Build your knowledge base and give your website visitors, clients, partners, and service agents the ultimate in support. Salesforce Knowledge lets you create and manage your company information and securely share it when and where it is needed.

Your Salesforce Knowledge base is built from knowledge articles, which are documents of information. Articles can include information on process, like how to reset your product to its defaults, or frequently asked questions, like how much storage your product supports.

Experienced service agents and internal writers write the articles. The articles are then published to a range of channels: Internal App, customer and partner communities, or public websites. Where and what information is published is based on the article layout profile and the field level security.

As of Spring '17, Knowledge is available in both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience. Lightning

Knowledge, which is Generally Available, is recommended for orgs new to Knowledge, or for existing orgs that can easily consolidate to one article type, have few data categories, and use single-language mode.

Note: Enabling Lightning Knowledge changes your Org's Data Model to use Record Types rather than Article Types. Orgs with multiple articles types require data migration to consolidate article types before enabling Lightning Knowledge. IMPORTANT: After you enable Lightning

Knowledge, you can't disable it. Test in a Sandbox or Trial org before enabling in production.

Salesforce Knowledge Documentation Overview

Use these lists to find Salesforce Knowledge information in the Salesforce documentation set.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Salesforce Knowledge Documentation Overview

Use these lists to find Salesforce Knowledge information in the Salesforce documentation set.

Overview of Salesforce Knowledge

•

Welcome to Salesforce Knowledge

•

Plan Your Knowledge Base

•

Salesforce Knowledge Limits

•

Work with Articles and Translations

•

Salesforce Knowledge Guide

Classic Knowledge

Set up Classic Knowledge

•

Build Your Knowledge Base

•

Knowledge Article Types

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Welcome to Salesforce Knowledge Salesforce Knowledge Documentation Overview

•

Import Existing Information into Salesforce Knowledge

•

Knowledge Article Access

•

Workflow and Approvals for Articles

Use Your Salesforce Knowledge Base in Salesforce Classic

•

Search Articles and External Sources on the Knowledge Tab

–

Find Knowledge Articles in a Salesforce Console in Salesforce Classic

–

How Does Search Work?

–

Articles or Knowledge Tab

–

For searching and viewing Salesforce Knowledge Articles on your Android device, see Access Salesforce Knowledge Articles with Salesforce1 for Android (Beta) and Salesforce1 Differences from the Full Salesforce Site

•

Create and Edit Articles

•

Publish Articles and Translations

•

Report on Salesforce Knowledge Articles

Translate Salesforce Knowledge Articles

•

Support a Multilingual Knowledge Base

•

Translate Articles Within Salesforce Knowledge

•

Export Articles for Translation

•

Import Translated Articles

Lightning Knowledge

Set up Lightning Knowledge

•

Enable Lightning Knowledge

•

Set up Lightning Knowledge

•

Create Lightning Knowledge Record Types

•

Create Lightning Knowledge Home

•

Set Access for Lightning Knowledge

Use Your Salesforce Knowledge Base in Lightning Experience

•

Authoring Actions in Lightning Knowledge

•

Search Articles in the Main Search Box and the Knowledge Sidebar

•

Use the Knowledge Sidebar in the Lightning Service Console

Define Data Categories for Your Salesforce Knowledge Articles

•

Data Categories in Salesforce.com

•

Create and Modify Category Groups

•

Add Data Categories to Category Groups

Share Your Salesforce Knowledge Base

•

Find, Attach, and Email Articles with the Case Feed Articles Tool (Classic)

Welcome to Salesforce Knowledge Salesforce Knowledge Documentation Overview

•

Enable Salesforce Knowledge in Your Community (Classic)

•

Use Knowledge with Live Agent (Classic)

•

If you want visitors to your public website to view Salesforce Knowledge articles, install the Public Knowledge Base app from the

AppExchange. To install, configure, and customize your public knowledge base with this package, see the Public Knowledge Base

AppExchange App Guide available on the AppExchange .

Knowledge and Salesforce1

•

What’s Available in Each Version of Salesforce1

•

Customer Service Features: What’s Not Available in Salesforce1

Develop with Salesforce Knowledge

•

The Salesforce Knowledge Developers Guide has Salesforce Knowledge specific development information along with tutorials and examples.

•

The Force.com REST API Developer Guide has information on supporting articles with the REST API.

•

The SOAP API Developer Guide has information on theSalesforce Knowledge API:

–

Guidelines

–

Objects

–

Calls

•

The Metadata API Developers Guide has information on Salesforce Knowledge Metadata API objects.

•

The Visualforce Developers Guide has information on Salesforce Knowledge Visualforce components.

•

The Force.com Apex Code Developers Guide has information on the Apex KnowledgeArticleVersionStandardController Class.

PLAN YOUR KNOWLEDGE BASE

It's important that you consider your individual company’s needs while you develop a strategy for capturing and publishing your support team’s expertise. With a robust knowledge base, customers receive service faster or even solve their own problems themselves.

Setting up Salesforce Knowledge is a “choose your own adventure” procedure. There are many features and options and it’s up to you to decide which ones are right for your enterprise.

Consideration

What information do you need to publish?

Who can provide the information?

Do you need to categorize your information?

Who has access to which categories?

Further Information

Article Types

Knowledge User License ,

User Setup

Who can approve and manage the information?

Knowledge Management ,

Validation Rules

Do you need workflow or approval processes to manage article creation and publication?

Workflow and Approvals for Articles

Do you have an existing Knowledge base or documentation that you need to import?

Who needs to read what information and where?

Import Existing Information into Salesforce

Knowledge

Knowledge Article Access

Groups

Create Public Groups for Knowledge ,

Assign Article Actions to Public

Data Categories in Salesforce.com

Data Category Visibility

Are you supporting more than one language?

Support a Multilingual Knowledge Base

Do you need agents to search for articles while working on a case?

Attach PDF versions of articles to case emails.View a list of suggested articles based on case information.

Set Up the Knowledge One

Widget

Do you need agents to follow articles in Chatter?

Feed Tracking

Do you need to share your knowledge base externally?

Public Knowledge for Mobile, Web, and Facebook

Do you need to enhance searchability?

Improve the Article Search Experience

Do you need guidelines, resources, and current discussions on the evolving world of knowledge base orientated service?

Salesforce Knowledge is "KCS Verified" by the

Consortium for Service Innovation, which recognizes best practices in customer support methodologies. By implementing

Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) features, you can create more efficient collaboration

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Plan Your Knowledge Base Salesforce Knowledge Limits

Consideration Further Information

within your team and provide pertinent and accurate information to your customers.

Consider the following tips when planning and using Salesforce Knowledge:

•

Create synonym groups in Salesforce Knowledge. Synonyms are words or phrases that are treated as equivalent in article searches,

letting you optimize search results.

•

Before setting up data categories, carefully plan your category groups and their hierarchies. Also, consider how your category hierarchy maps to your role hierarchy. For more information, see Data Category Visibility .

•

Create custom reports on your Salesforce Knowledge data. You can also install the Knowledge Base Dashboards and Reports app from the AppExchange to receive over two dozen helpful reports.

•

Multiple agents can edit the same article at the same time. If that occurs, your changes can be overwritten by a colleague without warning, even if you save your work frequently. To avoid accidental data loss, instruct all users who edit articles to edit only the articles they're assigned.

•

Know the maximum limits for articles , article types, and data categories.

•

Review your usage regularly to avoid storage shortages: from Setup, enter

Storage Usage

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Storage Usage.

•

Public knowledge base users cannot rate articles.

•

The File custom field type allows agents to attach documents to articles.

•

You will lose your data if you convert a custom field on an article type into any other field type. Do not convert custom fields unless no data exists for the field.

•

When renaming Salesforce Knowledge labels note that standard field names, like title and type, are fixed. These fields do not change the labels on the article create and edit pages. If the organization is set to another language, these fields remain in the fixed label for that language.

•

The Salesforce Knowledge search engine supports lemmatization, which is the process of reducing a word to its root form. With lemmatization, a search can match expanded forms of a search term. For example, a search for

running

matches items that contain run, running, and ran.

•

Make sure that you have a clear understanding of the type of articles your organization needs, and how agents interact with these article types. This determines the article type permissions and article actions that you need to assign to Salesforce Knowledge users, which you can then use to create the set of profiles or permission sets required by your organization. For more information, see

Knowledge Article Access on page 44.

•

Determine if you need to create workflow rules for some of your article types. For example, you can create a rule that sends an email to an article manager when an agent creates an article upon closing a case.

•

Determine if you need to create approval processes for some of your article types. For example, if you have a type of article that must have legal and management approval before it can be published externally, create an approval process for the article type.

Salesforce Knowledge Limits

Limits for Salesforce Knowledge per edition.

Salesforce Knowledge Limits

Limits for Salesforce Knowledge per edition.

Plan Your Knowledge Base Salesforce Knowledge Limits

Salesforce Knowledge is a knowledge base for creating and managing content. If Salesforce Knowledge is enabled in Communities, customers and partners can access articles.

Note: The following limits are default limits. Some limits can be expanded. Contact Salesforce to request limit increases.

Salesforce Knowledge Limits

Maximum number of articles

Maximum number of article types

Maximum number of custom fields per article type

Details for Classic Knowledge

50,000 articles

Details for Lightning Knowledge

50,000 articles

100 article types N/A

Enterprise, Developer, and Unlimited editions: 500 custom fields per article type

Performance editions: 800 custom fields per article type

N/A

Maximum file fields

Maximum file size

5 file fields

131072 characters

N/A

File fields are counted as attachments and can be up to 25 MB.

Files can be up to 25 MB.

131072 characters Maximum rich text area size

Maximum size of all rich text area fields on an article

1638400 characters 1638400 characters

Maximum unique article references (links) in a rich text area field

You can have up to 100 links to different

Salesforce Knowledge articles in one rich text field.

You can have up to 100 links to different

Salesforce Knowledge articles in one rich text field.

Article history tracking Article events are tracked for up to 18 months.

Article events are tracked up to 18 months.

Maximum number of supported languages 16 supported languages

Article import

The import .zip file must meet the following requirements:

•

There can only be one .csv file and one

.properties file.

•

The .csv file and the .properties file must be in the root directory.

•

The compression process must preserve the folder and subfolder structure.

•

The .zip file name can’t contain special characters.

•

The .zip file can’t exceed 20 MB and the individual, uncompressed, files within the zip file can’t exceed 10 MB.

•

.csv files can’t have more than 10,000 rows, including the header row.

N/A

Plan Your Knowledge Base Salesforce Knowledge Limits

Salesforce Knowledge Limits Details for Classic Knowledge

Therefore, you can have a maximum of

9,999 articles and translations.

•

.csv file rows can’t exceed 400,000 characters.

•

.csv file cells can’t exceed 32 KB.

•

Each article in the .csv file can’t have more than 49 translations.

Details for Lightning Knowledge

Maximum number of data category groups and active data category groups

5 category groups, with 3 groups active at a time

Maximum number of categories per data category group

100 categories in a data category group 100 categories in a data category group

Maximum number of levels in data category group hierarchy

5 levels in a data category group hierarchy 5 levels in a data category group hierarchy

Maximum number of data categories from a data category group assigned to an article

8 data categories from a data category group assigned to an article

Maximum number of promoted search terms

Maximum number of characters for

Knowledge article searches

Your organization can create a maximum of 2,000 promoted terms.

100 characters

If a user searches for more than 100 characters, results are returned, but the results only consider the first 100 characters.

8 data categories from a data category group assigned to an article

N/A

100 characters

If a user searches for more than 100 characters, results are returned, but the results only consider the first 100 characters.

Maximum number of characters from a supported object record used to suggest

Knowledge articles

255 characters

Admins choose which fields are used to suggest articles.

255 characters

Admins choose which fields are used to suggest articles.

BUILD YOUR KNOWLEDGE BASE

If your organization has Knowledge User licenses and one is assigned to you, you are ready to build your knowledge base.

To ensure that your organization has Knowledge User licenses, from Setup, enter

Company

in the Quick Find box, then select Company Information. Knowledge User licenses are listed near the bottom of the page, in the Feature Licenses related list.

To ensure that you are a Salesforce Knowledge user, from your personal settings, enter

Personal

in the Quick Find box, then select Personal Information. The Knowledge User checkbox is in the second column of the User Detail section.

To enable Salesforce Knowledge, from Setup, enter

Knowledge

in the Quick Find box, then select Knowledge Settings. Confirm that you want to enable Salesforce Knowledge and click

Enable Knowledge. If your org doesn’t have an article type, a default article type is created.

Note: If you enabled Knowledge before Spring ’16 you must create an article type first. After the Spring ‘16 release, you no longer need to create an article type first.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Enable Salesforce Knowledge

USER PERMISSIONS

From the Knowledge Settings page, you can create a Knowledge Base experience for your support agents, partners, and customers.

Knowledge Article Types

To enable Salesforce

Knowledge:

•

Customize Application

Article types, such as FAQs and Tutorials, provide the format and structure to control how an article displays for each audience, known as a channel. For each article type you can create custom fields, customize the layout by adding or removing sections and fields, and choose a template for each channel. You can also create workflow rules and approval processes to help your organization track and manage article creation and publication.

Import Existing Information into Salesforce Knowledge

You can import your existing articles or information database into Salesforce Knowledge. This importer is for articles and translations you currently have outside Salesforce Knowledge

Knowledge Article Access

Give your knowledge agents access to articles. Specify which agents in your company are Salesforce Knowledge users, those who can create, edit, archive, and delete articles. Create user profiles with the appropriate user permissions, and then assign users to these profiles.

Define Validation Status Picklist Values

When the

Validation Status

field is enabled on the Knowledge Settings page, you can create picklist values that show the state of the article. For example, values could be

Validated

Not Validated

, or

Needs Review

Workflow and Approvals for Articles

Ensuring that the content in your articles is accurate and helpful is foundational to getting accurate information to those who need it most. Creating processes where Knowledge experts review, validate, and approve articles for publication is critical to creating a trustworthy knowledge base. Implementing approval processes with Salesforce Knowledge gives you additional control over the content and publication of your articles.

Build Your Knowledge Base Enable Salesforce Knowledge

Create Knowledge Actions

Knowledge actions are templates that link a workflow action to an article type. When knowledge actions are enabled, you can use them to link article types to specific workflow article actions, such as publishing. For example, if you want to have each FAQ published as a new version each time it completes the approval process, you can create a knowledge action that links the FAQ article type to the

Publish as New

action. Then, when you create an approval process for FAQs, select the new Knowledge Action.

Modify Default Category Group Assignments for Articles

Salesforce Knowledge uses data categories to classify articles. Data categories are organized in category group. After creating category groups, admins decide which groups to use for Salesforce Knowledge articles. For example, if your org uses both the Answers and

Salesforce Knowledge, you might want one category group to be used by the answers community and two other category groups for articles. Answers and articles can use the same category group. Authors can assign up to eight data categories from one category group to an article so that users searching for articles can find and filter by category. By default, all the category groups you create are assigned to Salesforce Knowledge

Filter Articles with Data Category Mapping

Make suggested articles more relevant when solving cases. Map case fields to data categories to filter for articles assigned to those data categories. For example, cases with a field for which product they are about can be mapped to the data category of that product.

Articles assigned that category or product, are filtered to the top of the suggested article list.

Support Articles in Multiple Languages

With multiple languages for Salesforce Knowledge, you can lower support costs by translating articles into the languages your audience prefers. After selecting your language settings, two translation methods are available: translating articles in-house using the editing tool in the knowledge base, or sending articles to a localization vendor. Different languages can use different methods.

For example, you may want to export articles to a vendor for French translations, but assign articles to an internal Knowledge user for Spanish translations.

Improve the Article Search Experience

Enable search highlights and snippets, synonyms, promoted terms, topics, and keywords from cases to improve your article search.

Set Up the Knowledge One Widget

Knowledge One is available as a widget you can plug in to the Salesforce Console for Service or Salesforce Console for Sales. If you are using the Knowledge tab, you get the same easy-to-use interface for articles and external sources on cases and within the

Salesforce Console for Service. You can search, send, and create articles, all without leaving the case.

Enable Salesforce Knowledge

From the Knowledge Settings page, you can create a Knowledge Base experience for your support agents, partners, and customers.

To set up or edit your knowledge Base, from Setup, enter

Knowledge Settings

in the

Quick

Find

box, select Knowledge Settings, then click Edit.

Feature or Option

General Settings

Description

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Build Your Knowledge Base Enable Salesforce Knowledge

Feature or Option

Allow agents to create and edit articles from the Article or

Knowledge tab

Description

Enables agents to edit articles without going to the Article

Management tab. Agents can click Edit to open the article edit page. If a published version of the article exists, they can view the published version or edit the current version. If a draft version exists, they can continue with editing the existing draft, but must carefully review the draft so that they don’t overwrite unpublished changes.

