Getting started with knowledge management

Roles

Roles enable you to configure hierarchy in your organization. You can control the level of visibility that users have on the data by using roles.

For example, by configuring and assigning roles, you can enable users to open incidents on behalf of other users. For more information about configuring roles, see Managing roles.

Users

All staff members can create and edit a knowledge article. To enable staff members to publish, retire, or check out a knowledge article, grant the Remedyforce Knowledge User permission. For more information about adding staff members and granting the Remedyforce Knowledge User permission, see Adding or editing users and Enabling users to publish, retire, or check out a knowledge article.

BMC recommends that you assign permission sets to your users. When you are upgrading to a major release, most of the profile permissions are updated automatically for permission sets. If you do not assign permission sets, you need to manually update permissions of each profile.

Accounts

Accounts represent customers, organizations, departments, or other parties to which you want to give access to a set of configuration items, clients, and knowledge articles. You can choose to show only selected knowledge articles to the users of an account.

To understand the field descriptions and for more information about adding accounts, see Creating accounts. Also, see Salesforce Help.

Knowledge article types

Knowledge article types help you to categorize knowledge articles. Out of the box, the following knowledge article types are provided:

• FAQs
• How To
• Known Error
• Problem Solution

If you need additional article types to organize your knowledge articles, you can add knowledge article types. For more information, see Configuring custom article types.

Workflows

Workflows help you in automating frequently occurring actions in your service desk. For example, you can create a workflow to send an email message to the knowledge article owner whenever knowledge article is checked out. BMC Remedyforce provides you some workflows out of the box. All these workflows are inactive by default. You must activate the workflows that you need.

The following workflows are provided out of the box for knowledge articles:

• Notify Author that Article is due for review
• Notify user that knowledge article is published

For more information about activating a workflow, see Configuring workflows.

Prepare a list of workflows that you will need. Create the workflows that are not provided out of the box. For more information, see Salesforce Help.

Email templates

You can associate email templates with workflows or approval processes. Whenever a workflow is triggered, an email message is sent to the required users. By default, email templates that are associated with the out-of-the-box workflows are provided with the package.

If required, you can customize these email templates or create new email templates and associate them with the required workflows. For more information, see Creating an email template and Customizing an email template.

Testing your environment

• Ensure that you are able to create knowledge article.
• Ensure that you can check out and publish a knowledge article.
• Ensure that you can view a knowledge article in Self Service if the Display in Self Service check box is selected for the knowledge article.
• If you have activated workflows, ensure that the workflows are triggered at the configured condition.