Best practices for defining knowledge permissions in BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround


Before you define knowledge access permissions in

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, consider the goals you want to achieve by grouping knowledge content and limiting access to different article groups in

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. You can benefit from the opportunity to create the knowledge structure from the start to align it with the up-to-date needs of your organization, without inheriting the structure that reflects the goals that might be no longer relevant; for example, such outdated goals as grouping knowledge articles for filtering purposes or aligning the knowledge structure with the organization hierarchy.

Also, contrary to the hierarchy-based approach to defining access permissions, KCS offers the principles of Abundance and Trust that promote creating knowledge content constantly and collectively to enable knowledge sharing as much as possible.

To learn more about these principles, see What’s KCS®? Knowledge-Centered Service Explained and Placing Knowledge Management at the Heart of Digital Service Management posts on BMC Communities.

 

Approaches to defining knowledge permissions

The following table describes the different approaches to defining knowledge access permissions in

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Approach

Description

Confidentiality-based

Limit access to knowledge articles that contain sensitive or confidential information only for the user groups authorized to work with it, for example, confidential recruitment policies.

User role-based or job function-based

Assign access to knowledge articles based on the user's role within the organization. For example, employees of the finance and recruitment departments might need access to completely different sets of knowledge articles to do their jobs. Also, you can grant broader permissions for certain roles. For example, managers may need privileged access permissions compared with nonmanagerial employees.

Organization lifecycle-based

Grant access to knowledge articles that apply to a specific lifecycle phase within the organization only for users that need it. For example, you can allow new hires to access only onboarding knowledge articles.

Location-based

Restrict access for users from a specific location to knowledge articles created for a different location, for example, country-based HR policies.

Service provider multitenancy-based

Segregate knowledge articles for different external clients of the organization if the organization provides its services to the clients by using BMC products.

After you identify the approaches based on which you want to define knowledge access permissions, the respective user groups can be created in

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and mapped with the existing groups in your BMC application. 

 

Permission limitations in BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround

When you plan the knowledge access structure in

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, be aware of the following limitations: 

  • A maximum of 64 user groups can be created in environments that have not yet been migrated to the new content storage solution.
  • In migrated environments, up to 3000 user groups can be created, and each user can be assigned to up to 256 groups. For more information, see Creating user groups and assigning content access.

Additinally, user groups must be multiplied for each KCS role that requires access to knowledge articles in

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. Multiplying user groups for KCS roles your organization uses is needed because KCS roles in your BMC applications are assigned per user, but these KCS roles are assigned per user group in

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. As a result, users from your BMC applications are mapped to specific

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user groups based on their KCS role. However, you are not required to use all KCS roles for all user groups in

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. For example, you might want to grant access to knowledge articles only for Knowledge Managers in some user groups. 

Information
Example

Suppose, you use three KCS roles for your organization and have 20 user groups. You multiply these 20 user groups by each KCS role in

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that results in the creation of 60 user groups in total. 

Warning

Important

If a specific user has two different KCS roles in your BMC application, the higher level role is applied in

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.

 

 

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