Creating and publishing knowledge articles

Knowledge articles are a source of information that agents might require for incidents or cases they work on. As a service desk or case agent, you can create knowledge articles that contain information about resolving an issue, your company's policies, and so on. To create articles with different types of information, you must use the available knowledge templates. These templates provide a consistent structure for different types of articles. 

By using the Knowledge Curator agent, a service desk or case agent can automatically create knowledge articles from incident or case details and validate them to improve article quality. For more information about automatically creating and validating knowledge articles, see Automatically generating and validating knowledge articles.

By default, you have the Knowledge Candidate and Knowledge Contributor roles that enable you to work with knowledge articles. For more information about these roles, see Setting up roles and permissions. 

If an analyst modifies the default lifecycle of knowledge articles, the modified lifecycle is displayed when creating and editing articles. 

Before you begin

• Make sure that knowledge sets are created and associated with appropriate knowledge templates.
• To help users navigate to appropriate sections in a knowledge article, you can add cross-references to those sections by adding anchor tags. Before you add the anchor tags, an administrator must whitelist the attributes of the anchor tags. Contact your administrator to confirm if the attributes for the anchor tag are whitelisted. 

Best practices for creating knowledge articles

You must create comprehensive and accurate articles that provide agents with the necessary information for their incidents or cases. 

The following image shows best practices for creating knowledge articles:

To create a knowledge article

1. Log in to BMC Helix ITSM or BMC Helix Business Workflows. 

2. Navigate to (BMC Helix ITSM) Create New > Knowledge or (BMC Helix Business Workflows) Create > Knowledge.

   By default, the Line of Business is selected for which you can create an article. 
   
   

3. Select a knowledge template for the article. Before you start creating the article, you can preview the template and then choose Use selected Template or to select a different template, click Select a different template. 

4. On the Create Knowledge page, enter the article title in the Knowledge Title field and the content in the text box by using the DocEditor.
   The following image shows the options in the text editor to format the text:
   
   Use the following table to learn about some of the options in the text editor:

   Icon	Description
   	Add a cross-reference link to a section in the same document.
   	Copy the formatting from a word or paragraph to apply it to a different word or paragraph in the document.
   	Insert text from a Word document into the knowledge article.
   	Insert a page break that appears in the printed format of the knowledge article.
   	Find and replace text in the knowledge article.

   Success

   Best Practice
   We recommend that you do not change the template of a knowledge article after you enter the content of the knowledge article. If you change the template, you must reenter all the details for the article in the new template.

5. In the Knowledge Metadata section, fill the following fields:

   Description of fields in the Knowledge Metadata section

   Field	Description
   Knowledge Set	To associate a knowledge set with the selected template, select the required knowledge set from the list. Knowledge templates inherit the permissions from the knowledge set and these permissions are applied to the article.
   Company	Select the requester's company for the knowledge article.
   Author	The logged in user is selected by default.
   Article locale	Select the language for the article.
   Assigned Group	Select the group to which the article will be assigned.
   Assignee	Select the user to which the article will be assigned. The article inherits the access permissions from the selected group.
   Assign to me	To assign the article to yourself, click Assign to me.
   Keywords	Add a keyword to the article. You can use this keyword to search for the article from a case or incident.
   Category Tier 1, 2, 3, and 4	Select a category for the article. This classification is useful when searching for an article from a case or incident by using the Advanced search options and including the category values.
   Region, Site group, and Site	Select a region, site group, and site for the article. This information is useful when searching for the article from a case or incident by using the Advanced search options and selecting location values.
   Attachments	To attach files to the article, click Attachment. The valid file size is 20 MB.

   Warning

   Important

   When you view a knowledge article with the view permission, the following read-only fields are displayed:

   • Knowledge Title
   • Article ID
   • Knowledge Status
   • RTF fields
   • View counter
   • Useful counter
   • Knowledge Metadata
   • Flag icon
6. Click Save Knowledge.

The view, edit, and search permissions of knowledge articles are inherited from knowledge sets. To change the permissions of the knowledge article, see To add or remove user access to a knowledge article.

After you create an article, the default status of the article is In Progress. As you work on the article, you can change the article status to reflect its progress on the article. For more information about article statuses, see Changing knowledge article statuses.

If required, you can send the article for an SME review by changing its status to SME Review. For more information about SME Review, see Reviewing and validating knowledge articles.

To check similar articles

To identify duplicate or similar articles while creating a new one, perform the following steps:

1. Log in to BMC Helix ITSM or BMC Helix Business Workflows. 

2. Navigate to (BMC Helix ITSM) Create New > Knowledge or (BMC Helix Business Workflows) Create > Knowledge. 
   On the Create Knowledge page, once you start typing a title, a banner is displayed if similar articles are found based on the title.
3. To view similar articles, click Please review before creating a new one. 
   Similar articles are displayed in a pane with a percentage of relevance to the entered title.

The following image shows an example of similar articles that were retrieved based on the title of the new article:

To publish a knowledge article

You can publish knowledge articles to an internal or external audience. To publish an article, you must have the Knowledge Contributor, Knowledge Publisher, or Knowledge Coach role. For more information about these roles, see Setting up roles and permissions.

To publish a knowledge article, complete the following steps:

1. Log in to BMC Helix ITSM or BMC Helix Business Workflows. 
2. Navigate to (BMC Helix ITSM) Console > Knowledge Console or (BMC Helix Business Workflows) Workspace > Knowledge.
3. Click the required article. 

4. Click the current status (for example, Draft) to open the Edit status pane. 

5. In the Status field, select the value Published.

6. (Optional) Specify the audience for the article in the External list in the Knowledge Metadata section. By default, the value of this field is set to No.
   • No: Publish internally for agents.
     You must have a Knowledge Contributor, Knowledge Publisher, or Knowledge Coach role to publish the article internally.
   • Yes: Publish externally for agents and self-service users.
     You must have the Knowledge Publisher or Knowledge Coach role to publish the article externally.

After you publish the article, you can periodically review the article to validate it. The Next Review Date field in the Knowledge Metadata section of the article displays the date by when you should review the article. As required, you can specify a different review date or extend it. For more information about the periodic review of articles, see Reviewing and validating knowledge articles.

Related topics

Creating knowledge articles from Smart IT

Updating and maintaining knowledge articles

Changing knowledge article statuses