Knowledge Management - Given a set of requirements, determine how to configure data categories, article types, articles and publishing workflow

Introduction This blog post describes how to configure data categories, article types and article publishing workflow based on a set of requirements. It also provides an in-depth overview of these functionalities in Salesforce. This section also covers the required configurations for various types of user requirements related to article management.

Data Categories and Category Groups Data Categories Overview:

Data Categories are an admin controlled hierarchical taxonomies which are used for organizing the knowledge base content and providing a secure way to access the content. Data category modeling is done in multiple ways by answering some common questions like
- who is using the knowledge base?
- in which context the knowledge base is being used?
- does article distribution to specific groups required?
- how will end users filter results using the data categories?
Articles can be associated with none, one or multiple categories in each group, at any level of the hierarchy.
Data categories are used in Salesforce Knowledge (articles and article translations), Ideas, Answers, and Chatter Answers to help classify and find articles, questions, or ideas.
Salesforce Knowledge uses data categories to classify articles and make them easier to find.
Can be assigned to articles when created.
There can be a maximum of 5 category groups with 3 groups active at a time.
Each category group can have upto 100 categories with 5 levels of hierarchy.
Within a category group, a 5 level hierarchy of data categories can be created.
Data Category Mappings can be used to map case fields with Data Category Group

Categorizing Articles

Articles can be associated with none, one or multiple categories in each group, at any level of the hierarchy.
Can be assigned to articles when created.
We can expose articles to Internal users, Partner Portal users, Customer Portal Users or Public Knowledge base.

Data Category Visibility Settings

Data categories are also used to secure the access to the knowledge base through Data Category visibility Settings which you can set at the role level (you can also set some default ones). These settings allow you to restrict the access to a sub-tree of a data category group or even to forbid access to an entire data category group.
There are three kinds of visibility options
- All Categories: All categories are visible
- None: No categories are visible
- Custom: Selected categories are visible
With custom data category visibility, we can only see the data categories permitted by role, permission sets, or profile.
Data category visibility can be set with roles, permission sets, or profiles.
If data category visibility is defined with roles, permission sets, and profiles, Salesforce uses a logical OR between the definitions to create a visibility rule for each user.
Setting a category as visible makes that category and its entire directly related family line—ancestors, immediate parent, primary children, other descendants—visible to users.
Only the first-level categories in the category group are visible on the Answers tab.
Category group visibility settings are enforced on the Answers tab, the Article Management tab, the Articles tab in all channels (internal app, partner portal, Salesforce.com Community, and Customer Portal), and the public knowledge base
If a role, permission set, or profile data category visibility has not been set up, all users can see all data categories. However, if data category visibility is set up, users who are not assigned data category visibility by a role, permission set, or profile, only see uncategorized articles and questions unless you make the associated categories visible by default.
Child roles inherit their parent role’s settings and are kept in sync with changes to the parent role.
User’s can see an article if they can see at least one category per category group on the article.
Category Group Article Visibility Settings Examples

Data Category Visibility Best Practices

When you create a category group, its visibility is defaulted to All Categories.
When you grant visibility to a category, you also grant visibility to its child and parent categories. If you want to give access to all categories in a branch of the category hierarchy, select the top-level category All Categories.
Users who are not assigned to a category’s visibility by role, permission set, or profile can only see uncategorized articles and questions unless:
- The user has the “View all Data” permission.
- A category group has been made visible to all users on the Default Data Category Visibility page in Setup.
For role-based visibility, Customer Portal users and partner portal users inherit the role assigned to their account managers by default. You can change the category group visibility settings for each portal role.
Keep your category groups deactivated to set up your category hierarchy and assign visibility. Until you manually activate a category group, it does not display in Salesforce Knowledge or your answers community
For role-based visibility, always set up data category visibility in a top-down approach from the top of the role hierarchy down to the bottom. Give the highest roles the most visibility and give subordinate roles reduced visibility.