Activate Validation Status field Adds a

Validation Status on page 54 field to all Salesforce

Knowledge articles. Agents can select values to show whether the content of the article has been validated or not.

Allow agents to add external multimedia content to HTML in the standard editor

Allows <iframe> elements in the standard editor to embed multimedia content from the Dailymotion, Vimeo, and YouTube websites. Agents can simply cut and paste <iframe> HTML into the editor.

Enable Lightning Knowledge (Beta) Enables Lightning Knowledge (Beta). After you enable Lightning

Knowledge, you can’t disable it.

Article Summaries

Show article summaries in article list views For each channel, decide whether an article's summary details display beneath the article’s title in search results.

Knowledge One

Switch from the Articles tab to the Knowledge Tab

Enable Knowledge One with Profiles

Enable Knowledge One with Permission Sets

Suggest related articles on cases Search on the Knowledge tab suggests articles based on their content similarity and their links to similar cases. If no articles are linked to similar cases, suggested articles have similar titles as the case or have keywords in common with admin-selected case fields.

Suggested articles are available in the Salesforce Console for Service and your portals when viewing existing cases and creating ones.

Finally, if the suggested articles aren't suitable, the user working the case initiates a search with specific keywords, which may result in different articles.

Note: By default, the Subject field is selected. Choose up to five of the available short text fields that include a description of the issue, the affected product, or the case topic. We recommend choosing short text fields to return more relevant results. Only the first 255 characters of the content from all admin-selected fields are searched. The

Description field is always taken into account when suggesting articles for cases and does not count toward the character limit.

Build Your Knowledge Base

Feature or Option

Highlight relevant article text within search results

Auto-complete keyword search

Auto-complete title search

Language Settings

Default Knowledge Base Language

Single or Multiple Language

Case Settings

Allow agents to create an article from a case

Enable Salesforce Knowledge

Description

Search on the Knowledge tab generates a snippet of the relevant

article text with the search terms bolded. See Search Highlights and Snippets .

Search on the Knowledge tab suggests the three most popular keyword searches performed on the Knowledge tab. Suggestions are based on the channel (internal, customer, partner, or public) the reader is searching.

Note: Keyword search history is refreshed once a day.

Search on the Knowledge tab suggests up to 3 articles with matching titles.

The primary language used for writing articles. It defaults to your organization's language. We recommend that your Default

Knowledge Base Language and your organization's language are the same.

If you support more than one language, select Multiple Languages and choose the translation settings. For instructions, see

Support a Multilingual Knowledge Base .

Important: If you enable Multiple Languages, you can’t revert to a single language knowledge base. You also can’t enable and use Lightning Knowledge (Beta).

If this checkbox is selected, agents can create a draft article that is attached to the case when the article is published using one of the following options.

•

Create articles using the simple editor only when closing cases.

•

Create articles using the standard editor any time an agent creates an article. Make sure that users have “Manage Articles,”

“Read,“ and “Create” permissions. Designate the following:

–

The default article type, from the drop-down list

–

For articles created when closing a case, assign the article to a user.

–

Help agents create articles fast by Selecting an Apex class

that pre-populates any of the fields on the draft. By default, the Title field in all draft articles contains the case subject.

Note: If you enable this option, also click Layout

Properties on each case-close page layout and select “Enable submissions during case close and

Submit Articles.”

Build Your Knowledge Base Enable Salesforce Knowledge

Feature or Option

Use a profile to create article PDFs

Enable list of cases linked to an article

Description

By default, when a user creates an article PDF directly from a case , the PDF includes all the article fields visible to that user. If you want

PDFs generated according to a different profile, for example, a profile that hides certain fields from customers, select Use a profile to create customer-ready article PDFs on cases and choose the profile that determines field visibility.

Agents and Salesforce Knowledge managers can see a list of cases an article is attached to. This helps validate if the article is the right solution for a case and shows which articles are used most, without running a report. The Linked Cases related list:

•

Is visible on the detail or preview page of any article that has been published at least once.

•

Shows a maximum of 200 cases

•

Is sorted in descending order by the date the article was linked to the case. The sort order can’t be changed.

•

Doesn’t appear on archived articles or a translation’s edit and detail pages.

•

Doesn’t appear for external users such as portal or communities users or on Salesforce1.

Share Article via URL Settings

Allow agents to share articles via public URLs You can share an article that is available on a public knowledge base with a URL. In the Available Sites list, select the sites you want to allow your agents to send URLs from and add them to the

Selected Sites list. Agents can then email customer service clients with a URL to link directly to the article in your public knowledge base.

Answers Settings

Allow agents to create an article from a reply If this checkbox is selected, members of an answers community or Chatter Answers community can convert helpful replies into articles. The article type you select determines which fields appear on the draft article. However, on all articles the Title contains the question and the Summary contains the reply. After a reply is promoted to an article, the original reply has a status message indicating its association with the draft article. When the article is published, the message on the reply includes a link to the article.

Chatter Questions Settings

Display relevant articles as users ask questions in Chatter (also applies to communities with Chatter)

Knowledge Statistics Settings

Shows similar questions and relevant Salesforce Knowledge articles when a user enters a question in the Search field.

Build Your Knowledge Base Enable Knowledge One with Permission Sets

Feature or Option

Enable thumbs up or down voting for article

Description

With this option, the article VoteStat report (which by default only contains totals for star ratings) includes totals for the thumbs up or down ratings.

Enable Knowledge One with Permission Sets

To switch users from the Articles tab to the Knowledge tab, add the

Knowledge One

permission to their permission sets.

Enable Knowledge One with Profiles

To switch users from the Articles tab to the Knowledge tab, add the

Knowledge One

permission to their profiles.

Example Apex for Submitting Articles from Cases

If your organization allows customer-support agents to create Salesforce Knowledge articles while closing a case, you can use Apex to pre-populate fields on draft articles. To do so, create an Apex class and assign it to the case article type using the example below as a guide.

Enable Knowledge One with Permission Sets

To switch users from the Articles tab to the Knowledge tab, add the

Knowledge One

permission to their permission sets.

To add the

Knowledge One

permission to a permission set:

1. From Setup, enter

Permission Sets

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Permission

Sets.

2. Click the permission set you want to add the Knowledge One permission to.

3. In the

Find Settings... box, enter

Knowledge

4. Select Knowledge One from the list of suggestions.

5. Click Edit.

6. Under

Knowledge Management

, check the Enabled check box for

Knowledge One

7. Click Save.

8. Ensure each user has at least a Read permission on at least one article type.

Once Knowledge One is available for your users, define your external data sources . Your external data sources appear under your articles both in the search results and the left-side panel.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To create or edit permission sets:

•

Manage Profiles and

Permission Sets

To create and edit external data sources:

•

Customize Application

Build Your Knowledge Base Enable Knowledge One with Profiles

Enable Knowledge One with Profiles

To switch users from the Articles tab to the Knowledge tab, add the

Knowledge One

permission to their profiles.

To add the

Knowledge One

permission to a profile:

1. From Setup, enter

Profiles

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Profiles.

2. Click the profile you want to add the Knowledge One permission to.

3. In the

Find Settings... box, enter

Knowledge

4. Select Knowledge One from the list of suggestions.

5. Click Edit.

6. Under

Knowledge Management

, check

Knowledge One

7. Click Save.

8. Ensure each user has at least a Read permission on at least one article type.

Once Knowledge One is available for your users, define your external data sources . Your external data sources appear under your articles both in the search results and the left-side panel.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To create or edit profiles:

•

Manage Profiles and

Permission Sets

To create and edit external data sources:

•

Customize Application

Build Your Knowledge Base Example Apex for Submitting Articles from Cases

Example Apex for Submitting Articles from Cases

For more information on the syntax and use of Apex, see the

Force.com Apex Code Developer's Guide

Set up the example by creating the following article type, field, and data categories. Do not change the default

API Name

assigned to each new object.

Create an article type

called

FAQ

Create a text custom field called

Details

Create a category group called

Geography

and assign it a category called

USA

Create a category group called

Topics

and assign it a category called

Maintenance

Now, create and assign the Apex class.

5. From Setup, enter

Apex Classes

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Apex Classes and click New.

6. To specify the version of Apex and the API used with this class, click Version Settings.

If your organization has installed managed packages from the AppExchange, you can also specify which version of each managed package to use with this class. Use the default values for all versions. This associates the class with the most recent version of Apex and the API, as well as each managed package. You can specify an older version of a managed package if you want to access components or functionality that differs from the most recent package version.

You can specify an older version of Apex and the API to maintain specific behavior.

7. In the

Apex Class

text box enter the following script and click Save:

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To edit Salesforce

Knowledge settings:

•

Customize Application

To create an Apex class:

•

Author Apex public class AgentContributionArticleController {

// The constructor must take a ApexPages.KnowledgeArticleVersionStandardController

as an argument public

AgentContributionArticleController(ApexPages.KnowledgeArticleVersionStandardController

ctl) {

SObject article = ctl.getRecord(); //this is the SObject for the new article.

//It can optionally be cast to the proper article type, e.g. FAQ__kav article = (FAQ__kav) ctl.getRecord();

String sourceId = ctl.getSourceId(); //this returns the id of the case that was closed.

Case c = [select subject, description from Case where id=:sourceId]; article.put('title', 'From Case: '+c.subject); //this overrides the default behavior of pre-filling the title of the article with the subject of the closed case.

article.put('Details__c',c.description); ctl.selectDataCategory('Geography','USA'); //Only one category per category group can be specified.

ctl.selectDataCategory('Topics','Maintenance');

}

Build Your Knowledge Base Knowledge Article Types

8. From Setup, enter

Knowledge Settings

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Knowledge Settings and click Edit.

9. Verify the

case settings

; using our example, the Default article type should be FAQ.

10. From the Use Apex Customization menu, select AgentContributionArticleController and click Save.

As a result of this example, when agents create an article from the case-close screen:

•

The data from the

Description

field on the case appears in the

Details

field of the article.

•

The title of the article contains

From Case:

and the case subject.

•

The article is automatically assigned to the

USA

data category and the

Maintenance

data category.

Knowledge Article Types

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Create Article Types

An article type controls how an article displays and what type of information of fields are included.

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Add Custom Fields to Article Types

Create custom fields to store information that is important to your articles. The only standard fields provided on article types are: Article Number, Summary, Title, and URL Name. At minimum, you want to create a field where authors can write the body of the article.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Article Type Page Layouts

Article-type layouts determine which fields agents can view and edit when entering data for an article. They also determine which sections appear when users view articles. The article-type template defines the format of the article, for example whether layout sections display as subtabs or as a single page with links. You can apply a layout per profile per article type. Therefore, you can display more sensitive fields of the same article to only those agents with the correct profile.

Control Data Integrity with Validation Rules

Ensure that your article content is compliant with your company standards. Create validation rules for each article type to check whether required fields have the appropriate values based on the article’s status.

Article History Tracking

You can track the history of certain fields in articles. If you have history tracking enabled, open an article of that type and click Version to see a version history list. You can also set tracking for the article type and track the full history of an article and its versions. Article events are tracked for up to 18 months.

Article Type Templates

Article types in Salesforce Knowledge require a template for each channel. The standard article-type templates—Tab and Table of

Contents—specify how the sections in the article-type layout appear in the published article. For example, if you choose the Tab template, the sections defined in the layout appear as tabs when users view an article. With the Table of Contents template, sections appear on a single page with hyperlinks to each section. You can also create a custom template using Visualforce. Custom templates are not associated with the article-type layout.

Build Your Knowledge Base Create Article Types

Delete an Article Type

Deleting article types can result in errors and lost data. Read this entire topic carefully before deleting article types.

Create Article Types

An article type controls how an article displays and what type of information of fields are included.

Note:

Before agents can access article types, you must set object permissions for article types.

1. From Setup, enter

Knowledge Article Types

in the

Quick Find

box, then select

Knowledge Article Types.

2. Click New Article Type or edit an existing article type.

3. Enter the article types details

Field

Label

Plural Label

Gender

Starts with a vowel sound

Object Name

Description

Description

A name used to refer to the article type in any user interface pages.

The plural name of the object. If you create a tab for this object, this name is used for the tab.

If it is appropriate for your organization’s default language, specify the gender of the label. This field appears if the organization-wide default language expects gender. Your personal language preference setting does not affect whether the field appears. For example, if the organization’s default language is English and your personal language is French, you are not prompted for gender when creating an article type.

If it is appropriate for your organization’s default language, check if your label should be preceded by "an" instead of "a".

(Read only) A unique name used to refer to the article type when using the Force.com API.

In managed packages, this unique name prevents naming conflicts on package installations. The Object Name field can contain only underscores and alphanumeric characters. It must be unique, begin with a letter, not include spaces, not end with an underscore, and not contain two consecutive underscores.

An optional description of the article type. A meaningful description helps you remember

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To create, edit, or delete article types:

•

Customize Application

AND

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

Build Your Knowledge Base

Field

Track Field History

Deployment Status

Add Custom Fields to Article Types

Description

the differences between your article types when you are viewing them in a list.

Select this option to track the full history of an article and its

versions. The system records and displays field updates, publishing workflow events, and language versions for the master article and any translations.

Indicates whether the article type is visible outside Setup. In

Development means that article managers can’t choose this article type when creating articles. Only select Deployed after you are done creating the article type.

4. Click Save.

On the article type detail page,

•

In the Fields related list,

create or modify custom fields

as needed.

•

In the Fields related list,

edit the article-type layout

as needed to rearrange fields and create sections.

•

In the Channel Displays related list, choose a template

for the Internal App, Partner, Customer, and Public Knowledge Base.

Add Custom Fields to Article Types

Before you begin, determine the type of custom field you want to create.

Note:

Authors can view the

URL Name

when they create or edit an article. The

URL

Name

does not appear to end users viewing published articles.

1. From Setup, enter

Knowledge Article Types

in the

Quick Find

box, then select

Knowledge Article Types.

2. Select an article type.

3. Click New in the Fields related list.

4. Choose the type of field to create, and click Next.

5. Enter a field label. The field name is automatically populated based on the field label you enter.

This name can contain only underscores and alphanumeric characters, and must be unique in your org. It must begin with a letter, not include spaces, not end with an underscore, and not contain two consecutive underscores.

6. Enter any field attributes, such as

Description

, and click Next to continue.

Note:

You cannot enter a default value for any custom field.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To create or change custom fields:

•

Customize Application

AND

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

Build Your Knowledge Base Add Custom Fields to Article Types

7. Set the field-level security to determine whether the field is visible and editable or read only for specific profiles, and click Next.

Field-level security allows you to control which fields are visible in different channels.

8. If you do not want the field to be added automatically to the article-type layout, uncheck

Yes, add this custom field to the layout

9. Click Save to finish or Save & New to create more custom fields.

10. Optionally rearrange your custom fields on the article-type layout.

Note:

Creating fields can require changing many records at once. To process these changes efficiently, Salesforce might queue your request and send an email notification when the process has completed.

Warning:

You lose your data if you convert a custom field on an article type into any other field type. Do not convert a custom

field on an article type unless no data exists for the field.

Custom Fields on Articles

The first step in creating a custom field for articles is choosing the field type. This table describes all available custom field types.

Field-Level Security on Articles

Field-level security lets administrators restrict readers’ access to specific fields on detail and edit pages. For example, you can make a “Comment” field in an article visible for Internal App profiles but not for public Community profiles.

Use Videos from Any Provider with a Custom Visualforce Page

Using a custom Visualforce page and the HTML editor, you can insert videos from any provider into your Salesforce Knowledge articles.

Custom Fields on Articles

The first step in creating a custom field for articles is choosing the field type. This table describes all available custom field types.

Field Type

Article Currency

Currency

Description

In a multiple currency organization, an article can have an article currency field to set the article’s currency ISO code.

Allows agents to enter a currency amount. The system automatically formats the field as a currency amount. This can be useful if you export data to a spreadsheet application. You can make this field required so an agent must enter a value before saving an article.

Note: Salesforce uses the round-half-to-even tie-breaking rule for currency fields. For example, 23.5

becomes 24, 22.5 becomes 22, −22.5

becomes −22, and −23.5 becomes −24.

Values lose precision after 15 decimal places.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Build Your Knowledge Base

Field Type

Date

Date/Time

File

Add Custom Fields to Article Types

Description

Allows agents to enter a date or pick a date from a popup calendar.

In reports, you can limit the data by specific dates using any custom date field. You can make this field required so an agent must enter a value before saving an article.

Allows agents to enter a date or pick a date from a popup calendar, and enter a time of day. They can also add the current date and time by clicking the date and time link next to the field. The time of day includes AM or PM notation. In reports, you can limit the data by specific dates and times using any custom date field. You can make this field required so an agent must enter a value before saving an article.

