The Knowledge Lifecycle and Versioning Giving your team access to provide feedback either via chatter comments, ratings, or (for super users/authors) directly editing drafts is critical to ensuring your knowledge base is polished for your customers. The Knowledge Lifecycle is cyclical and stresses continuous improvements to content.
Full Answer
What is Salesforce knowledge?
Salesforce Knowledge gives you the ability to build out a comprehensive Knowledge Base (KB) inside of Salesforce to service your internal agents, partners and customers.
What is Salesforce Lightning knowledge and why should you care?
As you probably know, Salesforce Lightning has “struck” almost everywhere, and Salesforce Knowledge is no exception. Lightning Knowledge is a major reworking of the Classic Knowledge features and is more than just a change in UI.
What are the different types of articles in Salesforce?
Different article types are kept as Record Types, like any other Salesforce object. For example, you may have an FAQ record type, a Troubleshooting record type, and a News record type for the different types of content you want to organize.
What is a root article in Salesforce?
The root article acts as a container for the primary knowledge article created by you along with all the article versions and translations that you might create in future. The following diagram depicts the entity model for the KnowledgeArticleentity. When you create a knowledge article record, it is created in the Draftstate.
What is true about Salesforce knowledge?
Your Salesforce Knowledge base is built from knowledge articles, which are documents of information. Articles can include information on process, like how to reset your product to its defaults, or frequently asked questions, like how much storage your product supports.
What are two features of knowledge Salesforce?
One of the critical features of Salesforce Knowledge is Data Categories and Data Category Groups. These are two major functions — article organization and article access. Data Categories allow you to organize your article content in a hierarchical way.
What is Salesforce knowledge used for?
Salesforce Knowledge is an effective knowledge management system that helps solve issues or answer questions of external customers as well as internal employees, by using articles.
What is Article management in Salesforce?
The Articles and Article Management tab is your gateway to creating, organizing, editing, deleting, and publishing help articles for your users. This is a vital part of Salesforce Knowledge.
What is a knowledge article Salesforce?
Knowledge Articles (Salesforce Knowledge) Articles can include information on process, like how to reset your product to its defaults, or frequently asked questions like, how much storage your product supports. Experienced service agents and internal writers write the articles.
What is knowledge Article object in Salesforce?
When you create knowledge articles, you create records with concrete Salesforce objects. These objects inherit from their abstract counterparts. By default, these concrete objects are named “Knowledge__ka” for knowledge articles and “Knowledge__kav” for knowledge article versions in Lightning Knowledge.
What is a knowledge base Salesforce quizlet?
What is a knowledge base? A single repository for storing helpful organizational information.
How do I manage knowledge articles in Salesforce?
Select Manage Salesforce Knowledge. 3. Click on App Permissions....You also need to make sure that the Tabs are visible as necessary:From Setup, enter Profiles in the Quick Find box, then select Profiles.Select a User profile.Click Edit.Set the visibility of the necessary tabs to Default On.Click Save.
How do I view knowledge articles in Salesforce?
To switch to the Knowledge One and the Knowledge tab, have your administrator add the Knowledge One permission to your profile or permission set. If the search bar is in the left-side panel of the page you are using the Articles tab. The Articles tab presents a list of your Salesforce Knowledge published articles.
What details does a knowledge article hold?
Knowledge articles are those who provide users with information such as self-help, troubleshooting, and task resolution.
What is article type in Salesforce?
Description. Article Types are like Record Types for Salesforce Classic Knowledge. They are custom templates that can provide a different look-and-feel for the published article as well different types of information, visibility and edit rights. Default article types include FAQs, Offers, and How-To's.
How does suggested articles work in Salesforce?
Suggested Articles uses keyword-based search to find relevant articles. It's automatically enabled when Lightning Knowledge is enabled. Einstein Article Recommendations analyzes past cases and case-article attaches to find relevant articles.
What is Salesforce Knowledge Base?
Salesforce Knowledge gives you the ability to build out a comprehensive Knowledge Base ( KB) inside of Salesforce to service your internal agents, partners and customers. A Knowledge Base is simply a collection of articles with relevant information about your products and services, to encourage a self-service model for your customers ...
What is the knowledge lifecycle?
The Knowledge Lifecycle is cyclical and stresses continuous improvements to content. To support the Knowledge Lifecycle, Lightning Knowledge has version control, which is a new feature from the Classic model.
What is Lightning Knowledge?
The Lightning Knowledge data model is very different from the Classic Knowledge data model, so the access is also fairly different . In Lightning Knowledge, all articles are on a single Salesforce object called Knowledge (Knowledge__kav) by default (you can actually rename if you want, not just relabel!)
How are topics different from data categories?
Topics are different from Data Categories in that they don’t drive article access in any way and they are not hierarchical. They are primarily used to organize information within a knowledge base in a community. Topics are assigned to articles in Content Management > Topics in the Salesforce community workspaces.
Why add topics to articles?
Adding topics to articles lets you easily classify them based on content and provides easier searching within your knowledge base. Think of these like keywords. A single article can have a multitude of topics assigned depending on the content.
Can you approve articles in Salesforce?
As with most Salesforce objects, you can create an approval process for articles. This is invaluable for controlling what content is published, especially if you have a public knowledge base and need to screen content for customer-facing articles.
