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Blog » Getting Started with Knowledge Articles
The ability to create and manage knowledge articles is something many people have been asking for. We’ve now rolled out the first stage of knowledge articles within Beetil – keeping them relatively simple to start with. They’ve got a look and feel that’s a combination of incidents (and their ability to link to other beetils) and messages (with their topics/categories). Also like incidents and messages, knowledge articles can be made available to your customers via the self-service customer portal.
Knowledge articles are a way of providing your staff and/or customers with a clear and common understanding of your services. Examples of information you might publish as knowledge articles could be:
- Overviews of business processes and services provided to your customers
- Training material for each of your services
- Policies or procedures for using or changing your services
- Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about your business processes and services
- “How To” guides and articles
You can easily link knowledge articles to any other incident, problem, change, release or related configuration items. Also just like for other beetils you can also add/remove yourself from the watchlist, view the audit log history for the article and record time against it.
Knowledge Dashboard
The Knowledge Dashboard provides a summary of each knowledge article that is of interest to you and includes:
- its title (or question);
- the service;
- knowledge category;
- number of times it has been accessed (since it was published);
- number of comments; and
- when the last activity was.
You can filter by:
- status (draft or approved/published);
- whether they are owned or assigned to you or on your watchlist; and
- knowledge category.
To see what your customers can see, restrict the list of articles to “Customer Viewable” ones.
Drafting and Publishing Knowledge Articles
To create a new knowledge article just click on New Article from the dashboard or from the Knowledge menu.
The owner and assignee will both initially be the creator and the article will be in a “Draft” state. The title of the article will often be the “question” the article is answering (e.g. for FAQs). Images can now be placed inline within the text of the article. If you mark the article as “Customer Viewable” it will be visible in the customer portal when published.
When the article is ready for review, post a comment, add reviewers to the article’s watchlist and notify them. Comments can be hidden from customers. Moving the article to a “Published” state signals it has been reviewed and/or approved.
Find Answers on the Customer Portal
A new “Find Answers” tab will be visible in the customer portal as soon as you’ve published your first “Customer Viewable” knowledge article. This will give your customers the ability to answer their own questions instead of needing to log a call with your service desk.
Customers can perform a keyword search or browse articles by knowledge category. They can then sort by article popularity (i.e. how many hits has the published article received), usefulness ranking (i.e. how many customers voted the article as being useful) and newness of the article.
Customers can add the article to their watchlist to be notified of any changes to the article. If customer comments have been enabled for the article then comments can be viewed and logged against the article too.
Reports
To get you started we’ve provided a set of out-of-the-box knowledge reports for users of Beetil. Get to these from Reports in the Knowledge menu or by clicking on Knowledge Reports from the dashboard.
Like incidents, problems, changes and releases you can roll-your-own knowledge reports based on a range of attributes and you can schedule them to be emailed to you and/or share them with your team.
Managing your Knowledge
Knowledge categories are created and maintained in the Admin form for each service by an account administrator. You can’t yet create sub-categories but you can workaround that by using the pipe symbol to achieve that – e.g. FAQs | Incidents, FAQs | Problems, FAQs | Changes.
Since knowledge articles are a bit more formal than notes you might have on a Wiki somewhere, you’ll want to have some processes and controls to manage the updates and retirement of articles. Future versions of knowledge in Beetil will provide more fine-grained control in this area too.
What’s next?
We’ve deliberately started off with a simple approach. We know there are features missing (e.g. approval workflow, more discrete user permissions, sub-categories, ability to create an article based on an incident , etc.).
We’d like to hear your feedback. E.g. What are the most important things that are missing for you? What reports do you or would you find most useful? Drop us a line at support@beetil.com or log the feedback via your Beetil Support customer portal logon.
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