Allows agents to enter an email address, which is validated to ensure proper format. Character limit is 80. If this field is specified for contacts or leads, agents can choose the address when clicking

Send an Email. You can't use custom email addresses for mass emails. You can make this field required so an agent must enter a value before saving an article.

Allows agents to upload and attach a file to an article. You can make this field required so an agent must enter a value before saving an article. Note the following caveats about File fields:

•

The maximum attachment size is 25 MB.

•

You can add up to 5 File fields to each article type; contact

Salesforce to increase these limits.

•

If the

Disallow HTML documents and attachments

security setting is enabled, File fields do not support HTML files.

•

Text content in a File field attachment is searchable. You can search up to 25 MB of attached files on an article. For example, if an article has six 5-MB file attachments, the first 4.16 MB of each file is searchable.

•

You cannot attach Salesforce CRM Content files using the File field.

•

The File field type is not supported in Developer edition.

•

The filename cannot exceed 40 characters.

•

You cannot convert a File field type into any other data type.

Build Your Knowledge Base

Field Type

Formula

Lookup Relationship

Number

Percent

Add Custom Fields to Article Types

Description

Allows agents to automatically calculate values based on other values or fields such as merge fields.

Note: Salesforce uses the round half up tie-breaking rule for numbers in formula fields. For example, 12.345 becomes

12.35 and −12.345 becomes −12.34.

In Database.com, the Formula editor does not provide a

Check Syntax button. Syntax checking occurs when the agent attempts to save the formula.

Creates a relationship between two records so you can associate them with each other. For example, opportunities have a lookup relationship with cases that lets you associate a particular case with an opportunity. A lookup relationship creates a field that allows agents to click a lookup icon and select another record from a popup window. On the associated record, you can then display a related list to show all the records that are linked to it. You can create lookup relationship fields that link to users, standard objects, or custom objects. If a lookup field references a record that has been deleted, Salesforce clears the value of the lookup field by default. Alternatively, you can choose to prevent records from being deleted if they’re in a lookup relationship. You can make this field required so an agent must enter a value before saving an article.

Lookup relationship fields are not available in Personal Edition.

Lookup relationship fields to campaign members are not available; however, lookup relationship fields from campaign members to other objects are available.

Allows agents to enter any number. This entry is treated as a real number and any leading zeros are removed. You can make this field required so an agent must enter a value before saving an article.

Note: Salesforce uses the round half up tie-breaking rule for number fields. For example, 12.345 becomes 12.35 and

−12.345 becomes −12.34. Salesforce rounds numbers referenced in merge fields according to the user’s locale, not the number of decimal spaces specified in the number field configuration.

Allows agents to enter a percentage number, for example, '10'.

The system automatically adds the percent sign to the number.

You can make this field required so an agent must enter a value before saving an article.

Build Your Knowledge Base

Field Type

Phone

Picklist

Picklist (Dependent)

Picklist (Multi-select)

Text

Text Area

Text Area (Long)

Text Area (Rich)

Add Custom Fields to Article Types

Description

Note: If the decimal value is greater than 15, and you add a percent sign to the number, a runtime error occurs.

Values lose precision after 15 decimal places.

Allows agents to enter any phone number. Character limit is 40.

You can make this field required so an agent must enter a value before saving an article.

Salesforce automatically formats it as a phone number.

Allows agents to select a value from a list you define.

Allows agents to select a value from a list dependent on the value of another field.

Allows agents to select more than one picklist value from a list you define. These fields display each value separated by a semicolon.

Allows agents to enter any combination of letters, numbers, or symbols. You can set a maximum length, up to 255 characters. You can make this field required so an agent must enter a value before saving an article.

Allows agents to enter up to 255 characters that display on separate lines similar to a

Description

field. You can make this field required so an agent must enter a value before saving an article.

Allows agents to enter up to 131,072 characters that display on separate lines similar to a

Description

field. You can set the length of this field type to a lower limit, if desired. Any length from

256 to 131,072 characters is allowed. The default is 32,768 characters. Every time a agents presses

Enter

within a long text area field, a line break and a return character are added, both count toward the character limit. Also, smart links add more characters than what is displayed.

Note: If you lower the character limit and you have articles that surpass the new limit. Those articles can’t be edited until the limit is reset higher than their character counts.

Allows agents to enter up to 131,072 characters of HTML-supported text including code samples (

Salesforce Knowledge articles.

) and

There are two ways to create smart links:

smart links

between

•

Search for the article.

•

Enter the article URL.

Build Your Knowledge Base Add Custom Fields to Article Types

Field Type

URL

Description

Note:

•

You can have up to 100 links to different Salesforce

Knowledge articles in one rich text field.

•

When you convert a text area (rich) field to a text area

(long) field, links are displayed as link reference numbers, not URLs.

•

The upgraded editor doesn’t support Internet Explorer version 7 or version 8 in compatibility mode. If you are using these browsers, you use the older editor.

Allows agents to enter up to 255 characters of any valid website address. When agents click the field, the URL opens in a separate browser window. Only the first 50 characters are displayed on the record detail pages. You can make this field required so an agent must enter a value before saving an article.

Field-Level Security on Articles

If using both

article-type layout

and field-level security to define field visibility, the most restrictive field access setting always applies. For example, if a field is hidden in the article-type layout, but visible in the field-level security settings, the layout overrides security settings and the field aren’t visible. Some user permissions override both page layouts and field-level security settings. For example, users with the “Edit Read Only Fields” permission can always edit read-only fields regardless of any other settings.

Important: Field-level security doesn’t prevent searching on the values in a field. When search terms match on field values protected by field-level security, the associated records are returned in the search results without the protected fields and their values.

You can define security via a permission set, profile, or field.

Define field-level security via permission sets or profiles

1. For permission sets or profiles, from Setup, either:

•

Enter

Permission Sets

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Permission Sets, or

•

Enter

Profiles

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Profiles

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

2. Select a permission set or profile.

3. Depending on which interface you're using, do one of the following:

•

Permission sets or enhanced profile user interface—In the Find Settings... box, enter the name of the object you want and select it from the list. Click Edit, then scroll to the Field Permissions section.

•

Original profile user interface—In the Field-Level Security section, click View next to the object you want to modify, and then click Edit.

Build Your Knowledge Base Add Custom Fields to Article Types

4. Specify the field's access level.

Note: These field access settings override any less-restrictive field access settings on the article-type layouts.

5. Click Save.

Define field-level security via fields

1. For fields, from Setup, enter

Knowledge Article Types

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Knowledge Article

Types.

2. Select the article type that contains the field to modify.

3. Select the field and click Set Field-Level Security.

4. Specify the field's access level.

Note: These field access settings override any less-restrictive field access settings on the article-type layouts.

5. Click Save.

After setting field-level security, you can

modify the article-type layouts to organize the fields on detail and edit pages.

Build Your Knowledge Base Add Custom Fields to Article Types

Use Videos from Any Provider with a Custom Visualforce Page

Using a custom Visualforce page and the HTML editor, you can insert videos from any provider into your Salesforce Knowledge articles.

For example, create a Visualforce page:

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To create a Visualforce page

•

Customize Application

To create articles:

•

Manage Articles

AND

Read and Create on the article type

To edit draft articles:

•

Manage Articles

AND

Read and Edit on the article type

To edit published or archived articles:

•

Manage Articles

AND

Create, Read, and Edit on the article type

<apex:page showHeader="false" showChat="false" sidebar="false">

</iframe>

</apex:page>

Build Your Knowledge Base Article Type Page Layouts

Then, with the HTML editor, authors can reference videos using this code:

<salesforce_instance>

/apex/Video?videoID=12345" width="560">

</iframe>

Article Type Page Layouts

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Tip: You can also use

field-level security

to hide fields on article types. For example, if you publish the same article in the internal app and in a community, you can to use field-level security to hide a custom field such as

Internal Comments

from external community users.

1. From Setup, enter

Knowledge Article Types

in the

Quick Find

box, then select

Knowledge Article Types.

2. Click the article type.

3. Scroll down to the Page Layouts related list or click the Page Layouts link at the top of the page.

4. To create a page layout, click New and follow the prompts. To edit an existing layout, click Edit and make your changes.

Make your changes. The layout editor consists of two parts: a palette on the upper portion of the screen and the layout on the lower portion of the screen. The palette contains the available fields and a section element. The layout contains an Information section and space for you to add sections. By default, all custom fields are included in the Information section.

Important:

If you navigate away from your article-type layout before clicking save, your changes are lost.

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To customize the article-type layout:

•

Customize Application

Note: The

Article Number

Summary

Title

, and

URL Name

standard fields do not display in the layout.

Article

Number

and

Summary

appear in a read-only Properties section at the top of the published article. Also included in this header are the

First Published

Last Modified

, and

Last Published

fields.

Task

Add a section

Change the name of a section

Remove a field from a section

Description

Drag and drop the section element into the palette.

Click its title. You cannot rename the Information section.

Drag it to the right side of the palette or click the icon next to the field.

Remove a section from the article-type layout Click the icon next to the section name.

Save your changes and continue editing the article type layout Click Quick Save.

Build Your Knowledge Base Article Type Page Layouts

Tip:

•

Use the undo and redo buttons to step backwards and forwards, respectively.

•

Use the following keyboard shortcuts:

–

Undo = CTRL+Z

–

Redo = CTRL+Y

–

Quick Save = CTRL+S

•

To select multiple elements individually, use CTRL+click. To select multiple elements as a group, use SHIFT+click.

•

To quickly locate any item in the palette, use the Quick Find box. The Quick Find box is especially useful for article-type layouts that have large numbers of items available in the palette.

5. To assign various layouts to the article type based on a user profile, click Page Layout Assignments.

6. Click Edit Assignment.

7. Select the profile, or profiles (using SHIFT), you want to change and select the layout from the Page Layout To Use drop-down.

When creating multiple article type page layouts, consider the following limitations and functionality changes.

•

When creating page layouts, some fields are hidden based on the agent’s license. Out of Date, Translation Completed Date, and

Translation Exported Date are hidden from users who do not have a Knowledge User license or who are customer portal or partner portal users. In addition, Archived By and Is Latest Version are hidden from customer portal and partner portal users.

•

Before Spring ‘16, preview pages showed the Summary field in the API that contained text values, even if they were not in the page layout. To continue displaying summary fields on preview pages, manually update your page layouts to include them.

•

If you want to attach articles as PDFs to emails when solving cases, add File Attachments to the

Selected Email Tools in the Feed View for the article type layout.

•

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.

•

The Communication channel layout doesn’t use the page layout to determine which Article fields are inserted into a case email. The fields that are inserted include the fields selected in the Communication Channel mapping.

•

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.

•

Salesforce Mobile Classic actions and related lists are not available on article page layouts in the desktop Salesforce user interface, with the exception of actions on the article feed.

Send Article Content in Email

When using Knowledge One, agents can send an email with an article’s contents embedded in the body of the email.

Post Site and Community Article URLs

In the Service Console, agents can insert Site or Community URLs for articles into the case feed via the email, community, or social publishers.

Build Your Knowledge Base Article Type Page Layouts

Send Article Content in Email

When using Knowledge One, agents can send an email with an article’s contents embedded in the body of the email.

Agents can send article content within an email rather than just sending a URL. Your customers can access the information without going to a website. Your agents send articles that are not published publicly without rewriting or copy and pasting an internal article. Administrators can assign permission to only those agents with a good knowledge of what is acceptable for an external audience.

To enable and setup which article fields go into emails for each article type.

1. From the object management settings for cases, go to Page Layouts.

2. How you access the Case Feed Settings page depends on what kind of page layout you’re working with.

•

For a layout in the Case Page Layouts section, click Edit, and then click Feed View in the page layout editor.

•

For a layout in the Page Layouts for Case Feed Users section, click and choose

Edit feed view

. (This section appears only for organizations created before Spring ’14.)

If you’ve already opted to use the advanced page layout editor to configure the publisher for a layout, choose

Edit detail view

to add, change, or remove actions.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

3. Under

Articles Tool Settings

, check Enable attaching articles inline.

4. Click Save.

5. From Setup, enter

Knowledge Article Types

in the

Quick Find

box, then select

Knowledge Article Types.

6. Click the label or name of the article type you’d like to share via email.

7. Under Communication Channel Mappings, click New or Edit.

8. Enter a Label and Name.

9. Select and add

to the Selected Channels list.

10. Select and add the fields you’d like included in the body of an email.

Note: Smart links can’t be included in the email and the following fields are not supported:

•

ArticleType

•

isDeleted

•

Language

•

MultiPicklist

•

Picklist

•

Publish Status

•

Source

•

Validation Status

To administer Salesforce

Knowledge and create, edit, and delete page layouts:

•

Customize Application

AND

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

11. Click Save.

Example: While solving customer cases, agents with the permission can insert article content into the body of an email. Anywhere agents can attach articles to cases, such as the Knowledge One sidebar in the Salesforce Console, the Articles list in the case feed,

Build Your Knowledge Base Article Type Page Layouts the Article widget, or the suggested articles in a Knowledge One search, they can email any article of that type within the body of an email by selecting Email article with HTML in the action drop-down. The article content is inserted at top of email thread or wherever the agent left their cursor. Once an article has been emailed, an envelope icon appears to the left of the title. When the article has files that exceed the 10-mb attachment limit, agents are asked to select which files to attach and retry sending the email.

Note: If rich text is not enabled on your case feed layout for the article type, only article text is embedded into the email and the action changes to Email article text only.

Post Site and Community Article URLs

In the Service Console, agents can insert Site or Community URLs for articles into the case feed via the email, community, or social publishers.

To post Site or Community URLs for articles into the case feed , you must have the Knowledge sidebar enabled in the Service Console and either a Force.com Site or Community setup.

1. From Setup, enter

Knowledge

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Knowledge Settings.

2. Click Edit.

3. In the

Share Article via URL Settings

section, enable Allow users to share

articles via public URLs.

4. In the

Available Sites

list, select from which sites or communities you want agents to share article URLs and add them to the

Selected Sites

list.

5. Click Save.

Your agents can now select Attach and share article link from selected sites in the Knowledge sidebar of the console. Email is the default action but agents can change to the Social or Community action in the case feed before they insert the URL.

Important:

•

Articles must be published. Draft articles don’t show the insert URL option.

•

Articles must be shared publicly, meaning their Channel must be Public Knowledge Base,

Customer, or Partner.

•

All enabled URLs show Attach and share article link, even if the article is not visible in that site or community. The agent must confirm that the article is available in the site or community before sharing it with the customer.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To administer Salesforce

Knowledge:

•

Customize Application

AND

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

Build Your Knowledge Base Control Data Integrity with Validation Rules

Control Data Integrity with Validation Rules

1. From Setup, enter

Article Types

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Knowledge

Article Types.

2. Click the article type.

3. Scroll down to the Validation Rules related list or click the Validation Rules link at the top of the page.

4. To create a validation rule, click New. To edit an existing rule, click Edit.

5. Name the rule.

6. Make the rule active.

7. Optionally, describe what you want to control on articles of this type.

8. Specify an error condition formula and a corresponding error message.

The error condition is written as a Boolean formula expression that returns true or false. When true, the article is not saved, and an error message displays. The author can correct the error and try again. For information on validation rules, see Define Validation Rules .

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

Note: Knowledge article errors always display at the top of the page, not next to the field. Write your errors descriptively so that authors know how to satisfy the validation rule. For example, identify which field is causing the error.

9. Click Save.

To create or edit validation rules for article types:

•

Customize Application

AND

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

When creating validation rules on article types, consider the following limitations and functionality changes.

•

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.

•

The Article Currency field and the VLOOKUP function don’t support validation rules.

•

When importing articles, if the import data file has a valid article with an invalid translation, the translation is created, but its translated content isn’t imported.

•

Only the first validation rule error displays at the top of the page and in the import article log. If multiple errors exist but are not fixed, they are displayed on subsequent saves or imports.

•

In the API, KA fields, such as Case Association Count and Archived Date, don’t support validation rules. Only KAV (article version) fields are supported in validation rules.

Build Your Knowledge Base Article History Tracking

Article History Tracking

The system records and displays field updates, publishing workflow events, and language versions for the master article and any translations. When you track old and new values, the system records both values as well as the date, time, nature of the change, and the user who made the change.

When you track only the changed values, the system marks the changed field as having been edited; it doesn’t record the old and new field values. This information is available in the Version History list and the fields are available in the Article Version History report.

Article history respects field, entity, and record-level security. You must have at least “Read” permission on the article type or the field to access its history. For data category security, Salesforce determines access based on the categorization of the online version of an article. If there is no online version, then security is applied based on the archived version, followed by the security of the draft version.

1. From Setup, enter

Knowledge

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Knowledge Article

Types.

2. Create an article type or edit one from the Article Types list.

3. Click Set History Tracking.

4. Choose the fields you want to track.

Salesforce begins tracking history from that date and time. Changes made before that date and time are not tracked.

