Set up a private knowledge base

Every team at your organization needs access to product information, but not every team needs access to Aha! Roadmaps. Create a private product knowledge base from your workspace documents just for your organization. Then protect it with SSO to keep proprietary information safe.

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Confirm user permissions

Action

User permissions

Create a knowledge base

Customizations administrator

Configure SSO

Customizations administrator

Manage workspace documents

Workspace contributor


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Before getting started

For the purposes of this article, let's say we are part of the product team for Fredwin Cycling, a mobile cycling app. Our team creates, maintains, and shares a lot of essential product information for other teams across our organization. We manage and store our documents in an Aha! Roadmaps workspace. When we share product information, we copy and paste the content into a Google document on a shared drive in our company's Google Cloud account.

The way that we currently share product information is not ideal for our product team or the rest of the organization. Our product team has to maintain documents in multiple places, and other teams have to click through multiple folders in Google Drive to find the product information they are looking for. Documents inevitably become buried, forgotten, or outdated.

To address this issue, we will:

  • Create a new knowledge base that allows us to instantly publish updates to our product documentation

  • Enable single sign-on (SSO) for this knowledge base so that only members of our organization can access it

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Locate documents

We know which documents and folders we want to include in our knowledge base. We will confirm their location so they are ready when it is time to add them to our knowledge base.

If you are following along, make a list of the documents and folders you want to include in your knowledge base. Then, locate them so it will be easier to add them to your knowledge base.

We plan to include the following types of documents in our internal knowledge base:

  • Use cases

  • Product roadmaps

  • Case studies

  • User guides

  • Integration guides

  • Release notes

  • FAQs

We located all of the content in our Fredwin Cycling workspace that we want to include in our knowledge base. Now, we are ready to start setting it up.

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Create a new knowledge base

Now that we have located the documents we want to share, we can create a knowledge base. If you are following along:

  • Navigate to Settings ⚙️ -> Account -> Knowledge bases and click Add knowledge base.

  • Enter a title for your knowledge base. We will enter "Fredwin Cycling internal knowledge base" as our title.

  • Under Publish existing documents, search for one of the documents or folders you plan to include by name. We will search for "use cases" because we plan to include our Use cases folder in our knowledge base.

  • Click the folder's name to add it to your knowledge base, then click Next.

  • Select a publishing workflow. We will choose Publish as you write so updates will appear automatically in our Customer Success knowledge base.

  • Click Next.

  • Select a theme color and click Create knowledge base.

You will see a confirmation on your screen that your knowledge base is ready.

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Add documents to your knowledge base

We created our knowledge base with one folder of documents, but we are not done. Now, we will add the other documents we want to include in our knowledge base.

  • Navigate back to Settings ⚙️ -> Account -> Knowledge bases and click the name of the knowledge base you just created. This will open its knowledge base settings.

  • Click the Documents tab.

  • In the Documents tab, you will see the folder you added when you first created your knowledge base. Click Add documents.

  • At the top of the document selection window, select the workspace where the documents you want to add are located. That workspace's document hierarchy will appear in the window. You will only see workspaces that you have permission to view.

  • Click + next to all the documents or folders you want to add. Clicking a top-level document or folder will also select all of its nested documents.

  • When you have selected everything you want to add, click Select documents to add them to your knowledge base.

  • On the next screen, drag and drop your documents and folders into the desired order.

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Enable knowledge base SSO

Our knowledge base is built! Now we need to make sure that other teams at our organization can access it and that people outside of our organization cannot. Our organization uses Google Cloud, so we will set up SSO for our knowledge base through Google Cloud Identity. This will ensure seamless access to our knowledge base for team members as long as they are logged into their Google account.

In Aha! Roadmaps

  • From your knowledge base settings, navigate to Overview -> General -> Access.

  • Under Authentication, select SSO.

  • Under SSO identity provider, select Add new provider.

  • In the next window, name your identity provider. We will call ours "Fredwin G Suite."

  • Next to Type, select SAML. Then click Save.

  • Your new SAML SSO configuration will open.

  • Select Metadata file next to Settings using. Later, you will generate a metadata file from your Google Cloud Identity account that you will upload here.

In Google Cloud Identity

  • Navigate to the Apps menu and select SAML Apps -> Add a service/App to your domain -> Setup my own custom App.

  • Choose IDP metadata file and click Download to download the metadata file.

  • Enter a name for your app. You can name it whatever you choose. We will name ours "Fredwin Technologies knowledge base."

  • After naming your app, you will be prompted to provide the ACS URL and the Entity ID. You will find both of these in the SAML SSO configuration you just created in your Aha! account.

  • Select EMAIL as the Name ID Format value.

  • After entering the ACS URL and Entity ID you will be prompted to set up attribute mapping. Define EmailAddress, FirstName and LastName. These three values are required for Aha! Roadmaps SAML SSO.

Complete setup

Back in Aha! Roadmaps, upload the metadata file you exported from Google Cloud Identity to your SSO configuration. Then go back to Google Cloud Identity and enable the app you created by selecting On for everyone.

Congratulations! You just enabled SSO for your knowledge base.

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Share your knowledge base

Our knowledge base is built and SSO is enabled! Now we can share it with our organization. When teammates navigate to the knowledge base's URL, they will have instant access to the knowledge base as long as they are logged into their Google account. If they are not logged in, they will be prompted to log in to Google before they can access the knowledge base.

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