Create a knowledge article
When you create a knowledge article record, Dynamics 365 Customer Service internally creates a root article for the record. The root article acts as a container for the primary knowledge article created by you along with all the article versions and translations that you might create in future.
Create major and minor versions of a knowledge article
When you create a knowledge article record, the major version is automatically set to 1 and minor version to 0. Use the CreateKnowledgeArticleVersion message ( CreateKnowledgeArticleVersion Action or CreateKnowledgeArticleVersionRequest) to create a major or minor version of a knowledge article.
Create a knowledge article translation
Use CreateKnowledgeArticleTranslation Action (Web API) or CreateKnowledgeArticleTranslationRequest (organization service) to create a translation for a knowledge article record. You can translate your knowledge article in more than 150 languages, and information about these supported languages is available in the new LanguageLocale entity.
Knowledge article lifecycle: Change the state of a knowledge article
During its lifecycle, a knowledge article can be in the following states:
Associate a knowledge article record with a Dynamics 365 Customer Service entity instance
When you enable embedded knowledge search for an entity in Dynamics 365 Customer Service using the web client, a many-to-many relationship, msdyn_ <Entity_Name> _knowledgearticle, is automatically created.
Increment knowledge article view count
Use the IncrementKnowledgeArticleViewCountRequest message to increment the view count of a knowledge article record for a given day in the KnowledgeArticleViews entity. If a record doesn’t exist for a knowledge article for a specified day, it will create a record and then set the specified view count value in the KnowledgeArticleViews.
Search knowledge articles using full-text search
Knowledge articles in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, including their versions and translations, are full-text indexed and support SQL Server full-text search. For more information about full-text search, see SQL Server: Full-text Search.
archiveOnlineArticle (articleId, scheduledDate)
Archives an online version of an article. If the specified scheduledDate is null, the article is archived immediately. Otherwise, it archives the article on the scheduled date.
editArchivedArticle (articleId)
Creates a draft article from the archived master version and returns the new draft master version ID of the article.
editOnlineArticle (articleId, unpublish)
Creates a draft article from the online version and returns the new draft master version ID of the article. Also, unpublishes the online article, if unpublish is set to true.
editPublishedTranslation (articleId, language, unpublish)
Creates a draft version of the online translation for a specific language and returns the new draft master version ID of the article. Also, unpublishes the article, if set to true.
publishArticle (articleId, flagAsNew)
Publishes an article. If flagAsNew is set to true, the article is published as a major version.
restoreOldVersion (articleId, versionNumber)
Creates a draft article from an existing online article based on the specified archived version of the article and returns the article version ID.
scheduleForPublication (articleId, scheduledDate)
Schedules the article for publication as a major version. If the specified date is null, the article is published immediately.
Key Points – What You Need to Know
Content Management
- The Knowledge Lifecycle and Versioning
Giving your team access to provide feedback either via chatter comments, ratings, or (for super users/authors) directly editing drafts is critical to ensuring your knowledge base is polished for your customers. The Knowledge Lifecycleis cyclical and stresses continuous improvements to c…
Channels
- Once you have your articles published, you have several channels to share them with. These channels are like audiences for your content — Internal users, Partners, Customers, and the general Public.
Approval Processes
- As with most Salesforce objects, you can create an approval process for articles. This is invaluable for controlling what content is published, especially if you have a public knowledge base and need to screen content for customer-facing articles. The approval processes for knowledge articles work more or less like any other, but there are special approval actions that a…
Knowledge Features
- Ratings
One feature of Salesforce Knowledge is the ability to let your users rate the content. In Classic Knowledge this was always a 1-5 star rating, but in Lightning Knowledge it’s a simpler thumbs-up or thumbs down rating system. (When migrating, 3,4,5 stars are converted to thumbs-up and 1,2 … - Data Categories
One of the critical features of Salesforce Knowledge is Data Categories and Data Category Groups. These are two major functions — article organization and article access. Data Categories allow you to organize your article content in a hierarchical way. They can also be grouped into D…
Topics
- Adding topics to articles lets you easily classify them based on content and provides easier searching within your knowledge base. Think of these like keywords. A single article can have a multitude of topics assigned depending on the content. (Just don’t over-assign topics because then searches could return irrelevant results). Topics are different from Data Categories in that t…
Case Deflection
- With customer support teams feeling overwhelmed, Salesforce can help manage the high support volume and Knowledge is one of the methods. Exposing knowledge articles to your external and public users is a great way to deflect support cases from your service agents. A robust knowledge base will empower your customers to self-service rather than flooding your case queue with que…
Using Apex with Knowledge
- One final important feature of Knowledge is that it can have Apex triggers and be accessed through Apex code. In fact, there are standard apex classes relating to knowledge management that can be called in Apex for publishing, archiving, searching, and more. In Classic Knowledge this was more restrictive, but the Lightning Knowledge data architecture change included these …
Keep Learning!
- Lightning Knowledge is just one facet of the Lightning. To learn more about the Lightning Experience you can check out some webinars and other blogs on the topic! Why Lightning? Why Now? Lightning Experience is the next generation of Salesforce. Take advantage of the new features in Lightning and learn why now is the right time for Salesforce Lightning. Become a Ma…