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The common area contains four buttons when the Status is Draft: Submit for Review, Submit for Approval, Clone Article for Revision, and Cancel this Document.Submit Submit for Review changes the Status to Pending Document Manager and triggers an email to the Knowledge Management Team.Submit Submit for Approval changes the Status to Pending Approval and triggers creation of approval records for each individual who has been selected as one of the Approvers on the Progress tab.Cancel Cancel this Document changes the Status to Canceled. Clone this Article for Revision opens a new knowledge article with some of the basic information mapped.
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- Knowledge Type is required and helps to categorize the article. Once a Knowledge Type is chosen, the Knowledge Subtypes will be filtered to the subtypes related to the Knowledge Type. Topic(s) should be selected based on the content of the article. If any users have subscribed to one of the topics chosen for this article, then they will receive an email when this article is published, notifying them that there is a new piece of information they might find interesting.
- Priority and Rush can be used to indicate how quickly this article should be reviewed and published. The default of Rush is No.
- Purpose and Description are used to explain the content of the article. HTML can be entered into the Description field by changing the radio button below it to HTML, or by clicking the Edit button.
- Special Compliance Requirements is required, and one or more options can be selected. If any option besides None is chosen, Compliance Notes must be entered.
- Document Access is required and used to identify who should be able to view this article. The options are Public, Partners, All Internal Users, Restricted to Specific Departments, and Restricted to Specific Users. If Restricted to Specific Departments is selected, a field appears allowing selection of one or more departments to which this article should be available. Similarly, if Restricted to Specific Users is selected, a field will be visible to allow lookup and selection of those users. Audience is an informational field, providing an overview of the types of people for which this article is intended.
Document Files
This section has information about the document itself. Source Files contains the original files used for the knowledge article. Published Format has several file types to represent the final, published version of the document. Once the article is published, the finalized document(s) can be added to the Published Files field. Both Source Files and Published Files accept document (Word, PDF, etc.) and image file types. If the file is stored at in internal URL, the URL can also be entered in the Internal File URL field.
Related Articles
Articles may be related to each other so they appear in the Related Articles list by clicking the lookup lookup icon icon .
Ratings
This section appears only once the status is set to Published or Retired. Users may rate articles by clicking on the "Rate this Article" button. Once an article has any ratings, they will appear in this section. The Overall Rating and Ratings Average fields show the average rating description and number for this article based on all ratings.
Submitter Information
This sections shows the Submitter's name and department. The submitter defaults to the person who created the knowledge article, but an admin or manager can edit the Submitter if the article was created on behalf of someone else.
Progress Tab
This tab holds approval information and notes on the knowledge article. Requires Approval is set to Yes if the article must be approved; if so, one or more Approver(s) can be selected. Once the article is submitted for approvals, an approval record for each approver will appear in the table of Approvals below. Any Approval Notes can be entered into the field manually. In addition, if any approvers write notes into an approval record, those notes are pushed to the Approval Notes here in the article.
Working Notes holds more general notes on the article's progress.
If there are milestones for the article, the Next Milestone Date can be stored. An article may also have a Final Due Date.
If revisions are needed and will be best handled with a service request, the button Raise a Service Request for Revision can be used. It opens a new service request record, mapping some of the information from the knowledge article. If this is done, any service requests created from the article will be shown in a table.
Services Tab
The Services tab contains a table of Associated Services. Services related to this article can be selected by clicking the lookup icon.
Source Tab
The Source field is used to specify where the knowledge article originated from, for instance from a change request, incident, problem, or service request. If there is a source record, the information is included below. When a knowledge article is created from within another record, such as an incident, the source incident details are automatically populated within the knowledge article.
History Tab
The History tab shows auto-generated dates: Date Created, Date Updated, Date Published, and Date Retired. It also keeps track of the user who created the record and the user who last updated the record. Below these fields, the History Events section contains a row for each time a change was made to the record, either by a user or a rule, and which fields were modified.
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For example, if Create Knowledge Article is clicked within a Closed incident, a new knowledge article record appears with the Title, Purpose, and Content fields prepopulated. These fields can be modified as needed. Additional required fields will also need values before saving the article.
Review and Approvals
Once an article has been created in a Status of Draft, it can be submitted for review by the Document Management Team by clicking Submit for Review. This changes the Status of the article to Pending Document Manager and sends an email to the Document Management Team. A document manager must then review the information, edit information if necessary, and either submit the article for approval or publish without approval. Alternatively, if the document manager determines that the Submitter must review the article or make additional changes, the manager can click Return to Submitter.
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If approvals are not needed, the document manager will set Requires Approval to No and then can click Publish Without Approval. Clicking this button changes the Status of the article to Published.
If approvals are needed, the document manager will leave Requires Approval set to Yes on Yes on the Progress tab and tab and select the users who need to approve from the Approver(s) lookup.
The approver(s) selected will appear in the Approver(s) field, and then the document manager will click Submit for Approval. This changes the Status to Pending Approval and generates an approval record for each of the approver(s) selected, then displayed in the Approvals table below.
For example, if Roxanne Marcin, Rick Peterson, and Ralph Knowles are listed as Approvers, they will each get an email asking them to review and approve the document. By default, any approver can approve at any time relative to other approvers. The approvers can click the hyperlink in the email to view the approval record, where additional details about the article can be accessed by clicking on the Knowledge Title.
Approvers can Approve, Require Changes for, or Permanently Reject the article.Any Any approval notes entered by approvers will appear in the Approval Notes field in the article.Once Once each approver has approved the article, the Status of the article is automatically changed to Ready for Publication. In addition, the Submitter and the Assigned Team receive an email alerting them that the article has been approved.
A knowledge manager may then click Publish, which changes the Status to Published. When an article is published and the Document Access is Public or All Internal Users, internal customers will be able to see the article. In addition, any users subscribed to one of the Topics for this article will receive an email about the new article.
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Since any rejected Approvals set the Status of the document back to Draft, the process essentially starts over. The Submitter can review the comments made by the reviewers and see any red-lined documents that have been attached attached to the approval records. Then the Submitter edits the document and presses the Submit for Review button again to change the Status of the Document to Pending Review and notify the Document Manager. The Document Manager can then keep the same Reviewer(s) or change them and Submit for Approval again. If a document is rejected by an approver and then submitted for approval again (and the Status therefore changed from Pending Approval to Draft and back to Pending Approval), the status of all of the linked approvals is restored to Pending Approval, and all Reviewer(s) are notified by email.
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Information about how many users have viewed a knowledge article in a certain time can be captured. Several reports have been created to summarize this information. For example, one chart in the Activity Log table shows the number of file views per knowledge article each month.
Additional details on who viewed the file and when are part of this report as well.
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