The basic idea behind a knowledge base is to automate customer support by organizing product support information into an easy-to-find, easy-to-access format. The knowledge base can be used by customer support personnel to find answers to common customer complaints, or can be put out on the web, allowing the customer to do their own searching. Alternately these systems can be used to organizes product info for sales people, allowing faster/easier access to a wide range of product data for pre-sales support. At a bare minimum, an knowledge base might be an indexed set of FAQ's and mailing list archives indexed with a good search engine. At the high end, the system would have ways of removing old crufty information, and be integrated with call tracking or bug tracking systems.