Getting started with knowledge management

Knowledge articles are simple documents of information that are created to offer help to the users of the organization. They include information such as troubleshooting topics, how-to topics, FAQs, known errors in the application, useful resources, and so on.

To enable your staff members and clients to work with knowledge articles, you must configure the following:

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.

Best practice
We recommend 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.

Flows and workflows

Flows and workflows help you in automating frequently occurring actions in your service desk.

BMC Helix Remedyforce

provides you some flows and workflows out of the box. They are inactive by default. Activate them when required. For more information, see Configuring-flows and Configuring-workflows.

Important

Starting with the Winter'23 release, Salesforce retired workflow rules, but continues to support existing workflows until further notice. You can edit and activate workflows, but you cannot create new ones. Workflows that you activated in older releases continue to work after upgrading to the latest version of BMC Helix Remedyforce. For more information, see Salesforce article

Salesforce recommends using Flow Builder as an alternative to workflows. BMC Helix Remedyforce will support workflow rules only as long as Salesforce supports them.

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 flows or workflows, ensure that they are triggered at the configured condition.