Atlas is a one-stop-shop approach for customer and community support and is free to open source projects.

Until now, forums, knowledge bases and FAQ's have been the way for companies to provide community based support. The end user experience is however usually frustrating - how does one ever know where, in the myriad of available databases, the answer to one's question lies?

Furthermore, internal support staff, moderators and community members have to spend their time linking forum threads, documents, FAQ's and other sources to avoid frequent re-creation of the same content. The result is messy support forums that suffer from a fundamental disconnectedness.

What is worse is that failure of the system to answer any question make the situation worse. The answer might exist but a post that remain unanswered creates both clutter and a statement that suggest that no such answer does exist.

An IDC study found that workers spend more than 20 hours a week finding, gathering or recreating information.

Altas is a new product that aims to help the situation by providing off the shelf:

• A single location for Q&A, FAQ's, documents and videos
• Unified tagging across all content to find and filter quicker.
• Search, bookmark and share content to pinpoint solutions.
• Faster answers with the new "Relevant Replies" technology.

The idea is that you store all of your support information - FAQs, document, video and so on in the same repository and use a consistent tagging system to unify the knowledge base.  The tags can then be used to provide a context for the search. It also includes bookmarking of external content and it integrates with Windows Live Writer for content creation. 

Atlas is available for pre-order and a beta can be downloaded from www.atlasanswer.com. As with the Gemini project management platform, Countersoft offers Atlas for free to open source projects.