This document helps you hit the ground running in your new knowledge management.

Set up your Matterial

Setting things up requires only a few steps. We suggest to open a new tab for trying out the functions and keep this document open as you go.

Invite your team

To invite new team members go to the left menu and click “Administration”. Go to “Manage persons”. There you see pending invitations, all your team members and you can invite new users at the bottom of the screen.

Create and manage groups

Groups help you keep everyone in the loop and quickly give access rights to documents to the right people.

Go to the left menu and click “Administration”. Go to “Manage groups”. There, you see all existing groups. To create a new one, go to the bottom of the screen.

To add people to groups, click on one of them and add their username or registered email.

Manage access rights and permissions

You don’t want everyone to see or edit everything in your knowledge base. You want to make sure everyone gets the information they need, but not overwhelm anyone. To do this, you can create roles and define individual permissions for them.

Go to the left menu and click “Administration”. Go to “Manage roles”. There, you see all existing roles. To create a new one, go to the bottom of the screen.

To see who has been assigned a role, click on it and edit it as you like.

To create a new role, go to the bottom of the screen.

Create categories for your documents

Categories help you and your team mates to find information faster and to build a coherent system where it’s clear to which part of the organization’s knowledge a piece of information belongs.

In Matterial, you have two levels of categories. There are super-categories called “category types”. They can have an infinite number of categories that you can attach to documents.

Go to the left menu and click “Administration”. Go to “Manage categories”. There, you see all existing category types. Expand them to see the categories inside them, move categories to another category type, edit them, or add new categories. To create a new category type, go to the bottom of the screen.

To add categories to you document, go into edit mode and find “categories” in the page navigation or scroll down to the categories section. You can add free categories, called “tags”, or choose from the set of categories defined for your Matterial.

Manage languages

One of the special features of Matterial is the best system for managing multilingual content to date.

To set the available document languages as admin, go to the left menu and click on “Administration”. Go to “Manage languages”. Here you select the languages in which the documents in your Matterial should be available.

You can change the default language for documents individually in your personal settings, as well as the language of the user interface.

Insert your own logo

To replace the Matterial logo with the one of your organization, go to “Administration” in the left menu and then to “Manage logo” below. There you can upload your logo in the appropriate dimensions from your computer.

Search

As soon as you start typing in the search field, you will receive suggestions for your search term from the database. Once you have entered your search term, you can refine the search results by language, categories, check status, permissions, and advanced filters.

Save searches & customize dashboard

In the search results a button “Save search” appears in the upper right corner. So if you have defined your search results in such a way that you get all documents on one topic (for example “knowledge transfer”), you can always return to it by saving.

To do this, enter a name for your search. Choose whether you want to save the search only for yourself or for specific groups (permission required). If you select “Show on Dashboard”, the search will be shown on the dashboard for you or the groups of your choice.

Saved searches will also always appear in the left menu.

Create and edit documents

The Matterial knowledge base is made up of documents. They are so flexible that they can map all kinds of content. In addition, the essential characteristics that make your knowledge management productive depend on them.

You create a new document from the dashboard, with the button “New Document” at the top.

Add title, description and content

A good title is quite short, but contains important keywords that describe the document in a meaningful way and make it easy to find. When naming the document by its title, also consider what your team would look for if they wanted to find the document.

The description can be a short sentence, some keywords or an abstract in which you briefly explain the content of the document. This will help you classify and find the document. The description also helps other readers to determine if the document is relevant to them.

The content can be composed of different components such as text, pictures, videos, tables, etc. It is also included in the keyword search.

For formatting, you can use the toolbar or formatting options for markdown that you can simply type without having to press any buttons.

toolbar:

The table of contents is automatically generated from the headings of your document. Click on it to open it. Click on an entry in the table of contents to jump to the heading in the text.

Upload and insert images and other files

With the “Insert” button in the editor toolbar you can upload images and insert them directly into the text at the cursor position. They will be displayed in the preview and the document view.

You can also insert other files for download directly into the text as well as links to Matterial documents or special characters.

Also from the “Attachments” section below the document you can insert files directly into the content at the current cursor position.

Add document properties

Below the document there are sections for attachments, tasks, comments, categories and document properties. When you check a document property, your document gets a corresponding label and is displayed in the corresponding section on the dashboard.

Share document and edit access rights

In the section “Permissions” you define who should have read and write access to your document. To do this, select the corresponding group by clicking on it. If you also click on the pen icon, all members of the group will be given write permission. With the “Info” icon you can see which people are in the group.

If you only want to give read or write access to individuals, you can add them individually to the document.

Save and publish

You can save your progress in the document at any time with the “Save” button at the top or with CTRL + S. Your document is now in draft state.

To publish a new, valid version, click on the arrow next to the “Save” button and select “Publish”. This will activate all changes as a new version and you can track them in the change history.

Working with documents

Document view

In the document view you can also write tasks and comments and view the change history.

Narrow & wide view

Matterial documents are optimized for reading and writing text. However, there are contents, e.g. tables, for which a wider view is more comfortable.

With an icon in the upper right corner of the document view you can switch between the wide and narrow view.

Authors can use the document property (see above) to specify whether their document should be displayed wide or narrow by default. Readers* can then still decide how they want to read the document.

Add to favorites

Frequently used documents can be added to favorites by clicking the star in the upper right corner of the document in the document view. You can access your favourites via the right menu under “Favourites”.

Download

Documents can be downloaded as PDF files. To do this, go to the end of the document in the document view and click on “Download PDF”.

Document templates

Document templates can be found in the left menu. There you can create new templates and use or edit existing ones.

If you want to save a simple document as a template, open the document in the document view and go to the bottom. There you will find the button “Use as template”.

You can create a document directly from a template. From the dashboard, click on the small arrow next to the “New Document” button. “From Template” leads you to all available templates. If you mark a template in the overview of templates or in the view of a template with an asterisk as a favorite, this template will be shown as a shortcut directly below “From Template”. With one click you can use it directly.

Batch processing in the personal file

If you have searched for a term, you can put several documents from the search results list in your personal file for further processing together.

In the search results list, click on “Select” in the top right-hand corner. Select the desired documents using the checkbox and choose “Add to personal folder”.

You will find your personal folder in the left menu. In the personal folder you can process the documents stored there with “Actions”.

Tasks

In Matterial, tasks always refer to a document. To create a task, open a document in view or edit mode. Below the document you will find the section “Tasks”. Go to “Add”, enter the task and optionally select a due date. Then select a group or an individual. Once a group is selected, the task will be displayed to every person in the group. One person can then accept it.

To see which tasks are assigned to you, open the right menu and click on “Tasks”.

To see the status of tasks you have created, open the right menu and click on “Created tasks”.

comments

To add a comment to a document, open a document in view or edit mode. You will find the comments below the document. Enter your text and optionally add a person by typing an “@” followed by the person’s name. Select it and the person will receive an email as notification.

Version comparison

To compare document versions and see what has changed, click the version number in the metadata above the title in the Document View. You can select which versions you want to compare. In the change log, you can click to jump to the respective changes.

Personal settings

You can find your personal settings in the right-hand menu by clicking on your profile picture in the top right-hand corner and clicking “Settings” at the bottom of the bar. There you can change your language settings, personal data, security settings and many other personal adjustments.

Any questions?

For more tutorials and how-tos, head over to our FAQ or let us know if something is not working for you.

First things first—Matterial Starter’s Guide