5. Click Save.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To create, edit, or delete article types:

•

Customize Application

AND

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

Build Your Knowledge Base Article Type Templates

Article Type Templates

Article types in Salesforce Knowledge require a template for each channel. The standard article-type templates—Tab and Table of Contents—specify how the sections in the article-type layout appear in the published article. For example, if you choose the Tab template, the sections defined in the layout appear as tabs when users view an article. With the Table of Contents template, sections appear on a single page with hyperlinks to each section. You can also create a custom template using Visualforce. Custom templates are not associated with the article-type layout.

1. From Setup, enter

Knowledge Article Types

in the

Quick Find

box, then select

Knowledge Article Types

2. Click an article type name.

•

If you are using a default template, continue with Step 12.

•

If you are creating a custom template, make note of the article type's

API Name

. You need this value when you create the Visualforce page.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

3. From Setup, enter

Visualforce Pages

in the

Quick Find

box, then select

Visualforce Pages.

4. Click New.

USER PERMISSIONS

5. In the

Name

text box, enter the text that appears in the URL as the page name.

To create, edit, or delete article-type templates:

•

Customize Application

AND

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

6. In the

Label

text box, enter the text that users see when choosing this template from the

Channel Displays related list on the article type detail page.

7. Add your Visualforce markup.

The only requirement for custom article-type templates is that the standard controller is equal to the

API Name

of the article type. For example, if the

API Name

of the article type is

Offer__kav

, your markup would be:

<apex:page standardController="Offer__kav">

... page content here ...

</apex:page>

Note: Click Component Reference for a list of the Visualforce components, such as

knowledge:articleRendererToolbar

and

knowledge:articleCaseToolbar

, available for use in custom article-type templates.

8. If your article type has a File field , you can allow users to download the field's content.

In the following example, the article type is

Offer

, the name of the File field is

my_file

, and the text that appears as a link is

Click me

<apex:outputLink value="{!URLFOR($Action.Offer__kav.FileFieldDownload,

Offer__kav.id, ['field'=$ObjectType.Offer__kav.fields.my_file__Body__s.name])}">Click me</apex:outputLink>

Build Your Knowledge Base Article Type Templates

Note: If the File field is empty (meaning the author didn't upload a file), the link still appears on the published article but has no function. If you do not want the link to appear when the File field is empty, replace

Click me

in the example with the name of the file. For example,

{!Offer__kav.my_file__Name__s}

9. Click Save.

Your custom template can now be assigned to any channel on the article type.

10. From Setup, enter

Knowledge Article Types

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Knowledge Article Types

11. Click an article type name.

12. For each channel, specify the template.

•

For Internal App, Customer and Partner, Tab is the default template.

•

For Public Knowledge Base, Table of Contents is the default template.

•

If you created a custom template for this article type, it also appears in the drop-down menu.

13. Click Save.

Example: If you choose the Tab template, the sections you defined in the layout appear as tabs when users view an article.

Published Article Using the Tab Article-Type Template

If you choose the Table of Contents template, the sections you defined in the layout appear on one page with hyperlinks to each section title.

Published Article Using the Table of Contents Article-Type Template

Build Your Knowledge Base Delete an Article Type

Delete an Article Type

Deleting article types can result in errors and lost data. Read this entire topic carefully before deleting article types.

1. From Setup, enter

Knowledge Article Types

in the

Quick Find

box, then select

Knowledge Article Types.

2. Next to the article type, click Del.

3. Confirm that you want to delete the article type.

Notes on Deleting Article Types

•

If your organization has only article type, you cannot delete it. Every Salesforce Knowledge org requires at least one deployed article type. Create an article type and then delete the old one.

•

Any articles associated with a deleted article type are automatically removed from all channels, including draft, published, and archived articles.

•

Salesforce does not display deleted article types in the Recycle Bin with other deleted records. Instead, deleted article types appear in the Deleted Article Types list on the article list view page for 15 days. During this time, you can restore the article type and its articles, or permanently erase the article type and its articles. After 15 days, the article type and its articles are permanently erased.

•

If a reader clicks a bookmark to a deleted article's URL, an Insufficient Privileges message displays.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To delete article types:

•

Customize Application

Import Existing Information into Salesforce Knowledge

You can import your existing articles or information database into Salesforce Knowledge. This importer is for articles and translations you currently have outside Salesforce Knowledge

Note: If you are looking for instructions on importing translated articles that you've sent to

a localization vendor, see Import Translated Articles on page 63.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Prepare Articles for Import to Salesforce Knowledge

Each import file must have articles of the same type and columns corresponding to the fields in the article.

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Create a .csv File for Article Import

Each .csv file imports articles into one article type and maps the imported articles' content with the article type's fields. For example, a .csv file might map articles' titles with the standard field

Title

in an article type, meaning that each article's title is imported into the

Title

field.

Set Article Import Parameters

Specify import parameters in a property file using key names and corresponding values. For example, use the key

DateFormat

to specify that a date custom field appears in the

DateFormat=dd/MM/YYYY

format or specify the character encoding to be used for the import.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Create an Article .zip File for Import

To complete your article import, create a .zip file with your

.parameters

.csv

, and

.html

files, and upload them into

Salesforce Knowledge.

Build Your Knowledge Base Prepare Articles for Import to Salesforce Knowledge

Article and Translation Import and Export Status

Find the status of your article imports and exports on the Article Imports page in Setup.

Prepare Articles for Import to Salesforce Knowledge

Each import file must have articles of the same type and columns corresponding to the fields in the article.

Tip: Test your import using a small set of articles.

1. Sort your existing articles by information type.

For example: FAQ, product information, or offer.

2. Ensure that each information type has a corresponding Salesforce Knowledge article type that

matches its structure and content.

For example, if you are importing FAQs, ensure that Salesforce Knowledge has an FAQ article type with enough question and answer fields to accommodate the largest FAQ article.

If your articles contain .html files, use an article type that contains a rich text area field and ensure that the HTML is compliant with the tags and attributes supported in the rich text area field.

Note: The article importer does not support subfields. If you have fields within fields, adjust your structure and content before importing into Salesforce Knowledge.

3. Verify that the article's field-level security settings allow you to edit the fields.

For each article type, create a cvs file

to import.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To import articles:

•

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

AND

Manage Articles

AND

Manage Knowledge

Article Import/Export

AND

Read, Create, Edit, and

Delete on the article type

Build Your Knowledge Base Create a .csv File for Article Import

Create a .csv File for Article Import

Title in an article type, meaning that each article's title is imported into the

Title

field.

1. Create one .csv file per article type.

•

There can only be one .csv file and one .properties file.

•

The .csv file and the .properties file must be in the root directory.

•

The compression process must preserve the folder and subfolder structure.

•

The .zip file name can’t contain special characters.

•

The .zip file can’t exceed 20 MB and the individual, uncompressed, files within the zip file can’t exceed 10 MB.

•

.csv files can’t have more than 10,000 rows, including the header row. Therefore, you can have a maximum of 9,999 articles and translations.

•

.csv file rows can’t exceed 400,000 characters.

•

.csv file cells can’t exceed 32 KB.

•

Each article in the .csv file can’t have more than 49 translations.

2. In the first row, specify the article type's fields and metadata, such as language data categories or channels.

Enter one item in each column. You can use the following fields and metadata to import content.

Field or data

isMasterLanguage

Title

Standard and custom fields

Rich text area field

File field

Description

Identifies the article as a master (1) or translation (0). Required to import articles with translations, however, it can’t be in a .csv file to import articles without translations.

Translations must follow their master articles so that they are associated with the master article preceding it

The article or translation’s title. Required for all imports.

Refer to an article type's standard fields using field names and refer to custom fields using

API names. Leaving a row cell empty may cause your articles to be skipped if the related article type field is mandatory.

Use the rich text area

custom fields to import

.html files or images. Refer to an article type's rich text area field using its API name.

Use the

file custom fields to import any file

type (.doc, .pdf, .txt, etc.). Refer to an article type's file field using its API name.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To import articles:

•

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

AND

Manage Articles

AND

Manage Knowledge

Article Import/Export

AND

Read, Create, Edit, and

Delete on the article type

Build Your Knowledge Base

Field or data

Data category groups

Channel

Language

Create a .csv File for Article Import

Description

To categorize the imported articles, use category groups; refer to a category group using its unique name prefixed with datacategorygroup.

. For example, use datacategorygroup.Products

to specify the category group Products.

To specify where the imported articles are available, use the keyword

Channels

Specify the articles' language. Required to import articles with translations. Optional to import articles without translations. If you don't include this column, the articles automatically belong to the

default knowledge base language and you can’t import

translations along with the master articles.

3. In subsequent rows, specify the articles you want to import.

Use one row per article and enter the appropriate information in each field or metadata column.

Important: All file names are case sensitive and must match what is in the .csv file exactly.

Consideration

Standard or custom fields

Rich text area field

Notes

Enter the articles' data for each field, except for rich text area fields where you must enter the relative path to the corresponding .html file in your .zip file.

Note: The article importer does not support subfields. If you have fields within fields, adjust your structure and content before importing into Salesforce Knowledge.

Always enter the .html file path relative to the location of the

.csv file. Never enter raw text. If the specified path doesn't exist, the related article isn't imported. Note the following information about importing HTML and images.

•

We recommend that you create separate folders for the .html

files (for example,

/data

) and the images (for example, data/images

•

To import images, include the images in an .html file using the

<img>

tag and src

attribute. Ensure that the src value is a relative path from the .html file to the image folder.

•

Images must be

.png

.gif

, or

.jpeg

files.

•

Each image file can’t exceed 1 MB.

•

.html files can’t exceed the maximum size for their field.

•

If a date doesn't match the date format specified in the property file, the related article isn't imported.

Build Your Knowledge Base

Consideration

File field

Category groups

Channels

Create a .csv File for Article Import

Notes

•

If an .html file references a file that isn't allowed, the related article isn't imported.

•

If an .html file references an image that's missing, the related article is imported without the image.

Enter the path relative to the file's location. If the specified path doesn't exist, the related article isn't imported. Note the following information about importing files.

•

We recommend that you create a folder for your files (for example,

/files

•

Each file must not exceed 5 MB.

Use category unique names to categorize articles. Use the plus symbol (

) to specify more than one category. For example,

Laptop+Desktop

. Note the following information about data category groups.

•

Leaving the cell row empty causes your article to be set to

No Categories.

•

If you specify a category and its parent (for example,

Europe+France) the import process skips the child category

France and keeps the parent category Europe, because application of a parent category implicitly includes the category's children.

•

When importing articles with translations and associated data categories, only the master article retains the data categories. The article translations have no associated data category upon import.

Specify articles' channels using the keywords.

•

application

for Internal App. If you don't specify a channel, application

is the default.

•

sites

for Public Knowledge Base.

•

csp

for Customer.

•

prm

for Partner.

Use the plus (

) symbol to specify more than one channel (for example, application+sites+csp

to make an article available in all channels).

Note: When importing articles with translations and associated channels, only the master article retains the channels. The article translations have no associated channels upon import.

Build Your Knowledge Base Create a .csv File for Article Import

Example: The following example .csv files import articles in a Product Offer article type. The first example is for imports of articles without translations. The second is for imports with translations. The .csv files contain titles, summaries, and descriptions. They also classify the articles in the category group Products and make them available for specific channels. The description__c field is a rich text area and only supports paths to .html files. The summary__c

field is a text field and only supports raw text.

The “Best Desktop Computer Deals” article has no summary; the cell is left blank because the summary__c

field is not mandatory.

Title summary__c description__c

data/freecam.html

datacategorygroup

.Products

Channels

Consumer_ Electronics application+csp Free Digital Camera

Offer

Best Desktop Computer

Deals

Free Shipping on Laptop and Desktops

Get the new Digital

Camera.

data/bestdeals.html

data/freeship.html

Desktop

Laptop+Desktops application+csp application+csp

Example articlesimport.csv

file:

Title,summary__c,description__c,datacategorygroup.Products,Channels

Free Digital Camera Offer, Get the new Digital

Camera.,data/freecam.html,Consumer_Electronics,application+csp

Best Desktop Computer Deals,,data/bestdeals.html,Desktop,application+csp

Free Shipping on Laptop and Desktops,,data/freeship.html,Laptop+Desktops,application+csp

isMaster

Language

Title

1 Free Digital Camera Offer

summary__c

Libérer l'Offre d'Appareil photo digital

Liberte Oferta Digital de

Cámara

Get the new Digital

Camera.

data/freecam.html

Obtenir le nouvel Appareil photo digital.

data/freecam/fr.html

Consiga la nueva Cámara

Digital.

description__c

data/freecam/es.html

1 data/bestdeals.html

Best Desktop Computer

Deals

Meilleures Affaires d'ordinateurs de bureau data/bestdeals/fr.html

Mejores Tratos de ordenadores

Free Shipping on Laptops and Desktops

Libérer Affranchissement sur Portables et Ordinateurs data/bestdeals/es.html

data/freeship.html

data/freeship/fr.html

datacategorygroup

.Products

Consumer_ Electronics

Desktops

Laptops+ Desktops

Channels Language

application

+csp en_US fr application

+csp application

+csp es en_US fr es en_US fr

Build Your Knowledge Base Create a .csv File for Article Import

isMaster

Language

Title

0 Liberte Franqueo en

Laptops y Ordenadores

summary__c description__c

data/freeship/es.html

datacategorygroup

.Products

Channels Language

Example articlestranslationsimport.csv

file: isMasterLanguage,Title,summary__c,description__c,datacategorygroup.Products,Channels,Language

1,Free Digital Camera Offer,Get the new Digital

Camera,data/freecam.html,Consumer_Electronics,application+csp,en

0,Libérer l'Offre d'Appareil photo digital,Obtenir le nouvel Appareil photo digital.,data/freecam/fr.html,,,fr

0,Liberte Oferta Digital de Cámara,Consiga la nueva Cámara

Digital.,data/freecam/es.html,,,es

1,Best Desktop Computer Deals,,data/bestdeals.html,Desktops,application+csp,en

0,Meilleures Affaires d'ordinateurs de bureau,,data/bestdeals/fr.html,,,fr

0,Mejores Tratos de ordenadores,,data/bestdeals/es.html,,,es

1,Free Shipping on Laptop and

Desktops,,data/freeship.html,Laptops+Desktops,application+csp,en

0,Libérer Affranchissement sur Portables et Ordinateurs,,data/freeship/fr.html,,,fr

0,Liberte Franqueo en Laptops y Ordenadores,,data/freeship/es.html,,,es

Specify your import parameters in a property file using key names and corresponding values.

Build Your Knowledge Base Set Article Import Parameters

Set Article Import Parameters

Specify import parameters in a property file using key names and corresponding values. For example, use the key

DateFormat

to specify that a date custom field appears in the

DateFormat=dd/MM/YYYY

format or specify the character encoding to be used for the import.

1. Create a file with required parameters, as described in this table.

Key

DateFormat

DateTimeFormat

CSVEncoding

CSVSeparator

RTAEncoding

Description Default Value

Format of the date to read in the .csv file yyyy-MM-dd

Format of the date and time to read in the .csv file yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss

Character encoding used to read the .csv file

ISO8859_15_FDIS

.csv file separator ,

Default encoding used for the

HTML files (if not specified in the charset

attribute from the HTML meta

tag).

ISO8859_15_FDIS

Note: Salesforce does not support UTF-32 character encoding.

We recommend using

UTF-8. If you use specify UTF-16 character encoding, ensure that your HTML files specify the right byte-order mark.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To import articles:

•

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

AND

Manage Articles

AND

Manage Knowledge

Article Import/Export

AND

Read, Create, Edit, and

Delete on the article type

Note: Specify only Java date formats. Make sure the date format is not misleading. For example, if you choose the format yyyy-M-d, a date entered as 2011111 can be interpreted as 2011-01-11 or 2011-11-01. Specify at least:

•

Two digits for month and day format (MM, dd)

•

Four digits for year format (yyyy)

If a date in the .csv file does not match the date format specified in the property file, the related article is not imported.

2. Save the file with the

.properties

Example: Example offerarticlesimport.properties

property file:

DateFormat=yyyy-MM-dd

DateTimeFormat=yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss

Build Your Knowledge Base Create an Article .zip File for Import

CSVEncoding=ISO8859_15_FDIS

CSVSeparator=,

RTAEncoding=UTF-8

Create a .zip file and import into Salesforce Knowledge.

Create an Article .zip File for Import

To complete your article import, create a .zip file with your

.parameters

.csv

, and

.html

files, and upload them into Salesforce Knowledge.

1. Create a .zip file containing:

•

The .csv file.

•

The folder containing the .html files to import.

•

The folder containing the image files referenced in the .html files.

•

The .properties file.

