As mentioned in The 3-Part Mission of GreatAlbum, while we were in the process of building GreatAlbum, we had to think about how we would support the users of the app. We looked at a lot of traditional customer service applications, like Jira Service Desk, Zendesk, Zoho, etc. The problem was that with all of them, the model was to have a small number of people providing customer service to end users. That didn’t feel right.

As a result, we created GreatSupport (https://help.greatalbum.net), a stand-alone app (website for now) that enables a community support model, just like you get with open source communities like Drupal, WordPress and GitHub. The GreatAlbum team will provide the foundation of support, and more importantly, our users will help each other. That approach will be much more scalable, and it will reinforce the sense of community, not only in sharing content with members of your Albums, but also in helping other users with how they do the same with their own albums, even when you aren’t a member of their albums and can’t see their content. We think this could become a model for other companies. 

The way it works is that there are Guide Books on the site that assist with five major things overall: 

1. How to use the GreatAlbum App
2. How to use the GreatAlbum Help (ironically, help for how to use help)
3. Personal stories about user/life experiences as a result of using GreatAlbum
4. How to write stories and biographies
5. How to research family history

Each Guide Book is comprised of four kinds of content:

1. Topics - Kind of like chapters, describe major parts of functionality in the apps, or major topics in researching and writing
2. Articles - Explain how to perform functions related to each topic
3. Issues - Describe problems, bugs, suggestions, requested features related to the Topics and Articles
4. Discussions - Conduct discussions related to Topics, Articles and Issues
5. Releases - Coming soon...this describes new releases for GreatAlbum, GreatSupport and GreatHome.

There are three kinds of users who interact on the GreatSupport site:

1. Anonymous - can view everything; can't create/comment on anything
2. Authenticated Users - can create Articles, Issues and Discussions; can edit Articles/Issues; can comment on Discussions
3. Support Managers - can create/edit/delete anything on the site

The reason that Authenticated Users can edit any Article or Issue, is because they are empowered to support other users, which means they can create or edit any Articles to make them better, and they can edit any Issue to help resolve it.