Salesforce Knowledge Part-3

Imagine you have hundreds of files in one room, and you are trying to find that one file that you need for tomorrow's presentation, you might have to go through each and every file and it may take hours and days to find your file, if you don't organize them according to the categories. Similarly in 1-2-3 SFDC org a user can take hours to search an article in the knowledge database. It is very important to create a category group for the articles that makes the users life more easier. These are the category drop down menus which you define based on the business needs.

Creating Data Categories

In total 3 categories can be created with maximum 5 hierarchy levels. Go to Setup, click Customize > Data Categories. Under category groups select create new. 

Now create following three categories

1) Product Type

2) Support Options

Category Groups are your main types of data categories with hierarchy of data under them. For example the two main category groups for 1-2-3 SFDC is Product type and Support Options. The category group Product Type will have categories like laptop, mobile and desktop. Now the laptop category can have sub categories like Dell, Lenovo and Apple. Sub categories can again have child categories and this can go on to 5 hierarchy levels. Create New and specify the group name. This group will appear as the title for the category drop down on article tab.

Activate the Category Group

On the left hand side you will find two sections 1) Active 2) Inactive category groups. Move the mouse on the category group name and select the activate option as shown in the screen shot. Activate the data categories to make them visible to all users.

 

Enable the feed tracking on Chatter

Next enable Chatter feed for our article types for collaboration. Go to Setup-> Customize-> Chatter-> Feed Tracking .You will find your article types “FAQ” and “Product manual” on the left panel under objects section. Enable feed tracking for the article types

We are finished with all the settings to enable knowledge in our org.

In our org 1-2-3 SFDC we have three different roles who will be using articles-

1.      Support Rep

2.      Knowledge Manager

3.      Sales Rep

We have an experienced category of support reps who are responsible to create articles. While dealing with a case if there is no related article available in the knowledge base or there is any additional info to be updated this is done by our support reps, before the articles are published it needs to go through an approval process by our knowledge manager. We have sales rep who look for relevant articles but not necessarily create articles. Sales rep can rate articles, provide comments and feedback if it was helpful in resolving any issues. Knowledge manager reviews all the information and decides if an article is to be removed, updated, added etc.

Let’s create an article and publish it:

Let’s login as a knowledge manager. Go to Set up-> User-> Kate Hudson and login as her. If you do not see login option before the user then you probably will have to use her username and password login to salesforce and enable the grant login access from profile settings.

You are logged in as knowledge manager. You should see article management in the tab section. If you do not see this tab then you need to enable article management object and knowledge for the knowledge manager profile.  Now click on the “new” icon under article management tab.

Select Article type as “Product Manual”. We will create an article for Dell Inspiron Laptop.

Type Dell Inspiron under in title field.

You will see a form required to create an article. Look closely the procedure section with the description long text area. We created this field on our article type object “Product Manual”. Type the Title and the description.

 

On the left panel you will see categories, select Dell under laptop and add this on the selected categories section on the right side and hit "ok".

Similarly edit the support options and select the product support and move it under selected categories.

The article that you just created has been saved as a draft. In case If you want to publish this article then select the publish option and publish it or schedule the publication on any future date. 

    
On the left panel you will see find list of articles in the draft , published and archived status. Congratulations! you have published your first article in Salesforce. Let us learn how to related articles with cases in our next post  Salesforce Knowledge Part-4