Important: The import .zip file must meet the following requirements:

•

There can only be one .csv file and one .properties file.

•

The .csv file and the .properties file must be in the root directory.

•

The compression process must preserve the folder and subfolder structure.

•

The .zip file name can’t contain special characters.

•

The .zip file can’t exceed 20 MB and the individual, uncompressed, files within the zip file can’t exceed 10 MB.

•

.csv files can’t have more than 10,000 rows, including the header row. Therefore, you can have a maximum of 9,999 articles and translations.

•

.csv file rows can’t exceed 400,000 characters.

•

.csv file cells can’t exceed 32 KB.

•

Each article in the .csv file can’t have more than 49 translations.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

2. From Setup, enter

Import Articles

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Import

Articles.

3. Select the appropriate Article Type for the imported articles.

4. To select the .zip file, click Browse, and then click OK.

5. If your import contains translations, select the

Contains translations?

checkbox.

Note: If this checkbox is selected, your .csv file must contain the isMasterLanguage, Title, and Language columns. If this checkbox is not selected, your csv file can’t contain the isMasterLanguage column but must contain the Title column. The Language column is optional for imports of articles without translations.

6. Click Import Now.

When the import is complete, you receive an email with an attached log that provides details about the import.

Check on the status of your import , on the Article Imports page.

To import articles:

•

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

AND

Manage Articles

AND

Manage Knowledge

Article Import/Export

AND

Read, Create, Edit, and

Delete on the article type

Build Your Knowledge Base Article and Translation Import and Export Status

Article and Translation Import and Export Status

Find the status of your article imports and exports on the Article Imports page in Setup.

To check the status of your imports and exports, from Setup, enter

Article Imports

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Article Imports. If you've enabled multiple languages for Salesforce

Knowledge, you see two tables: one for article and translation imports and another for exports for translation.

Import information includes:

•

Possible actions

•

.Zip file names

•

Who submitted it and when

•

Status

•

Started and completed dates

•

Article types

Export information includes:

•

Possible actions

•

Zip file names

•

Who submitted it and when

•

Status

•

Started and completed dates

Status descriptions are as follows:

Status

Pending

Processing

Stopping/Stopped

Aborted

Completed

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Description

The import or export will start as soon as the previous pending import or export completes.

The import or export is processing.

Possible Action

You can click Cancel to cancel the import or export.

Salesforce Support is stopping or has already stopped the import or export.

If you want to stop the process, or if the process has been stopped, call Salesforce

Support. Salesforce may stop an import or export if a maintenance task has to be performed or the import or export exceeds one hour.

Contact Salesforce Support to restart the import or export, or click Cancel to cancel an entry.

The import or export has been canceled.

The articles that already imported or exported successfully are available in

Salesforce.

You can restart an import or export, click Del to delete an entry, or click Email Log to receive the completion email and check the details of your import or export.

The import or export is complete.

Successfully imported articles are visible on the Article Management tab on the

This status doesn't mean the import or export is successful. Click Email Log to see the log file attached to the completion email

Build Your Knowledge Base

Status

Knowledge Article Access

Description Possible Action

Articles

subtab. Successfully imported translations are visible on the Article

Management tab on the

Translations

subtab.

and check the details of your import or export.

Click the exported .zip file name to save or open the file on your system.

Knowledge Article Access

Give your knowledge agents access to articles. Specify which agents in your company are Salesforce

Knowledge users, those who can create, edit, archive, and delete articles. Create user profiles with the appropriate user permissions, and then assign users to these profiles.

By default all internal users can read articles. However some licenses like the Knowledge Only User licenses, require the “AllowViewKnowledge” permission on the user’s profile. To give a user the

“AllowViewKnowledge” permission on their profile, activate the permission on a cloned profile and assign the cloned profile to the user.

Note: To do more than read articles, agents need the Knowledge User license.

1. From Setup, enter

Users

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Users.

2. Click Edit next to the user's name or click New to create a user.

3. If you are creating a user, complete all the required fields.

4. Select the

Knowledge User

checkbox.

5. Click Save.

See

User permissions control access to different tasks Salesforce Knowledge. We recommend using permission sets or custom profiles to grant users the permissions they need. For example, you can create a permission set called “Article Manager” that includes the permissions to create, edit, publish, and assign articles.

Refer to this table for details on permissions associated with Salesforce Knowledge tasks.

Salesforce Knowledge Task

To create article types:

To manage article actions:

User Permissions Needed

“Manage Salesforce Knowledge” (This permission is on by default in the System

Administrator profile.)

“Manage Salesforce Knowledge”

This permission is on by default in the System

Administrator profile.

To create articles from cases using the simple editor:

“Read” and “Create” on the article type

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To create or edit users:

•

Manage Internal Users

To create article types and article actions:

•

Customize Application

AND

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

Build Your Knowledge Base Knowledge Article Access

Salesforce Knowledge Task

To create articles from cases using the standard editor:

User Permissions Needed

“Manage Articles” (This permission is on by default in the System

Administrator profile.)

AND

“Read” and “Create” on the article type

To search articles from cases and attach articles to cases:

“Read” on the article type

To create articles from answers:

“Read” and “Create” on the article type

To search for and read articles from the Article or Knowledge tab:

“Read” on the article type

To create or edit articles from the Article Management tab: “Manage Articles” (This permission is on by default in the System

Administrator profile.)

AND

“Read”, “Create”, and “Edit” on the article type

To edit draft articles from the Article Management tab:

To delete articles from the Article Management tab:

“Manage Articles” (This permission is on by default in the System

Administrator profile.)

AND

“Read” and “Edit” on the article type

“Manage Articles” (This permission is on by default in the System

Administrator profile.)

AND

“Read”, “Edit”, and “Delete” on the article type

AND

A delete article action, set on the

Article Actions Setup page .

To publish articles from the Article Management tab:

To assign articles for the Article Management tab:

“Manage Articles” (This permission is on by default in the System

Administrator profile.)

AND

“Read”, “Create”, “Edit”, and “Delete” on the article type

AND

A publish article action, set on

Article Actions Setup page

“Manage Articles” (This permission is on by default in the System

Administrator profile.)

AND

“Read” and “Edit” on the article type

Build Your Knowledge Base

Salesforce Knowledge Task

To edit published or archived articles:

To archive articles from the Article Management tab:

To submit articles for translation:

To delete translated articles:

To publish translated articles:

To edit translated articles:

Knowledge Article Access

User Permissions Needed

“Manage Articles” (This permission is on by default in the System

Administrator profile.)

AND

“Read”, “Create”, and “Edit” on the article type

AND

A publish or archive article action, set on the Article Actions Setup page

“Manage Articles” (This permission is on by default in the System

Administrator profile.)

AND

“Read”, “Create”, “Edit”, and “Delete” on the article type

AND

An archive article action, set on the

Article Actions Setup page

“Manage Articles” (This permission is on by default in the System

Administrator profile.)

AND

“Read”, “Create”, and “Edit” on the article type

AND

A translate article action, set on the Article Actions Setup page

“Manage Articles” (This permission is on by default in the System

Administrator profile.)

AND

“Read”, “Edit”, and “Delete” on the article type

AND

A delete article action, set on the

Article Actions Setup page

“Manage Articles” (This permission is on by default in the System

Administrator profile.)

AND

“Read”, “Create”, “Edit”, and “Delete” on the article type

AND

A publish article action, set on the

Article Actions Setup page

“Manage Articles” (This permission is on by default in the System

Administrator profile.)

AND

“Read”, “Create”, and “Edit” on the article type

Build Your Knowledge Base Knowledge Article Access

Salesforce Knowledge Task

To import articles:

To import and export translated articles:

To create data categories

User Permissions Needed

AND

A translate article action, set on the Article Actions Setup page

“Manage Salesforce Knowledge” (This permission is on by default in the System Administrator profile.)

AND

“Manage Articles”

AND

“Manage Knowledge Article Import/Export”

AND

“Read”, “Create”, “Edit”, and “Delete” on the article type

“Manage Salesforce Knowledge” (This permission is on by default in the System Administrator profile.)

AND

“Manage Articles” (This permission is on by default in the System

Administrator profile.)

AND

“Manage Knowledge Article Import/Export” (This permission is on by default in the System Administrator profile.)

AND

“Read”, “Create”, “Edit”, and “Delete” on the article type

“Manage Data Categories” permission. This permission is on by default in the System Administrator profile.

To enable agents to perform their specific tasks, create

public groups for each role and assign only the necessary

article actions

to those groups.

Example: Your Salesforce Knowledge agents are a mixture of different levels of job experience and expertise in the products and services your company offers. These examples outline four basic types of users and some of the permissions they need to perform their jobs.

Scott: The Reader

Scott Jackson is relatively new to the company, so he’s a basic agent of the knowledge base. Currently, he has read-only access to articles, so he can search and view articles. Readers don’t author or publish, so he won’t belong to a public group or need to submit articles for approval. He needs the following permissions to perform his job.

Scott Permission

Salesforce Knowledge Functionality Manage Articles

Search articles from and attach articles to cases

Read

Article Type-Specific Permissions

Create Edit Delete

Build Your Knowledge Base Knowledge Article Access

Scott Permission

Salesforce Knowledge Functionality Manage Articles

Search for and read articles from the Articles tab

Read

Article Type-Specific Permissions

Create Edit Delete

Amber: The Candidate

Amber Delaney is a candidate-level agent and can create and publish articles with statuses of either

Work in Progress or

Not Validated

. If Amber works on an article with a different validation status, she must send it to a queue for approval before it’s published.

Amber is part of the KCS Candidate public group and submits the articles she can’t publish to the Publishing External queue.

She needs the following permissions to perform her job duties.

Read

Article Type-Specific Permissions

Create Edit Delete

Amber Permission

Salesforce Knowledge Functionality Manage Articles

Search articles from and attach articles to cases

Search for and read articles from the Articles tab

Create or edit article from the Article

Management tab

Edit draft articles from the Article

Management tab

Edit published or archived articles

Anne: The Contributor

As a contributor, Anne Murphy is a more advanced Knowledge user. She understands the standards for articles in the organization and can create articles and publish articles with

Validated Internal

status. She can also work on articles authored by other users if they have either

Work in Progress

Not Validated

statuses, and can change them to

Validated Internal

. Since she doesn’t have permission to publish articles to an external audience, she must submit those customer-facing articles to the Publishing External queue.

Note: Article approvers require the “Manage Articles” permission and at least the “Read” permission on the article type associated with articles they review. These permissions let them access the article in a draft state. Without these permissions, approvers can reassign but not approve articles.

Anne is a member of the Contributor public group and she needs the following permissions to perform her job duties.

Build Your Knowledge Base Knowledge Article Access

Salesforce Knowledge Functionality

Permission

Manage

Articles

Create articles from cases using the simple editor

Create articles from cases using the standard editor

Search articles from and attach articles to cases

Create articles from answers

Search for and read articles from the Articles tab

Create or edit article from the Article

Management tab

Edit draft articles from the Article

Management tab

Delete articles (version or entire) from Article

Management tab

Assign articles from Article Management tab

Edit published or archived articles

Archive articles from the Article Management tab

Read

Article Type-Specific Permissions

Create Edit Delete

Pat: The Publisher

Pat Brown is Knowledge domain expert and is responsible for reviewing and publishing articles to an external audience. He is a member of the Publisher public group. Pat also belongs to the Publishing External queue. He needs the following permissions to perform his job duties.

Salesforce Knowledge Functionality

Permission

Manage

Articles

Read

Article Type-Specific Permissions

Create Edit Delete

Create articles from cases using the simple editor

Create articles from cases using the standard editor

Search articles from and attach articles to cases

Create articles from answers

Build Your Knowledge Base Knowledge Article Access

Salesforce Knowledge Functionality

Permission

Manage

Articles

Search for and read articles from the Articles tab

Create or edit article from the Article

Management tab

Edit draft articles from the Article

Management tab

Delete articles (version or entire) from Article

Management tab

Publish article from Article Management tab

Assign articles from Article Management tab

Edit published or archived articles

Archive articles from the Article Management tab

Read

Article Type-Specific Permissions

Create Edit Delete

How they all work together

Each user profile defines an agent's permission to perform different job duties and functions. To enable agents to perform these functions, you create

public groups

for each role and assign only the necessary article actions

to that group. The criteria you create in the

approval process

defines which validation status can be automatically approved and published and which

article must be approved and published by a domain expert.

For example, Anne, the Contributor, can create a

Validated External

article, but based on the article actions assigned to her public group, the approval process sends her article to Pat, the Publisher, to be published. Pat, as a Publisher, can publish his own articles without submitting them to a queue.

The following table lists the job functions that each role needs to perform on articles in the organization

Job Function

Create and publish

Work in

Progress

Create and publish

Not

Validated

Create and publish

Validated

Internal

Reader

Candidate

Automatically approved and published

Needs approval

Contributor

Automatically approved and published

Publisher

Yes

Build Your Knowledge Base

Job Function

Create and publish

Validated

External

Update and publish

Work in

Progress

Update and publish

Not

Validated

Update and publish

Validated

Internal

Update and publish

Validated

External

Reader

Candidate

Needs approval

Contributor

Needs approval

Knowledge Article Access

Publisher

Yes

Automatically approved and published

Needs approval

Yes

Create Public Groups for Knowledge

Salesforce Knowledge uses public groups as a way to assign users to specific tasks related to articles. When you assign article actions to a public group, you can grant users in that group the ability to do things like publish articles with a specified validation status.

Public groups are also used in approval processes to manage the publishing workflow.

Assign Article Actions to Public Groups

Article actions allow agents to participate in the article publishing process. By default, all article actions are assigned to users with the “Manage Articles” user permission. Agents can complete an action as long as they have the correct article type permission. You can control article action access by assigning public groups to article actions and adding agents the relevant public groups. To further restrict actions like publishing, you can create approval processes that allow agents to publish only those articles that have specific validation statuses. For example, many contributors can write many articles but you can create an approval process so no articles are published until they are reviewed and validated by a qualified author.

Build Your Knowledge Base Create Public Groups for Knowledge

Create Public Groups for Knowledge

Salesforce Knowledge uses public groups as a way to assign users to specific tasks related to articles.

When you assign article actions to a public group, you can grant users in that group the ability to do things like publish articles with a specified validation status. Public groups are also used in approval processes to manage the publishing workflow.

For example, when a member of the

Candidate public group submits an article with the status

Work in Progress

for approval, it is automatically approved and published. If the same agent submits an article with

Validated Internal

status, it moves to the Publishing External queue to be reviewed before being published.

1. From Setup, enter

Public Groups

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Public Groups.

2. Click New, or click Edit next to the group you want to edit.

3. Enter the following information:

Field

Label

Description

The name used to refer to the group in any user interface pages.

Group Name

(public groups only) The unique name used by the API and managed packages.

Grant Access Using

Hierarchies

(public groups only)

Select Grant Access Using Hierarchies to allow automatic access to records using your role hierarchies.

When selected, any records shared with users in this group are also shared with users higher in the hierarchy.

Deselect Grant Access Using Hierarchies if you’re creating a public group with All Internal Users as members, which optimizes performance for sharing records with groups.

Note: If Grant Access Using Hierarchies is deselected, users that are higher in the role hierarchy don’t receive automatic access.

However, some users—such as those with the

“View All” and “Modify All” object permissions and the “View All Data” and “Modify All Data” system permissions—can still access records they don’t own.

From the

drop-down list, select the type of member to add. If you don’t see the member you want to add, enter keywords in the search box and click Find.

Note: For account owners to see child records owned by high-volume portal users, they must be members of any portal share groups with access to the portal users' data.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To create or edit a public group:

•

Manage Users

To create or edit another user’s personal group:

•

Manage Users

Build Your Knowledge Base

Selected Members

Selected Delegated Groups

Assign Article Actions to Public Groups

Select members from the Available Members box, and click Add to add them to the group.

In this list, specify any delegated administration groups whose members can add or remove members from this public group. Select groups from the

Available Delegated Groups box, and then click Add. This list appears only in public groups.

4. Click Save.

Note: When you edit groups, sharing rules are automatically reevaluated to add or remove access as needed. If these changes affect too many records at once, a message appears warning that the sharing rules aren’t automatically reevaluated, and you must manually recalculate them.

Now assign only the necessary actions to your groups so the selected members can perform their tasks while keeping the integrity of

your knowledge base.

Assign Article Actions to Public Groups

Note: Although you can add any user to a public group, only agents with the “Manage

Articles” user permission and the appropriate object permissions can perform article actions.

This table summarizes the article type permissions that are required for each article action.

Create Read Edit Delete Article Action

Publish Articles

Archive Articles

Delete Articles

Edit Published and Archived Articles

Submit Articles for Translation

Publish Translation

Edit Translation

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To create public groups and assign them to article actions:

•

Customize Application

AND

Manage Users

AND

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

1. From Setup, enter

Knowledge Article Actions

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Knowledge Article Actions.

