A source register
Included collections, access groups, effective dates, refresh rules, and a named owner for retiring old material.
Knowledge & teams / Internal knowledge search
Find the answer. Keep the source in sight.
Help colleagues find useful answers in approved internal documents, with the relevant passage, its date, and a clear route for unanswered questions.
Discuss your project Start with an outline, not a perfect brief.
Where it gets stuckInternal knowledge search,
Internal knowledge search,
with the context attached.
A policy lives in a handbook, an exception in a team folder, and the old answer in a chat thread. Search returns all three; a confident summary can hide which one actually applies. The task is to retrieve evidence for this person and this question, not blend every document into a plausible answer.
A good first scope
Choose one audience and one body of guidance, such as purchasing policies. Identify the source owner, the current version, and questions colleagues repeatedly ask.
The workflow
- 01 / The starting point
A team member asks whether a remote-work equipment request needs approval. The agreed sources are a current purchasing policy and a regional supplement.
- 02 / The right context
Check the requester’s source permissions, retrieve the relevant passages, and compare their effective dates. A private HR note is outside this person’s permitted search.
- 03 / Prepared for review
Prepare an answer with document links, section references, and a question about location if the applicable supplement is unclear. Conflicting guidance stays visible.
- 04 / A person decides
The colleague can inspect the evidence; the policy owner resolves the exception. The output is a source-linked answer or an assigned unanswered question—not an approved purchase.
Tangible work
A useful working handoff
An evidence-first search experience
Answers beside the passages that support them, with source dates and a clear distinction between an answer, a conflict, and insufficient evidence.
A maintenance and escalation queue
Unanswered questions, stale links, conflicting versions, and permission failures assigned for review without exposing restricted content.
A focused engagementDefine the job.
Define the job.
Test the handoff.
- 01
Set the search boundary
Map users to source access. Choose what may be indexed, how changed permissions propagate, and what must never appear in an answer or preview.
- 02
Build a question set
Collect representative questions with expected sources, including regional exceptions and questions that have no answer in the approved material.
- 03
Test freshness and access
Try a revoked permission, a removed policy, and conflicting versions. Agree refresh and escalation behavior with the source owner before wider use.
How we would startMap it. Test it.
Map it. Test it.
Then decide.
Agree the trigger, source systems, reviewer, and acceptance criteria. Build the bounded preparation path, then test it with the person who will own it.
Include the awkward cases
Test an outdated policy ranked above its replacement, a broken source link, a revoked group membership, and a document containing instructions to ignore the search boundary. Restricted snippets must not leak through previews or answer history.
Keep this boundary explicit
Permission-aware retrieval is a requirement to implement and test, not a security guarantee. Missing evidence should lead to an unanswered question, not invented policy. Source owners—not the assistant—decide which guidance is authoritative.
See how acceptance evidence works ↗A few useful answers
Before we begin.
What if two documents disagree?
Show the conflict and the relevant versions. Effective dates and a designated source owner can resolve it; recency alone is not authority.
Can everyone search the same company index?
Only if its contents are appropriate for everyone. Per-user retrieval, cached answers, and source previews need access checks; some collections may need exclusion or separation.
Who keeps the answers current?
A named content owner maintains the sources. The scope should define refresh checks, removal handling, unanswered-question review, and how users report a wrong answer.