Article Types

Article types provide the format and structure to control how an article displays for each audience, known as a channel.
Article type is similar to a custom object where custom fields, fieldsets, validation rules, triggers, page layouts, compact layouts, Channel Displays, and Communication channel Mappings can be configured for additional customization.
File Data type is available for an article type that allows the author to upload a file.
Channel displays (Article Type Templates) allow the display format for the channels (Internal App, Partner, Customer, and Public Knowledgebase) to be either Table of Contents or Tab or Custom. Tab displays each section as a tab and fields are displayed one after the other within each section. Table of Contents displays sections on one page as hyperlinks. Custom templates use the selected visualforce pages to display sections.
Communication Channel Mappings help agents embed article content into the body of customer emails.
When creating multiple article type page layouts, consider the following limitations and functionality changes.
- To continue displaying summary fields on preview pages, manually update your page layouts to include them.
- The article edit page only shows the standard fields (Article Number, Title, URL Name, and Summary) and all the custom fields added to the layout, including the side bar fields. Other standard fields added on the page layout are ignored because they are not editable, and the custom fields are displayed in the order specified in the page layout.
- If an article type page layout doesn’t include a field with a validation rule, you can’t create or edit an article of that article type. Make sure all page layouts assigned to the article type by profile include all fields with validation rules.
- You can set up a specific profile to generate a PDF file. When sending articles as PDFs, the pdf is generated based on the sender’s profile. Therefore, the receiver might get fields they are not meant to see. Use the Use a profile to create customer-ready article PDFs on cases setting on the Knowledge settings page so the fields in PDFs come from the page layout assigned to the configured profile. Also, Field Level Security of both the sender profile and the configured profile are applied.

Lightning Knowledge

Lightning Knowledge can be enabled to use Knowledge base in Lightning Experience.
Once enabled by navigating to Knowledge Settings in Setup and selecting ‘Enable Lightning Knowledge’, it cannot be disabled.
Once Lightning Knowledge is enabled Knowledge Object Setup will appear where all the Knowledge setting and layouts can be controlled.
Instead of Knowledge article types record types are used in Lightning Knowledge.
Differences between Classic and Lightning Knowledge
Advantages
- Using Record Types for article types means you can change your mind and switch an article from one Record Type to another once it’s been created. This wasn’t possible with Classic Knowledge – once you created an article, you couldn’t switch it to a different article type; you had to create a brand new article in the new article type and archive the old, incorrect article.
- With Lightning Knowledge, you can attach as many files as you want to a single article using the Files Related List!
  - With Classic Knowledge it was required to create a field to attach each file to an article which is not scalable.
  - Classic Knowledge file attachments had a limitation of 25 MB compared to Lightning Knowledge, which now allows for up to 2 GB per file attached to the article.
- Now it’s even easier to view and manage Lightning Knowledge from within the Service Console.
  - You can edit, publish, and archive articles directly from the Knowledge Sidebar of a Case.
  - Hover over functionality gives you a preview panel where you can not only view the article details but also vote or modify it without ever leaving the Case you’re on! See below for a comparison between what you get in Lightning and what you get in Classic.
- You now have the ability to directly edit source content and have more formatting options to make your Knowledge Articles look better than ever. And it is now compatible with the LockerService.
- The new derived fields are a great step towards better reporting capabilities in Salesforce Knowledge. It will be possible to see the total view count on an article when viewing a version record. These fields are available in API’s, List Views, Page Layouts, Compact Layouts and Search Layouts
- Ability to find knowledge articles by their attached files.
Limitations
- Delete archived articles is not available in Lightning Knowledge. However, you can still perform this action in Salesforce Classic when Lightning Knowledge is enabled.
- For articles with more than 30 versions, the versions above 30 show in Salesforce Classic, but not in Lightning Experience.
- You currently can’t remove a published article while editing it. Instead, the article remains published while you edit the new version as a draft. You can still perform this action in Classic when Lightning Knowledge is enabled.
- The action to restore a past version of an article is not available in Lightning. (You can still perform this action in Classic when Lightning Knowledge is enabled.)
- Some mass actions (such as mass archiving) are not available in Lightning Knowledge. Only the mass publish and mass assign actions are currently supported in Lightning Experience.
- Data categories can’t be shown in Knowledge list views in Lightning Experience or Salesforce Classic. Date categories are only used for filtering.
- You can’t add promoted search terms to articles in Lightning Knowledge.
- You can’t see vote information in the new ratings component unless there’s a Published (also known as online) version of the article. This affects article drafts and archived articles because all online versions are removed when an article is archived.
- When articles are exported for translation, the files attached to them are not exported. Files are also not imported as attached Files when Articles translations are re-imported after translation is complete.
- URL formats for articles differ between Classic and Lightning Knowledge. In Lightning Knowledge, the URL (along with other parameters) contains the Knowledge Article Version ID. In Classic Knowledge, the URL contains the Knowledge Article ID.
- Prior to December 2017, when knowledge articles were authored with images in Lightning Experience, only the author could view the images. Other users with Read permission enabled for Knowledge articles were not able to see the images. As of December 2017, a fix was backported that remedied this issue. Photos uploaded from December 2017 forward are now visible to all users with Read perms enabled. Photos uploaded prior to December 2017 must be reuploaded.
- Star ratings are not supported in Lightning Knowledge. Currently, only thumbs up and thumbs down ratings are supported in Lightning Experience. Star ratings in existing Salesforce Classic orgs are automatically converted to thumbs up ratings in Lightning Experience. Ratings of 3, 4, and 5 stars become a thumbs up, and 1 or 2 star ratings become thumbs down.
- You can’t search your list views.
- You can’t use inline edit on the Knowledge record home.
- The Knowledge footer is not in the Lightning Service Console.
- The following actions aren’t available in the Knowledge component for the Lightning Service Console: attach as a PDF to case email and insert article Community URL to case publishers.
- In the Knowledge component, Files from Custom File fields and File related lists cannot be automatically added to a case email when performing an insert article to email action.
Limitations in Salesforce Classic after enabling Lightning Knowledge
- The following items aren’t available in Salesforce Classic after enabling Lightning Knowledge
  - Knowledge list views
  - Search for article types
  - Filtering a search by Knowledge Record Types
  - Filtering a search by Archived Articles (except in Article Management)
  - Files in the Files related list in Lightning Experience don’t display in Salesforce Classic
- The following items aren’t available on the Knowledge article record home in Salesforce Classic:
  - Page layout selections for actions and related lists
  - Two Column page layouts
  - Some actions, such as Change Record Type
Limitations for using Lightning Knowledge with other Salesforce products
- To remove an attached file from an article, click the File title, go to “Share”, expand the “Who can Share” section, and then click the X next to the article to unshare the file with the article.
- If you are using Salesforce for Android or iOS, recent articles are not displayed on object home.
- The Files related list on Knowledge articles is not supported in Communities.
- The Article Title and Article URL fields can’t be removed from a page layout because they’re required fields. Communities use page layouts to display Lightning Knowledge Articles which means that these fields can’t be removed from Communities (without customization).
Record Types
- Record types can be created to distinguish types of knowledge articles.
- Standard Record Types replace custom article types
- Record types help in controlling the content and layout for each type of article.
- New record types can be created from knowledge object setup and existing record types can be selected to use as a template.
- Profile access and page layout can be specified for a record type.
Access
- Access to article actions can be specified using profile permissions
- Permissions need to be assigned to agents who publish (Manage Articles, (Read, create, edit and Delete on knowledge) and Publish Articles perms), archive(Manage Articles, (Read, create, edit and Delete on knowledge) and Archive Articles perms), delete(Manage Articles, (Read, create, edit and Delete on knowledge)) and manage articles. These perms are under App Permissions of Profiles and Permission sets.
- Permission sets or custom profiles can be used to grant users the permissions they need for Lighting Knowledge.
- See Lightning Knowledge Access For all the required perms for each Lightning Task