Build Your Knowledge Base Define Validation Status Picklist Values

2. Click Edit.

3. For the action you want to assign, select the appropriate radio button and choose a public group.

If you don't modify an article action, all agents with the “Manage Articles” permission can perform that action.

4. Click OK and then click Save.

Note: Article action assignments are ignored when updating an article through SOQL.

Define Validation Status Picklist Values

When the

Validation Status

field is enabled on the Knowledge Settings page, you can create picklist values that show the state of the article. For example, values could be

Validated

Not Validated

, or

Needs Review

Note: In Salesforce Classic, validation status picklist values aren’t retained when you export articles for translation. Articles with picklist values can be imported, however, and their values are retained as long as the values exist in your organization.

1. From Salesforce Classic Setup, enter

Validation Statuses

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Validation Statuses.

2. On the picklist edit page, click New to add new values to the validation status field. You can also edit, delete, reorder, and replace picklist values.

When you replace a picklist value, the system replaces it in all versions of the article, including any archived versions.

3. Add one or more picklist values (one per line) in the text area.

4. To set the value as the default for the picklist, be sure to select the

Default

checkbox.

5. Click Save.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To create or change validation status picklist values:

•

Customize Application

Build Your Knowledge Base Workflow and Approvals for Articles

Workflow and Approvals for Articles

Implementing approval processes with Salesforce Knowledge gives you additional control over the content and publication of your articles.

Creating workflow rules and approval processes lets your organization automate many of the tasks involved with managing its knowledge base. When implementing Salesforce Knowledge, you can create workflow rules and approval processes for some or all the article types used by your organization.

Workflow rules let you create email alerts, update fields, or send outbound API messages when an article meets certain criteria. For example, you could create a workflow rule that sends an email alert to the article owner when a new article is created from a case. Tasks are not supported by article type workflow.

Approval processes automate the approval of articles. When implemented with Salesforce

Knowledge, approval processes give you additional control over the content of your articles and the process used to approve them. For example, you can create a process that requires legal and management teams to approve articles containing sensitive information.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

Note: Tasks aren't available for article type workflow rules. For more information about creating workflow rules, see Set the Criteria for Your Workflow Rule . For more information about creating an approval process, see Create an Approval Process with the Standard Wizard .

1. From Setup, enter

Workflow Rules

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Workflow

Rules to access the workflow rules list page.

2. On the workflow rules list page, click New Rule.

To view workflow rules and approval processes:

•

View Setup and

Configuration

To create or change workflow rules and approval processes:

•

Customize Application

3. Select the article type from the

Select object

drop-down list.

4. Click Next.

5. Enter a rule name. Optionally, enter a description for the rule.

6. Select the evaluation criteria and choose how criteria are met.

7. Enter criteria for the rule.

8. Click Save & Next.

9. Click Add Workflow Action, select the type of action for the rule, and enter the information required by the action.

10. Click Save.

11. Optionally, add a time-dependent workflow action by clicking Add Time Trigger. Provide time trigger information and then click

Save.

12. Click Done.

13. From Setup, enter

Approval Processes

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Approval Processes.

14. Choose the Approval Process Wizard.

Two wizards are available to help you through the approval setup process. Choose the one that better meets your requirements.

See Choose the Right Wizard to Create an Approval Process .

15. Provide a name, unique name, and description for the process.

Build Your Knowledge Base Workflow and Approvals for Articles

16. Specify criteria for entering the process.

For example, you could specify that if the article is published on a public site it requires approval:

Visible on public site equals True

17. Specify approvers for the process.

Let the submitter choose the approver manually. (default)

Prompts the user to select the next approver.

Automatically assign an approver using a standard or custom hierarchy field.

Assigns the approval request to the user in the field displayed next to this option. You select this field when you configure the approval process.

Automatically assign to a queue.

Available only for objects that support queues. Assigns approval requests to a queue.

Automatically assign to approver(s).

Assigns the approval request to one or more specific users, specific queues, or users related to the submitted record. You can add up to 25 per step.

18. Select the email template that the process uses to notify approvers.

When an approval process assigns an approval request to a user, Salesforce automatically sends the user an approval request email.

The email contains a link to the approval page in Salesforce, where the agent can approve or reject the request and add comments.

19. Configure the approval request page layout.

The approver approves or rejects the article from this page. You can add as many fields to this page as you think your agents need to reasonably assess an article's content. For example, you might choose to include information such as a summary of the article's content, the product discussed, and the author's name.

20. Specify which users are allowed to submit articles for approval.

For example, for articles that require editing before approval, you could create a public group containing editors, and then specify that only members of that group can submit articles for approval.

21. Activate the approval process.

Example: When an approval process is associated with an article type, agents with the “Manage Articles” permission might see both the Publish... and Submit for Approval buttons from an article's detail page. Which buttons they see is determined by both permissions and article actions. These agents can publish an article without submitting it for approval. To limit this ability to certain users, assign the “Publish Articles” article action to a select group of users instead of giving it to all users with the “Manage

Articles” permission. The ability to publish articles without prior approval is governed by an approval process that is specific to each user’s public group.

Keep the following in mind when creating approval processes for article types.

•

Adding an approval process to an article type lets your organization ensure that the required reviewers approve the article before it's published. When an approval process is enabled for an article's article type, the Approval History related list displays on the article details page.

•

When creating an approval process, change the final approval action to “Unlock the record for editing” to allow agents to publish the article.

•

Articles aren't published automatically at the end of an approval process. Agents must click Publish... to make the article available in the publishing channels.

•

When an approval process is associated with an article type, agents with the “Manage Articles” permission might see both the

Publish... and the Submit for Approval buttons on an article's detail page. (Which buttons they see is determined by both permissions and article actions). These agents can publish an article without submitting it for approval. To prevent this from affecting

Build Your Knowledge Base Create Knowledge Actions many users, assign the “Publish Articles” article action to a limited group of users instead of giving it to all users with the “Manage

Articles” permission. For more information, see

Assign Article Actions to Public Groups

on page 53. You still need to make sure that the users with direct publishing capability know which articles need approval before publication.

•

Article approvers require the “Manage Articles” permission and at least the “Read” permission on the article type associated with articles they review. These permissions let them access the article in a draft state. Without these permissions, approvers can reassign but not approve articles.

•

Workflow rules and approval processes apply to the “Draft to Publication” portion of the article publishing cycle. Workflow rules aren’t available for archiving. Approval processes aren’t available for translation or archiving.

Note: When an article is published from the edit page, the article is first saved and then published. Workflow rules apply to the saved draft article but not the published article.

•

A user who only has read access to an article type can publish a draft article of that type if there is an approval process associated to the article type and the approval process is complete (all the approvers have approved) but the article has not been published.

Create Knowledge Actions

Publish as New

action. Then, when you create an approval process for FAQs, select the new Knowledge Action.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Important: When you create the approval process, make sure to change the final approval action to

Unlock the record for editing

to let users publish the article.

1. From Setup, enter

Knowledge Action

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Knowledge

Action.

2. Click New Knowledge Action.

3. Select the article type for the action. The workflow rules and approval process that you associate with the action must belong to the same article type.

4. Enter a unique name for the knowledge action.

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

5. Select the type of action you want to apply to the article type. For example,

Publish as

New

publishes the article as a new version.

6. Enter a description.

USER PERMISSIONS

To enable Salesforce

Knowledge Actions:

•

Customize Application 7. Click Save.

The Knowledge Action detail page appears showing you the rules and approval processes that use the knowledge action.

8. When you’re ready to use the knowledge action in an approval or workflow process, click Activate on the Knowledge Action detail page.

Build Your Knowledge Base Modify Default Category Group Assignments for Articles

Modify Default Category Group Assignments for Articles

Salesforce Knowledge uses data categories to classify articles. Data categories are organized in category group. After creating category groups, admins decide which groups to use for Salesforce

Knowledge articles. For example, if your org uses both the Answers and Salesforce Knowledge, you might want one category group to be used by the answers community and two other category groups for articles. Answers and articles can use the same category group. Authors can assign up to eight data categories from one category group to an article so that users searching for articles can find and filter by category. By default, all the category groups you create are assigned to

Salesforce Knowledge

1. From Setup, enter

Data Category Assignments

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Data Category Assignments under Knowledge.

A list of all category groups appears.

2. Click Edit and move any category groups that you don't want available for articles from the

Selected Category Groups list to the Available Category Groups list.

Later, you can choose to make a hidden category group visible.

Note:

The order of category groups is not preserved from the edit page to the data category assignment page.

3. Click Save.

You receive an email after the save process completes. Authors can now assign categories in the selected groups to articles on the Article Management tab. Authors can only access categories if the category group is active and the author's data category visibility settings provide access to the category.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To modify category groups assignments in Salesforce

Knowledge:

•

Customize Application

AND

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

Build Your Knowledge Base Filter Articles with Data Category Mapping

Filter Articles with Data Category Mapping

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Important:

•

Filtering articles based on case information is only supported in text and picklist fields.

•

Filters are applied to Knowledge results after the case has been saved.

•

Filters are applied after a Knowledge search and only to the articles returned in the search.

•

Using Filters does not return a list of all articles that match the filter criteria. Instead, the filters are applied to the initial pool of article results returned.

•

Results may be filtered after a search.

•

A category group can only be used once in a data category mapping.

•

Support Articles in Multiple Languages

For example, you may want to export articles to a vendor for French translations, but assign articles to an internal Knowledge user for Spanish translations.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

•

Before you add languages to your knowledge base, decide for each language whether you want to translate articles directly in Salesforce or export articles to a translation vendor.

Communicate your decision to the people involved in the translation process (authors, reviewers, translation managers, publishers).

•

When adding a language to your knowledge base, keep in mind that it can't be deleted; however, you can hide a language by making it inactive. Deactivating a language means it no longer appears as a choice in the New Article dialog or the Submit for Translation dialog. Also, if articles are already published in the language, those articles are no longer visible to readers when the language is deactivated.

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

•

You can only add languages supported by Salesforce to your knowledge base.

•

To hide translated articles for a specific language, deactivate the language by unchecking

Active

on the Settings page.

Support a Multilingual Knowledge Base

Reach a global audience by offering your knowledge base in multiple languages.

Export Articles for Translation

If your organization sends Salesforce Knowledge articles to a vendor for translation, use the Export Articles for Translation feature in

Setup.

Import Translated Articles

If your organization sends Salesforce Knowledge articles to a vendor for translation, use the Import Article Translations feature in

Setup. You can only import articles that have been exported from the same Salesforce organization. For example, you can't export articles from your test or sandbox organization and import them into your production organization.

Build Your Knowledge Base Support a Multilingual Knowledge Base

Support a Multilingual Knowledge Base

Reach a global audience by offering your knowledge base in multiple languages.

1. In Setup, enter

Knowledge Settings

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Knowledge

Settings.

2. Click Edit.

3. Select

Multiple Languages

and add the languages you want to include in your knowledge base.

Important: You can add the languages that your instance of Salesforce supports. But you can't remove any languages that have been added to your knowledge base.

4. Choose which settings you want to apply to language.

Setting

Active

Default Assignee

Default Reviewer

Description

Active languages appear in the New Article and Submit for

Translation dialog boxes.

The active/inactive status determines whether a published article is visible. For example, if Spanish articles are published to your partner portal and then you make Spanish an inactive language, the articles no longer appear.

The default assignee is automatically assigned articles submitted for translation. The default assignee can be either an individual person or a queue.

The default reviewer is automatically assigned finished translations that are ready to be reviewed or published. The default reviewer can be either an individual person or a queue.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To set up multiple languages for Salesforce

Knowledge:

•

Customize Application

AND

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

5. Save your changes.

6. If you want, create queues to distribute and assign articles to groups of people who can either translate them or review the finished translations. When setting up queues, use the Knowledge Article Version object.

Build Your Knowledge Base Export Articles for Translation

Export Articles for Translation

If your organization sends Salesforce Knowledge articles to a vendor for translation, use the Export

Articles for Translation feature in Setup.

Place the articles to be translated in a translation queue. To enable the article export feature, create one or more queues; authors and reviewers select the queue when they submit an article for translation. Make sure that they know which queue to choose for which language.

Note: You can have up to 50 exports in 24 hours and a maximum of 15 pending exports

(exports that have not entered a final state such as Completed, Failed, or Canceled).

1. Create a

translation queue

with articles for translation.

2. On the Article Management tab, select the articles you want to translate, and click Submit for

Translation.

3. In the dialog box, indicate which languages to translate the articles into and assign the translations to their corresponding language translation queue.

4. From Setup, enter

Export Articles for Translation

in the

Quick Find box, then select Export Articles for Translation.

5. Select the queue that contains the articles you're exporting.

6. Select either:

•

All articles to export every article in the queue.

•

Updated articles to only export articles that have been modified or added.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

7. Click Continue.

8. Select the source and target language pairs you want to export.

Important: Salesforce creates a separate .zip file for every article type in each language pair. You must retain the .zip file structure for a successful import. For more information, see

Import Translated Articles

on page 63.

To export articles:

•

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

AND

Manage Articles

AND

Manage Knowledge

Article Import/Export

To view articles:

•

Read on the article type

To create articles:

•

Read and Create on the article type

9. To have the files reviewed or published after being translated, select a user or a queue.

10. Select the file character encoding.

•

ISO-8859-1 (General US & Western European, ISO-LATIN-1)

•

Unicode

•

Unicode (UTF-8) default

•

Japanese (Windows)

•

Japanese (Shift_JIIS)

•

Chinese National Standard (GB18030)

•

Chinese Simplified (GB2312)

•

Chinese Traditional (Big5)

•

Korean

•

Unicode (UTF-16, Big Endian)

11. Select the delimiter for the .csv files.

The delimiter is the separator for columns when the file is converted to table form. Your options are tab (default) or comma.

Build Your Knowledge Base Import Translated Articles

12. Click Export Now.

You’re notified by email when your export is complete. You can also check the status of your export by viewing the Article Import and

Export Queue. From Setup, enter

Article Imports and Exports

in the

Quick Find box, then select Article Imports

and Exports.

Unzip the exported files, but retain the file structure for a successful import.

Import Translated Articles

If your organization sends Salesforce Knowledge articles to a vendor for translation, use the Import

Article Translations feature in Setup. You can only import articles that have been exported from the same Salesforce organization. For example, you can't export articles from your test or sandbox organization and import them into your production organization.

1. From Setup, enter

Import Article Translations

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Import Article Translations.

2. Choose how Salesforce handles translations after they're imported.

Option Description

Review imported translations on the Article Management tab before publishing

Add imported translations to a queue from which agents can review them.

Publish translations immediately on import

Publish imported translations without reviews.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

3. Select the language of the articles you're importing.

4. If you chose to have articles reviewed before publishing, select to send the files to a user or a queue.

5. Click Browse, choose the translation .zip file to upload, and click Open.

You must place all the translation files (meaning, those exported from Salesforce and translated by your vendor) in a folder whose name is the same as the language code. For example, put

French articles in an

folder. Zip up this folder to create your import file.

Important: To import translated articles successfully, verify that the file structure and their extensions match the file structure and extensions of files exported from Salesforce

Knowledge for translation. For example, if the target language is French, the file structure begins as follows: import.properties

-fr

--articletypearticlename_kav

---articlename.csv

---[Article collateral, html, images, etc.]

6. Click Import Now.

If you have more translated articles to upload, repeat steps four through six.

USER PERMISSIONS

To export articles:

•

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

AND

Manage Articles

AND

Manage Knowledge

Article Import/Export

To view articles:

•

Read on the article type

To create articles:

•

Read and Create on the article type

Build Your Knowledge Base Improve the Article Search Experience

7. Click Finish.

An email notification is sent to you when your import finishes. You can view the status of your import from Setup by entering

Article

Imports and Exports

in the

Quick Find

box, then selecting Article Imports and Exports.

Improve the Article Search Experience

Enable search highlights and snippets, synonyms, promoted terms, topics, and keywords from cases to improve your article search.

EDITIONS

Search Highlights and Snippets

Quickly identify the best article and see how articles match your search terms with relevant text and highlighted search terms in the search results.

Search Synonyms for Articles

Create synonyms so words or phrases are treated as equivalents in searches. When searching

Salesforce Knowledge articles, users can enter search terms that don’t match any terms in those items but are synonymous with the terms.

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Manage Promoted Search Terms

View, edit, and delete—from a single page—all the promoted search terms that are associated with Salesforce Knowledge articles.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Enable Topics for Articles

With topics on articles, you can classify and search articles by assigning topics. Topics can be added from the article view and detail pages. Suggested topics, which are only supported in English, are terms extracted from the article, so that they are more concrete and precise than a data category assignment. When searching, topics can be used to index the article, so the matched articles are more relevant to keyword searches.

