Managing knowledge article visibility

BMC Knowledge Management uses visibility groups to restrict access to knowledge base content. You can specify the audience for your article by assigning one or more visibility groups to the article.

When you create a new article, the system does not assign any visibility group. By default, when you save an article with no visibility groups assigned, the article is accessible to the following users:

• Article's assignee support group
• Article's owner support group
• AR Administrator
• Users with unrestricted access

When you change an article's company and a visibility group or groups are already assigned to the article, the group or groups remain assigned for the new company. You can change the assignments as described in the following procedure.

When you change the article's company and no visibility groups are assigned to it, the article remains with no visibility group for the new company. By default, the article can be accessed by the support groups of the article's assignee and owner.

To view an article, a user must belong to a support group that is mapped to a visibility group that, in turn, is assigned to the article. The following is a graphical representation of how you can make an article visible to a user:

Consider the following scenario:

Calbro has two support groups, Front Office and Back Office. Currently, the VG1 visibility group is mapped to the Back Office support group. VG1 is assigned to the KA1 knowledge article. User 3, who is a member of Front Office support group, needs to view KA1. An administrator provides User 3 visibility to KA1 by using either of the following two methods:

• Method 1—Add the user to a support group that is mapped to a visibility group that, in turn, is assigned to the article. For information about adding users to a Support Group, see Adding members to a support group.
  In the above example, VG1 is assigned to KA1. To make KA1 visible to User 3, the administrator adds User 3 to the Back Office support group that is mapped to VG1.

• Method 2—Create a new visibility group that is mapped to the support group to which the user belongs. Assign the new visibility group to the knowledge article.
  In the above example, User 3 belongs to the Front Office support group. The administrator configures a new visibility group VG2, mapped to Front Office support group, and assigns VG2 to KA1. Now, all users belonging to Front Office support group can view KA1.

For more information, see Configuring-visibility-groups.

To assign a visibility group to a knowledge article

1. Open the article to which you want to add visibility groups.
2. Click Functions > Article Visibility to open the Visibility Groups window.

3. To add visibility groups, select a combination of a company and a group from the lists on the left side, and click Add.

   Note

   If you set the Visibility Group field to All, the knowledge article becomes visible to all users belonging to the selected company.

4. Click Save.

To remove a visibility group from a knowledge article

1. Open the article from which you want to remove a visibility group.
2. Click Functions > Article Visibility to open the Visibility Groups window.
3. In the list on the the right side, select the visibility group that you want to remove.
4. Click Delete.
5. Click Save.

Related topic

Configuring-visibility-groups