Articles

Overview
- Salesforce knowledge is built from Knowledge Articles which are documents of information.
- Articles can include information on the process, or frequently asked questions or steps to troubleshoot an issue or information about known issues in product etc.
- Experience service agents and internal writers write the articles and publish to different channels like Internal App, Customer and Partner communities, or public websites depending on the requirements and audience
- From Spring 17 onwards, Knowledge is available both in classic and lightning. Lightning Knowledge is recommended for new organizations. Migration from Classic Knowledge to Lightning Knowledge should be done by keeping the limitations in mind.
Article Creation/Editing
- Knowledge articles can be created from the Knowledge tab or Article Management tab.
- It may be needed to select the article type (record type in Lightning Knowledge) and language.
- When editing a published article we can choose whether to leave it published while we work the draft copy or whether to remove the original article from publication and work on it directly. If we work on the original article it wont be available till it is republished. If we work on copy, publishing the copy replaces the earlier version with the new version.
- Apply categories and Make the article visible to the channels to make it visible to the intended parties.
- In Lightning Knowledge Channels can be added to an article using fields Visible in Public Knowledge Base, Visible to Customer, and Visible to Partner.
- Smart links can be added to articles that automatically adjust when a name or URL of an article changes.
- When creating or editing an article, we can use a keyword search or manually create a smart link in a rich text area field.
Article Publishing Workflow
- Draft articles created from the Article Management tab can be assigned to team members who can contribute content.
- An Approval process can be created for article types (knowledge object in Lightning Knowledge) and once approved these can be published to channels (internal app, customers, Partners, or public knowledge base).
- Workflow rules with knowledge actions can be created for article types.
- Article managers can perform article actions such as create, edit, assign, delete, publish and archive.
Add Knowledge Action to Approval Process
- Knowledge actions can be created and added to the Approval process.

References