Use More Case Keywords to Find Articles

When searching articles from a case, by default, only the case title is used in the search. Often, you want to use information from the case for more accurate search results, or create a custom search button.

Search Highlights and Snippets

Quickly identify the best article and see how articles match your search terms with relevant text and highlighted search terms in the search results.

Search highlights and snippets give your agents and users context as to why the particular result matched their search query. The relevant text appears below the title with the search terms in bold.

You can enable search highlights and snippets on the

Salesforce Knowledge Settings page

on page

11.

Note: Search highlights and snippets are not generated for searches with wildcards.

Search highlights and snippets are generated from the following fields:

•

Long text area

•

Rich text area

•

Text area

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Build Your Knowledge Base Search Synonyms for Articles

Search highlights and snippets aren’t generated from the following fields:

•

Checkbox

•

Currency

•

Date

•

Date Time

•

File

•

Formula

•

Lookup

•

Multi-picklist

•

Number

•

Percent

•

Phone

•

Picklist

•

URL

Note:

If a snippet is not generated, the article’s summary field is shown instead.

Search Synonyms for Articles

Create synonyms so words or phrases are treated as equivalents in searches. When searching

Salesforce Knowledge articles, users can enter search terms that don’t match any terms in those items but are synonymous with the terms.

To create synonyms and synonym groups, from Setup, enter

Synonyms

in the

Quick Find box, then select Synonyms under Customize > Search. An org can create up to 10,000 synonym groups

A search for one term in synonym group returns results for all terms in the group. For example, if you define a synonym group with these synonyms:

CRM, customer relationship management, Salesforce then a search for

customer relationship management

matches articles that contain

customer relationship management and articles that contain CRM or Salesforce.

Synonyms affect search behavior in the following ways:

Priority

If a search term is part of a synonym group, the search results list items that contain the search term, followed by items that contain other terms in the synonym group.

For example, if this synonym group is defined:

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

fruit, oranges

Then a search for

oranges

matches a list of items containing oranges, followed by items containing fruit.

Note: In the Article Management tab, if you sort the list by clicking a column header, the sort order, not priority, persists in the current and additional searches.

Wildcards

If a wildcard is used in a search, the wildcard expands the search term, but the search doesn't match any synonyms, even if the search phrase contains a defined synonym.

Build Your Knowledge Base Search Synonyms for Articles

For example, if these synonym groups are defined:

fruit, oranges, apples

cabbage, lettuce

Then a search for

orang* lettuce

matches items that contain orange and oranges, but doesn't match items that contain fruit,

apples, and cabbage.

Operators

If a search phrase contains an operator (

AND

AND NOT

), synonym matches are returned only if the entire search phrase is a defined synonym.

For example, if these synonym groups are defined:

fruit, oranges and apples

vegetables, carrots

Then a search for

oranges and apples

returns matches for all items that contain the literal string oranges and apples and items that contain the term fruit.

However, if the search phrase is

fruit and vegetables

, which is not a defined synonym, the search matches only those items that contain both the terms, fruit and vegetables.

In this case,

AND

functions as an operator and synonym matches are not returned in the search results. In terms of this example, items that contain a synonym of either fruit or vegetables (items that contain the term carrots or the phrase oranges and apples) are not returned.

Exact phrase matches

If a defined synonym is only a part of a longer exact phrase search, the search doesn't treat it as a synonym.

For example, if this synonym group is defined:

oranges apples, fruit

Then an exact phrase search for

“raspberries oranges apples”

doesn't match items that contain the word fruit.

Lemmatization

Synonyms do not under go lemmatization in search results; rather, they are matched as an exact phrase. However, the search term does under go lemmatization.

For example, if this synonym group is defined:

quench, drink orange juice

Then a search for

quench

matches items that contain quench, quenched, quenching, and drink orange juice, but doesn't match items that contain drinking orange juice.

Ignored words

Words that are normally ignored in searches, such as the, to, and for, are matched if the word is part of a defined synonym.

For example, if this synonym group is defined:

peel the orange, cut the apple

Then a search for

peel the orange

matches items that contain the exact string peel the orange.

Overlapping synonyms

If a search term consists of overlapping synonyms from different groups, the search matches synonyms in all the overlapping synonym groups.

For example, if these synonym groups are defined:

•

orange marmalade, citrus

Build Your Knowledge Base Manage Promoted Search Terms

•

marmalade recipe, sugar

Then a search for

orange marmalade recipe

matches items that contain orange marmalade, citrus, marmalade recipe, and

sugar.

Subsets

If one synonym group includes a synonym that is a subset of a synonym in another group, a search for the subset term doesn't match items that contain synonyms from the subset synonym group.

For example, if these synonym groups are defined:

•

orange, apple

•

orange marmalade, citrus

•

marmalade, jam

Then a search for

orange marmalade

matches items that contain orange marmalade and citrus, but doesn't match items that contain apple or jam.

Manage Promoted Search Terms

View, edit, and delete—from a single page—all the promoted search terms that are associated with Salesforce Knowledge articles.

You can add promoted search terms to articles

on the article’s detail page in the Promoted Search

Terms related list.

1. From Setup, enter

Promoted Search Terms

in the

Quick Find

box, then select

Promoted Search Terms under CustomizeSearch.

2. To view which terms are assigned to an article, sort by the Article column.

3. To edit a term, click Edit in its row.

You can only change the term from this page, not the article it is assigned to.

4. To delete a term, click Delete in its row.

The term is only deleted from the article associated with this row, not from other articles.

5. Remember to save your changes.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To create, edit, and delete promoted search terms:

•

Manage Promoted

Search Terms

Build Your Knowledge Base Enable Topics for Articles

Enable Topics for Articles

Note: Contrary to data categories, topics added to an article are not transferred to the same article in another language.

Topics for articles are enabled for each article type.

1. From Setup, enter

Topics for Objects

in the

Quick Find

box, then select Topics

for Objects.

2. Click the article type name where you want to enable topics.

3. Check Enable topics.

4. Select which fields you want to use for suggestions.

5. Click Save.

6. Via profile or permission set, under System Permissions, define which agents can assign, create, delete, and edit topics.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To enable topics:

•

Customize Application

Use More Case Keywords to Find Articles

Luckily, Salesforce Knowledge search pages accept other parameters:

•

id=<case id>: The ID of the current case.

•

search=<keywords>: The keywords to be searched.

•

articleType_<article type dev name>=on: multiple parameters possible, article types to select (if no article type is selected, then all article types are selected)

•

ct_<data category group internal name>=<data category internal name>: multiple parameters possible, filter pre-selection

To take advantage of those parameters, add a custom button to the case detail page containing a few lines of javascript that extract keywords from the case and hide the default article search button.

Note: You can also create a custom article widget with support:caseArticle

1. From the object management settings for cases, go to Buttons, Links, and Actions.

2. Click New Button or Link.

3. Enter a unique

Label

Name

, and

Description

4. Select Detail Page Button for

Display Type

5. Select Execute JavaScript in the

Behavior

drop-down.

6. Select OnClick JaveScript in the

Content Source

drop-down.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To create or change custom buttons or links and create a Visualforce page:

•

Customize Application

Build Your Knowledge Base Use More Case Keywords to Find Articles

7. Enter code for extracting case data and setting up parameters for the article search page.

For example:

// article search page URL var url = '/knowledge/knowledgeHome.apexp';

// ID of the current case url += '?id={!Case.Id}';

// use the case subject as the search keywords url += '&search={!Case.Subject}';

// read case attributes var caseType = '{!Case.Type}'; var caseProduct = '{!Case.Product__c}';

// if the case is of a certain type, select only 2 of the article types available

// in other cases, we keep the default behavior (all article types selected) if (caseType=='Problem' || caseType=='Question') { url += '&articleType_FAQ_kav=on'; url += '&articleType_How_To_kav=on';

}

// preselect a data category for search results based on the category var product = ''; if (caseProduct=='Home') product = 'Home'; if (caseProduct=='SMB') product = 'Small_and_Medium_Business'; if (caseProduct=='Large enterprise') product = 'Large_Enterprise'; if (product.length>0) url += '&ct_Products2=' + product;

// once the logic is executed, we go to the article search page window.location = url;

8. Click Save.

9. From the object management settings for cases, go to Page Layouts.

10. Click Edit next to

Case Layout

11. Drag your custom button for article search into the case layout.

12. Click Save.

13. Create a Visualforce page named

CaseDetailsWithoutStandardKBSearchButton

with the following code:

<apex:page standardController="Case">

</style>

Build Your Knowledge Base Set Up the Knowledge One Widget

<apex:detail/>

</apex:page>

14. Back in the Buttons, Links, and Actions area for cases, click Edit next to

View

15. Select Visualforce Page in

Override with

16. Select CaseDetailsWithoutStandardKBSearchButton from the drop-down.

17. Click Save.

Set Up the Knowledge One Widget

Knowledge One is available as a widget you can plug in to the Salesforce Console for Service or

Salesforce Console for Sales. If you are using the Knowledge tab, you get the same easy-to-use interface for articles and external sources on cases and within the Salesforce Console for Service.

You can search, send, and create articles, all without leaving the case.

Of all the Salesforce Knowledge article widgets , the Knowledge One widget lets you:

•

Attach a published Salesforce Knowledge article to the case in one click.

•

Share an article as a URL, if it is shared on a public channel.

•

Email an article as a PDF, if it is shared on a public channel.

•

Create and manage articles.

•

Make adjustments based on your window width. In the console, in windows smaller than 600 pixels, the searchable objects are displayed in a drop-down menu.

Note:

The article widget in a case feed search doesn’t necessarily use the agent’s language.

If the agent’s language isn’t a Salesforce Knowledge supported language but their locale language is, the locale language is the search language. If neither the agent’s language nor local language are supported, the search language is the default Salesforce Knowledge language, which you can find and set on the Knowledge Settings page.

1. From the object management settings for cases, go to Page Layouts and open your case page layout for edit.

2. Ensure the Email quick action is in the case page layout.

Without the Email quick action, you can’t send articles via email.

a. Select Quick Actions in the left-hand menu.

b. Drag Email to the

Quick Actions in the Salesforce Classic

Publisher

line.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To administer Salesforce

Knowledge and Salesforce

Console for Service:

•

Customize Application

AND

Manage Salesforce

Knowledge

3. Disable previous article sidebar components.

•

To disable the Knowledge sidebar, click Layout Properties and ensure

Knowledge Sidebar

is unchecked.

•

To disable the case feed article tool, click Feed View and ensure

Use Case Feed Article Tool in the Console is unchecked.

4. In the page layout editor, click Custom Console Components.

5. In the sidebar where you want the Knowledge One widget, select

Knowledge One

in the Type drop down and set the sidebar parameters.

Email quick action to be added to the Case page layout in order to show up

Build Your Knowledge Base Compare Article Widgets for Cases at a Glance

Tip: If you can’t see the Knowledge One sidebar, increase its width to 250 (height to 150) in the page layout. These are the minimum measurements for the Knowledge One sidebar to display properly.

Compare Article Widgets for Cases at a Glance

Decide which Salesforce Knowledge article widget is best for your organization.

Compare Article Widgets for Cases at a Glance

Decide which Salesforce Knowledge article widget is best for your organization.

Does the widget...

Filter on data category

Create an article

Search an external object

Access your draft articles

Attach an article to a case

Send an article as a PDF

Share an article’s public URL

Adjust with the window size

Have more than one way to suggest articles

Yes

Article Widget

Yes

Article Case

Feed Widget

Yes

Knowledge One

Widget

Yes

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Build Your Knowledge Base

Article Widget

Compare Article Widgets for Cases at a Glance

Article Case Feed Widget

Build Your Knowledge Base

Knowledge One Widget

Compare Article Widgets for Cases at a Glance

WORK WITH ARTICLES AND TRANSLATIONS

The Article Management tab is your home page for working with articles throughout the publishing cycle as they are created, assigned to collaborators, translated, published, archived, and deleted.

Agent’s need the correct permissions on an article's article type and article actions to complete

some tasks. For more information see, Assign Article Actions to Public Groups

To specify which articles appear in the list view, use the following options in the sidebar:

•

In the View area, select Draft Articles, Published Articles, or Archived Articles. You can filter draft articles by those assigned to you or those assigned to anyone (all draft articles for your organization).

•

If applicable, click the Translations tab in the View area, and select Draft Translations or Published

Translations. You can filter draft translations by those assigned to you, those assigned to a translation queue, or those assigned to anyone (all draft translations in your organization).

•

To refine the current view, first select an article language filter and then enter a keyword or phrase in the

Find in View

field. The

Find in View

field is inactivated for archived articles.

•

In the Filter area, choose a category from a drop-down menu to filter the current view.

To modify which columns display, click Columns. The following columns are available depending on what is selected in the view area:

Action

Column

All User Ratings

Archived Date

Article Number

Article Title

Assigned to

Assignment Details

Description

Displays the actions available for the article or translation.

View

All articles and translations

Average ratings from users of your internal Salesforce organization, Customer Portal, partner portal, and your public knowledge base.

Published and archived articles and published translations

Date the article was archived.

Archived articles

Unique number automatically assigned to the article.

All articles and translations

Click to view the article.

All articles

The user who is assigned work on the article.

Draft articles and translations

Instructions for the assignment.

Draft articles and translations

Assignment Due Date

Date to complete work on the article. If the date has passed, it displays in red.

Draft articles and translations

Created Date

Date the article was written.

Draft articles and translations

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To create, edit, or delete articles:

•

Manage Articles

AND

Create, Read, Edit, or

Delete on the article type

To publish or archive articles:

•

Manage Articles

AND

Create, Read, Edit, and

Delete on the article type

To submit articles for translation:

•

Manage Articles

AND

Create, Read, and Edit on the article type

To submit articles for approval:

•

Permissions vary depending on the approval process settings

Work with Articles and Translations

Column

Customer Ratings

Language

Last Action

Last Modified by

Last Modified Date

Search Articles and External Sources on the Knowledge Tab

USER PERMISSIONS

To view articles:

To create articles:

To edit draft articles:

To edit published or archived articles:

To delete a draft, published, or archived article:

To create and edit external data sources:

Read on the article type

Manage Articles

AND

Read and Create on the article type

Manage Articles

AND

Read and Edit on the article type

Manage Articles

AND

Create, Read, and Edit on the article type

Manage Articles

AND

Read, Edit, and Delete on the article type

Customize Application

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Use a single search to find all your resources at once.

1. Enter your search terms in the Search box.

You can use search wildcards and operators in your search terms. If your organization has any auto-complete options enabled, you can select from the suggestions.

Note: In the auto-complete drop-down, article titles have a paper icon while the keywords have a magnifying glass icon.

2. Click the search icon or press Enter on your keyboard.

3. Optionally, select filters to refine your search results.

Depending on the source you are searching, filter by language, data category, article status, article type, and article validation. Click

Reset to return all filters to their default setting.

•

When

All

is selected, you can filter by language and data category, depending on what your organization supports.

•

When

Articles

My Draft

is selected you can filter by:

–

Article status: Published, Draft, and Draft Translations

–

Language: Values depend on those supported in your org

–

Data categories: Values depend on those created in your org

Work with Articles and Translations Search Articles and External Sources on the Knowledge Tab

–

Article type: Values depend on those created in your org

–

Validation Status: No Filter (all articles), Not Validated (articles that are not validated), Validated (validated articles), and any other values supported in your org such as in review

•

When an external source is selected, there are no filters, and the general article information displayed is controlled by your external object search layout.

4. For articles, you can sort by:

•

Published Date

•

Best Rating

•

Promote Articles in Search Results

Articles must be in published status for you to manage their promoted terms.

1. In the Article Management tab, select Published Articles in the View section, and then click the title of the published article that you want to promote for a search term.

2. In the Promoted Search Terms related list, click New Promoted Term.

3. Enter the keywords that you want to associate with the article.

•

You can associate the same term with multiple articles. If the user’s search matches the promoted term, all associated articles are promoted in search results, ordered by relevancy.

•

The maximum number of characters per promoted term is 100. For best results matching users’ search terms, limit each promoted term to a few keywords.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

4. Click Save.

Example:

For example, if an article addresses a common support issue such as login problems, you can associate the terms

password

and

password change

. Article search matches a promoted term whenever all keywords within the term occur within the user’s search terms, in any sequence. Each keyword must match exactly. For example:

•

The promoted term password matches a search for

change password

•

The promoted term password change matches a search for

how do I change my password

but doesn’t match

forgot password

•

The promoted term password doesn’t match a search for

change passwords

USER PERMISSIONS

To create, edit, and delete promoted search terms:

•

Manage Promoted

Search Terms

Consider these limitations and general limits when you use promoted search terms.

•

Your organization can create a maximum of 2,000 promoted terms. For best results, use them selectively, which means create a limited number of promoted terms and a limited number of promoted articles per term.

