How Partoo got 100% of its people onto one knowledge base, and kept 80% of it fresh

A wiki that scaled to 40 people and no further

Partoo helps businesses take control of their online presence: listings, customer reviews, local SEO, across 150 countries. Its internal knowledge base started as a WordPress wiki. That was a reasonable choice for a small team, and it stopped being one as headcount climbed toward 400.

• Nothing said whether an article was still true. No freshness tracking, no publication dates. Content aged quietly and kept being read.
• Nobody knew who had written what. With no clear author, there was no one to ask and no one responsible for the update.
• Finding anything took too long. Retrieval degraded as volume grew, until searching felt like a gamble.
• Admins were flying blind. No way to measure impact, no way to see which content actually helped, so no basis for deciding what to fix first.

The compounding effect was the real problem. Trust was eroding. For a company whose client-facing teams depend on accurate information, an internal base people have learned to doubt is worse than no base at all.

Research the replacement, then earn the adoption

Partoo's knowledge manager treated the choice as a project rather than a purchase. Four categories were evaluated: extend WordPress with plugins, move to a full intranet, adopt a dedicated knowledge base, or take a tool that combined a base with more. They also benchmarked what comparable French scale-ups were running.

• Search that answers rather than lists. Advanced search with filters and auto-suggestions replaced digging through folder hierarchies.
• Access rights that keep up with growth. Fine-grained permissions mean who-sees-what changes as fast as the org chart does, without creating a bottleneck.
• Freshness is enforced, not hoped for. Validity dates on articles plus automated reminders to content owners mean nothing goes stale in silence. That single mechanism is what rebuilt the trust.
• Analytics inform what gets written next. Content performance, user behaviour and space activity turn maintenance from guesswork into a priority list.
• The rollout was run like a launch. A pilot group of key contributors first. Then defined teams (HR, Strategy, Operations, Care) with admin training, space structure and the WordPress migration, creating internal champions. Then the full company launch, complete with its own logo, desktop shortcuts, Slack announcements and QR code posters around the office.

Many people speak about Notion and Confluence. But here at Partoo we decided to use Elium to manage our growing company knowledge. It is simpler and responds better to our needs.

Adopted, then relied on

The numbers are unambiguous: every employee connects, and four out of five articles are checked regularly for freshness. Spaces mirror the corporate structure, so navigation matches the mental model people already have. Most content is public by default, with selective privacy where it is warranted, and clear roles define who reads and who maintains each area.

The softer signals say more. Likes, comments and sharing became part of daily work. The knowledge base started turning up in official presentations and internal conversations without anyone prompting it.

We had one key mantra when it came to knowledge management at Partoo. We wanted to ensure that our teams would have access to the right information, at the right time, in the right place. And this guided our entire project approach.

Trust is the thing a knowledge base actually runs on, and Partoo had lost it. One mechanism brought it back: a validity date on every article, and a reminder to whoever owns it.