Best practices for registering knowledge sources

Source types

Lifecycle Management

Use lifecycle management when you want articles to go through an approval process. The approval process ensures that only articles in the Publish status can be found on searches.

Relevancy fields

Relevancy fields are indexed automatically and are displayed on the Article Details tab as part of the article metadata. Relevancy fields cause articles to appear higher in the search results if the searched words appeared in the relevancy fields.

Title and Displayed ID relevancy fields are shown as the header of each result in the search result list.

• Title field—Because the Title field is shown as the title of each result in the search result list, map it to a field that represents or summarizes the article content.
• Keywords—In searches, matching words in keywords relevancy field, get higher score than regular word matching. Map it to a keyword field in your source form to make your searches more accurate.
• Displayed ID—Use this relevancy field if you have a different ID that identifies your article other than the Request ID field. The Displayed ID appears in the header of each result list search and you can enter the ID as a search term.

Source name

Source description

We recommend that you write a description to your sources when creating a new source. This enables you to know what the source represents. The source description helps distinguish between sources with similar names.

The description is shown in the Create Article dialog box and helps users select the appropriate source when creating a new article.

Owner and owner group

Article language

If you are working in a multi-lingual environment, selecting the source language from the language selection field ensures that all your source articles are in one language.

We recommend that you leave the language field blank if:

• You are working in a single language environment and do not have to filter your searches by language.
• You are working in a multilingual environment and your source articles are in more than one language.

Indexing interval

The Indexing Interval field is applied only to Knowledge Base sources and Searchable sources when their AR form is a Join, Vendor, or View type. File System Path sources also have an indexing interval that is set in the configuration form.

By setting the Indexing Interval field, you can define how often Full Text Search checks the knowledge source for changes, and then indexes them. This process consumes resources from the server.

Several factors influence the resource consumption:

• Interval Value—The smaller the value, the more resources are consumed.
• The more sources with indexing interval, the more resources are consumed.
  We recommend that you set the interval according to how often your search results data gets updated.
• If your data is not changing frequently, set the interval to a longer time.
  Note: The out-of the-box value of Indexing Interval time for external documents, is changed from 2 minutes to 60 minutes. Any change made to an external document is available only after 60 minutes. This change is applicable only to external documents. Typically, external documents do not change frequently, and a longer interval time reduces the workload on the system.

• If you import data when the interval is set to a longer time and you want it to be available immediately, you can rebuild the index (available from the Manage Knowledge Sources console) without changing the indexing interval.
  Note: If you choose to index table fields that point to other forms, the other forms are also checked for changes by Full Text Search.

  
  

Content fields

Choosing the right fields to index improves the accuracy of your search results and the performance of the search process. We recommend that you index content fields that contain important data of the article, as well as fields that users are most likely to search by. Typical examples of indexed content fields include fields that represent the ID, Title, Subtitle, Subject, Summary, Notes, Environment, Platform, Keywords, and Date of the article.

Another reason to index the Keywords, Title, and Environment fields is that the articles in which the searched words appeared in any of these fields get higher rating in the search result list.

Tip: If you marked the Title, Article ID, and Keywords fields as relevancy fields, the fields are automatically indexed and there is no need to select them for indexing again.

You can index the following field types: Character, Diary, and Table. All other field types cannot be indexed. When you select Table field as a content field, you are actually indexing the fields of the form that the table is referencing.

If you need to index data from more than one form, perform one of the following steps:

• Create a Join form with the fields that you want to index and select them as the content fields.
• Have a table or tables in your form that reference the fields that you want to index from the other form(s).

For example, you may want to search Incidents by associated Work Info, so that your search results will bring not just the relevant Work Info but also any matched Incident. To do that, index the HPD:Help Desk (Incident) form and select the Work Details table as a content field. The registration wizard treats the table as a content field and indexes all valid columns. When you perform a search, the search result will bring up incidents in which the Work Info content (and other content fields if selected) matches the search word. The registration wizard does not show fields that were marked for Full Text Search indexing by Developer Studio. To keep these fields indexed, select the fields again as content fields.

Accessibility

Accessibility defines the permissions to the knowledge source. For example, who can see and use the source in the search dialog box and source management console.

There are two levels of permissions, company permissions and form permissions.

• Company permissions — Only users that belong to this company can use the source. You can select one or more companies. Select the Global company if you do not want to limit access to the source by the company.
• Form permissions — Use this type of permissions when you want to grant access to the knowledge source to users with specific form permissions. Only users that have the specified form permissions can use the source. By default, all the forms are shown in the table. You can register the source with fewer permissions by removing forms from the table.

Registration time

Several factors determine the time of the registration process.

• Searchable Item sources are usually registered faster as they require less processing than other sources.
• The amount of data in the source form or directory in File System Path sources influences the registration time of Knowledge Base sources and the indexing time of all source types.
  The more content fields you choose for indexing and the more content there is in these fields, the longer the indexing time.
• We recommend registering sources when there is less demand on your system, especially when registering sources with a considerable amount of data.

Registering File System Path source that exists on remote computers

Mapping types

You can select either fixed values for categorization, or dynamic values that will be taken from the AR form and which require that you map existing fields to the fields on the AR form.

• Select Map to Existing fields if you have values in the organization and categorization fields of your source form and you want to filter searches by these fields and show them in the article details tab.
• Select Use Fixed Values if you do not have values in the organization and categorization fields of your source form, but you still want the same organization and categorization values for all your articles and filter searches by them.