knowledge base was no exception. For example, we have been keeping records of our weekly meetings there for several months, and we have also created a whole section of internal documentation: you can find a training plan for new technical support engineers, instructions for conducting scheduled work on cloud servers and recommendations for going on vacation.

Many features and corrections were implemented exactly in the wake of our experience: something that looked convenient on the layouts turned out to be not very comfortable to use, or we felt that some functionality was missing. And on the night before the release of the classics of the genre, we found a rather serious bug and managed to fix it with joint team efforts.

Is there anything else interesting?

Of course, the knowledge base is not the only improvement in YouTrack 2020.2.

Project administrators can now set up a group of users who will see tasks in the project by default - for this scenario, you no longer need to write code. In addition, we have expanded the list of field types that can be converted to other types: for example, a text field can be converted to a string field, and a status field can be converted to an enumerated one to avoid a conflict of several status fields.

For productive work with colleagues from other teams, you can share tags, saved searches, Agile boards and reports in a new, more flexible way, namely share with several user groups at once.

We also added new settings for the workspace and task list, as well as the action “Clone task as draft”. For those who are just starting to work with Agile boards, we have simplified the process of creating a board as much as possible. Read more about all the innovations in our blog .

YouTrack now with a knowledge base