Asking for an example of a system usually means asking what one looks like in a company like yours, and the honest answer depends more on who reads it than on what it is called. Four shapes cover nearly every case, and each is described here by the company it fits rather than by its feature list.
A support team of twelve, a public help center with an internal half
Articles face customers, a smaller internal set carries the caveats, both live in one product with a hard publish boundary. The agent sees the internal answer inside the ticket and the customer sees the public one from a search engine. This is the most common shape in a company of two hundred and the one most likely to be right by default.
An engineering company of eighty, a wiki everybody writes in
Contribution is high because the people are writers, structure is loose, and the failure mode is that nothing has an owner. It works, and it works because somebody imposed an owner line and a checked-on line by convention and then enforced it, which is the only part of the setup that is not the software.
A regulated operations team, a base with approvals
Two tiers: ordinary articles anybody in the team may edit, and procedures that carry an approval and a version history you can produce on request. The distinction is visible on the page so nobody edits the second kind casually. The product choice is decided entirely by whether it can show a prior version and its approval.
An IT service desk, the base inside the ticketing tool
The reader is nearly always an agent with a ticket open, so the article is offered inside the ticket rather than in a second tab. Weak as a general reading surface, which is fine, because in this company almost nobody else was going to read it.
Questions people ask about knowledge management systems example
Which shape should a company pick if it is unsure?
The first. It is the only one that serves both an internal and a customer audience without a second system, and moving away from it later is easier than merging two bases.
Can a company run two shapes?
Many do, usually a wiki for engineering and a help center for everybody else, and it works as long as each has a clear subject boundary. What does not work is two systems holding the same answers.
How much do these differ in price?
Less than they differ in fit. The cost that varies is whether readers count as billed seats, which is worth checking early because the number of people who should read a base is everybody.
What do all four have in common?
An owner per article and a date somebody confirmed it was still true. Every shape that lasted has both, and no shape supplies them by itself.