Are there any pre-populated knowledgebases we can import into Altiris Helpdesk?

May I also make a suggestion: Build your own KB content.

But you say, that takes too much time!

Normally, that would be true, but there is an interesting shortcut that can kickstart your KB. I don't have all the steps documented but here it is in general steps:

1) Using Inventory Solution, make a list of all apps in your environment.
2) Using App Metering, make a list of the most used apps.
3) Using Helpdesk, make a list of the apps that need support the most.
4) Intersect the above lists.

Now for the fun part...

5) Gather the Help CHMs for the most used and painful products.
6) Use the windows HH.EXE command line utility to extract the HTML files from the Compressed HTML File (yes, that is what CHM stands for).
Example: HH.EXE -decompile D:/xTemp/decompile-folder C:/xTemp/convert.chm

This gives you a directory full of HTML files, one for each "page" in the HTML file.

This is the interesting part.

You can just put the folder in the KB directories on your NS and reindex. They will all add. The problem is that there isn't any meta tags at the top of the HTML files so they don't exactly "fit" into the KB just right. No categories, etc.

I have done the above with several customers and each said it was a great way to get started.

If some smart person out there were to figure out a VBscript or some tool that would add the proper HTML header to the file, voila, we would have the holy grail for KB content generation.

Good luck to all y'all Juice Drinkers
-John-

I have implemented the KBI solutions for several companies. They were happy with the depth of the content and more importantly, the fact that they didn't have to enter the information.

Anything that can cut down calls to the service desk is defintitely worth looking into...

http://www.keyworks.net/keytools.htm can also help