•

If your organization translates articles into multiple languages, each promoted term is associated with one article version and the article version’s language. If you need equivalent promoted terms to be associated with each translation, you must specify promoted terms for each translation. For example, associate change password with an English language article version and changer mot de passe with a French language article version.

•

The end user’s language setting determines the scope of the article search. Search results exclude article versions and any associated promoted terms that are not in the user’s language.

Work with Articles and Translations Article Search Results

Article Search Results

Many factors influence the order in which articles appear in the results list. Salesforce evaluates your search terms and your data to move more relevant matches higher in your list of results. Some of these factors include:

Operators

When you don’t specify an operator in your article search, the search engine determines the best operator to use.

Many searches use “AND” as the default operator. When you search for multiple terms, all the terms must match to generate a result. Matching on all terms tends to produce search results that are more relevant than searches using the “OR” operator, where matches on any of the search query terms appear in the results.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

If the search engine doesn’t return any results that match all the terms, it looks for matches using the “OR” operator. With the “OR” operator, the search engine boosts documents that contain more terms from the search query, so that they appear higher in the results list.

Frequency

This algorithm calculates the frequency with which a term appears within each article. The algorithm then weighs them against each other to produce the initial set of search results.

Relevancy

Articles that are frequently viewed or that are frequently attached to cases appear higher in the results. Article ownership and recent activity also boost an article in the results list.

Proximity of Terms

Articles that contain all the keywords in a search are ranked highest, followed by articles with fewer keywords, followed by articles with single keyword matches. Terms that are closer together in the matched document, with few or no intervening words, are ranked higher in the list.

Exact Matches

Matches on exact keywords are ranked higher than matches on synonyms or lemmatized terms.

Title Field

If any search terms match words in an article title, the article is boosted in the search results.

Token Sequence

If the search term is broken up into multiple tokens because it contains both letters and numbers, the system boosts results based on the same sequence of tokens. That way, exact matches are ranked higher than matches on the tokens with other tokens in between.

Work with Articles and Translations Create and Edit Articles

Create and Edit Articles

Note: When applying categories, choose the categories that a user would naturally look for as they navigate. Users only find an article if they select its explicitly applied category, the parent of that category, or a child of that category.

Once your article is complete, you can assign it to another agent to edit or review the article,

publish the article

directly, or submit the article for approval. If you have the “Publish Articles” article action and an approval process is set up for an article, you'll see both Publish... and Submit for Approval buttons..

Smart Links to Salesforce Knowledge Articles

Smart linking from one article to another.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Smart Links to Salesforce Knowledge Articles

Smart linking from one article to another.

Smart links automatically adjust when the name or URL of an article is changed. For example, when the URL Name of an article is changed, Salesforce Knowledge automatically updates the article’s

URL based on the channel, adds the site prefix for a public knowledge base, and adds the community name for the community portal. There are two ways to create a smart link in the rich text editor to a Salesforce Knowledge article within another article:

•

Search for the article.

•

Enter the article URL.

Important: Smart links are based on the channels they are in. Therefore, you can’t add a smart link to an article in another channel. For example, an article on your public knowledge base can’t link to an article only published in your internal channel.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Smart Links to Salesforce Knowledge Articles Through Search

Smart linking from one article to another using the Link Article dialog in the rich text editor.

Smart Links to Salesforce Knowledge Articles with URLs

Smart linking from one Salesforce Knowledge article to another by manually entering the article

URL in the rich text editor.

USER PERMISSIONS

To create articles:

•

Manage Articles

AND

Read and Create on the article type

Work with Articles and Translations Smart Links to Salesforce Knowledge Articles

Smart Links to Salesforce Knowledge Articles Through Search

Smart linking from one article to another using the Link Article dialog in the rich text editor.

When creating or editing an article, you can use a keyword search to create a smart link in a rich text area field.

1. Place your cursor where you’d like to place the link.

Click the link icon,

The Link Article dialog appears.

3. Optionally, select which language to search.

If no language is selected, Salesforce Knowledge returns those articles in your knowledge base’s default language that are related to your keyword search.

4. Optionally, select the publish status type to search.

•

Online (default if no publish status is selected)

•

Draft

•

Draft translations (if your knowledge base supports multiple languages)

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

5. Enter article keywords into the search bar.

6. Click the search icon at the end of the search bar.

The top 20 related articles display.

7. Select the article to reference in a smart link from the article list.

To create articles:

•

Manage Articles

AND

Read and Create on the article type

8. Optionally, click Go to Article to view the article in another window and ensure that it is the correct reference.

9. Optionally, click the Target tab and select where the referenced article displays.

•

Not Set: Opens the linked article in the same frame as it was clicked.

•

Frame: Opens the linked article in a designated frame.

•

New Window (_blank): Opens the linked article in a new window or tab.

•

Topmost Window (_top): Opens the linked article in the full body of the window.

•

Same Window (_self): Opens the linked article in the same frame as it was clicked.

•

Parent Window (_parent): Opens the linked article in the parent frame.

10. Click OK.

Note: Smart links add more characters than what is displayed. If you see an error that you have surpassed the character limit, have your administrator increase the limit.

Work with Articles and Translations Smart Links to Salesforce Knowledge Articles

Smart Links to Salesforce Knowledge Articles with URLs

Smart linking from one Salesforce Knowledge article to another by manually entering the article

URL in the rich text editor.

When creating or editing an article, you can manually create a smart link in a rich text area field.

1. Highlight the content or place your cursor where you’d like to place the link.

Click the link icon, .

3. Select Link Type URL.

4. Select Protocol <other>.

5. Enter the article URL as:

/articles/[language]/[articleType]/[URLName]

For example, for an English article in a multiple language knowledge base, of article type FAQ, with a URL Name of About-Passwords the article URL is:

/articles/en_US/FAQ/About-Passwords

. Add a language only if your Salesforce

Knowledge base supports multiple languages.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

6. Optionally, click the Target tab and select where the referenced article displays.

•

Not Set: Opens the linked article in the same frame as it was clicked.

•

Frame: Opens the linked article in a designated frame.

•

New Window (_blank): Opens the linked article in a new window or tab.

•

Topmost Window (_top): Opens the linked article in the full body of the window.

•

Same Window (_self): Opens the linked article in the same frame as it was clicked.

•

Parent Window (_parent): Opens the linked article in the parent frame.

To create articles:

•

Manage Articles

AND

Read and Create on the article type

7. Click OK.

Note: Smart links add more characters than what is displayed. If you see an error that you have surpassed the character limit, have your administrator increase the limit.

Work with Articles and Translations Publish Articles and Translations

Publish Articles and Translations

Publishing articles and translations makes them visible in all channels selected. If you publish an article that has translations, all translations of the article are published as well.

EDITIONS

You can publish an article or translation from the Article Management tab or the article’s or translation’s detail page. To publish, you need the publish permission on an article's article type and the “Publish Articles” or “Publish Translated Articles” article action to publish an article or translation.

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

When publishing articles keep the following in mind.

•

You can choose to publish directly or schedule publishing for a future date. Articles you scheduled for publication later continue to appear in the Draft Articles filter, now with the pending icon ( ) next to the article title. To see the publication date, hover over the icon.

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Tip:

To cancel a scheduled publication, click Cancel Publication on the article or translation detail or edit page.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

•

If your organization has implemented approval processes, you need the same permissions and actions to publish an article after it has been approved. Approval processes aren't available for translations.

•

An article in an approval process might be sent to a queue to be published even if it is scheduled to publish immediately. This happens when the article is very large, there are many active languages, or there are many other articles to publish at that time. To mitigate performance issues, the article is sent to a queue until it can be published successfully, usually within minutes. Also, note that the

Last Modified By

field shows Automated Process as the last user to modify the article.

•

If the draft being published is a working copy of a currently published article, it is published as a new version of the original.

•

For articles and translations that have already been published, select the

Flag as new version

checkbox to make the new article icon ( ) display next to your article in the selected channels. Readers from these channels can see that this article has been modified since the last time they’ve read it. This checkbox is not available when you publish an article for the first time, as the icon displays by default for new articles.

•

If you assign an article that is scheduled for publication, you also cancel the scheduled publication.

•

Scheduling a publication removes any assignment information. The user who scheduled the publication is assigned to the article.

•

Conflicts might occur when different agents perform actions on the same articles simultaneously. Depending on who performs the action first, the articles will not be available for subsequent users though the articles still display momentarily in the articles list.

Performing an action on these articles results in a conflict error.

•

If you have the “Publish Articles” article action and an approval process is set up for an article, you see both Publish... and Submit

for Approval buttons.

Work with Articles and Translations Translate Articles Within Salesforce Knowledge

Translate Articles Within Salesforce Knowledge

If your organization translates Salesforce Knowledge articles internally, you can enter the translation from the translation detail page.

Depending on the status of your translation and the article actions assigned to you

, you can do the following from the translation detail page.

Action

Archive

Assign...

Delete

Edit

Preview

Publish...

Description Article Status

Archiving

removes published translations that are obsolete so they no longer display to agents and customers on your organization's Salesforce

Knowledge channels.

To archive a translation, archive its master article.

Assigning changes the owner of the translation.

Draft translations

Deleting a translation permanently removes it from the knowledge base.

Draft translations

Note: You can't undelete a draft translation.

Editing modifies the translation's content or properties.

Previewing shows how the translation appears to end users.

Note: Voting and

Chatter information is not available when previewing a

Knowledge article.

Draft and published translations

Publishing translations makes them visible in all channels selected.

Draft translations

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

USER PERMISSIONS

To work with translated articles:

•

Manage Articles

AND

Create, Read, Edit, or

Delete on the article type

(depending on the action)

1. Click the Article Management tab and select Translations in the View area.

2. Select Draft Translations.

Note: You can also edit a published translation. It reverts to draft status until you republish it, although you can choose to keep the existing version published while you update it.

Work with Articles and Translations Archive Articles and Translations

3. Optionally, change the

Assigned To

filter to view articles that are not assigned to you for translation.

For example, you might want to view articles assigned to a translation queue.

4. Click Edit next to the article and language you want to translate.

5. Enter your translation.

6. Click Save.

Archive Articles and Translations

Archiving removes published articles and translations that are obsolete so they no longer display to agents and customers on your organization's Salesforce Knowledge channels.

You can archive published articles and translations on the Article Management tab. You can choose to archive either real time (now) or schedule the archival.

Articles you're archiving now move directly to the Archived Articles view. Articles you scheduled for archiving later continue to display on the Published Articles view, now with the pending icon

( ). Hover over the icon to see the archive date. On the archive date, the article automatically moves to the Archived Articles view.

Note:

•

If you edit a published article that is scheduled for archiving, you also cancel the archiving.

•

If an article has a published translation with a draft version, on archive, the draft version is deleted. Published translations are archived along with the article.

Tip: To cancel a scheduled archive, click Cancel Archive on the article detail page.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Work with Articles and Translations Salesforce Knowledge Article Versions

Salesforce Knowledge Article Versions

Article versions allow you to save an older version of a published article and then see which version of the article is associated with a case. To save the previous version, select the

Flag as new version

checkbox when publishing a new version. The previously published version is saved and the new version is published with the next sequential version number as an identifier.

When an article is attached to a case and a new version of the article is published, the version attached to the case as being outdated. For example, if Version 2 is attached to a case and a third version is published, the article attached to the case becomes Version 2 (outdated). This notation ensures that there is a permanent record of which content was associated with the case.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

When you click the version number in the Article View, and the Article or Translation Detail pages, you see the Version History list. In this list you can:

•

View the list of archived versions.

•

To view a version, click its title.

•

Expand the version to view its field change history (if you have history tracking enabled for the article type and for fields).

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

By default, the system stores up to ten versions of an article, plus any versions that are attached to cases.

When several versions of an article exist, you can restore an older version and republish it. Click

Revert to Draft Version

to copy the archived version’s content into a draft article, then republish it as a new version. You can also restore the older version of any associated translations at the same time.

Note: When there is an existing draft for the article, the option to revert isn’t available.

You can delete an older, outdated version of a published article by selecting

Delete This Version

from the article detail page.

If you delete an article version associated to a case, it is no longer be attached to the case. Translated article versions depend on the master language article. If the master language version is deleted, the translated versions are also deleted.

Versions also appear in custom reports, allowing you to find and read the article version attached to a case.

Delete Articles and Translations

Note:

•

To delete published article and translations, first remove them from publication by choosing edit or archive.

•

When a user without delete access cancels the editing on published article, the newly created article draft is not deleted automatically.

Deleting articles moves them to the Recycle Bin, where you can undelete them if you change your mind. If you delete an article with translations, the translations are also moved to the Recycle Bin.

However, if you delete a single translation, you can't undelete it. Deleting an article or translation

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

Work with Articles and Translations Articles or Knowledge Tab may fail if another user or the system simultaneously modifies it while the deletion is being processed. You receive an error message when this occurs.

Note:

•

If you delete a draft article that is a working copy of a currently published article, the original published version is not affected but the draft version is permanently removed. It does not go to the Recycle Bin. You can edit the published version to work again on a draft copy.

•

When a user without delete access cancels editing a published article, the newly created article draft is not deleted automatically.

Articles or Knowledge Tab

Find out which Salesforce Knowledge tab you are using and what you can do on each.

There are two tabs for searching Salesforce Knowledge articles: the Knowledge

tab or the

Articles

tab. The one you use depends on when your organization started using Salesforce Knowledge or if it adopted the Knowledge tab.

The Knowledge tab

If the search bar is at the top of the main frame of the page you are using the Knowledge One on the Knowledge tab.

EDITIONS

Available in: Salesforce

Classic, Lightning Experience

Salesforce Knowledge is available in Performance and Developer Editions and in Unlimited Edition with the

Service Cloud.

Salesforce Knowledge is available for an additional cost in: Professional,

Enterprise, and Unlimited

Editions.

The Knowledge tab merges functionality of the old Articles tab and the Article Management tab and uses federated search to search all your resources at once. On the Knowledge tab, you can:

•

Search all your Salesforce Knowledge articles and any of your external data sources, such as Microsoft

SharePoint

•

Filter

articles by language and data categories.

•

Sort articles by published date, rating, most viewed, and title.

•

Use the Create Article drop-down to select an article type and

create an article

•

Use the drop-down by each article to follow or unfollow,

edit

publish

, and

delete an article, depending on your permissions.

Note:

For information on article permissions see Knowledge Article Access

on page 44.

Work with Articles and Translations Articles or Knowledge Tab

Also, when you use case feed, the Knowledge tab layout is applied to the article sidebar.

Note: Community members without the Knowledge One permission cannot access Knowledge through Communities. They also can’t access Knowledge in communities via the Salesforce1 mobile browser and downloadable apps.

To switch to the Knowledge One and the Knowledge tab, have your administrator add the

Knowledge One

permission to your

profile

permission set

The Articles tab

If the search bar is in the left-side panel of the page you are using the Articles tab.

The Articles tab presents a list of your Salesforce Knowledge published articles. On the Articles tab, you can:

•

Search for published articles

•

View published articles

•

Create an article

•

Customize how the article information is displayed

INDEX

Archive articles

Archiving article versions

articles

Article Translations import

Article types adding sections to layout

assigning templates to channels

creating

creating fields

custom templates

delete

field-level security

managing

rearranging fields on layout

Articles archive

archived versions

create

CSV file for importing to Salesforce Knowledge

deleting

edit

export status

history

import status

importing

importing parameters for Salesforce Knowledge

manage

modify

preparing articles for import to Salesforce Knowledge

publish

Complete Guide to Salesforce

Knowledge

Salesforce, Summer ’17

@salesforcedocs

Copyright 2000–2017 salesforce.com, inc. All rights reserved. Salesforce is a registered trademark of salesforce.com, inc., as are other names and marks. Other marks appearing herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

CONTENTS

Welcome to Salesforce Knowledge

Plan Your Knowledge Base

Build Your Knowledge Base

Work with Articles and Translations

Index

WELCOME TO SALESFORCE KNOWLEDGE

Salesforce Knowledge Documentation Overview

Overview of Salesforce Knowledge

Classic Knowledge

Lightning Knowledge

Define Data Categories for Your Salesforce Knowledge Articles

Share Your Salesforce Knowledge Base

Knowledge and Salesforce1

Develop with Salesforce Knowledge

PLAN YOUR KNOWLEDGE BASE

Salesforce Knowledge Limits

BUILD YOUR KNOWLEDGE BASE

Enable Salesforce Knowledge

Enable Knowledge One with Permission Sets

Enable Knowledge One with Profiles

Example Apex for Submitting Articles from Cases

Knowledge Article Types

Create Article Types

Add Custom Fields to Article Types

Custom Fields on Articles

Field-Level Security on Articles

Use Videos from Any Provider with a Custom Visualforce Page

Article Type Page Layouts

Send Article Content in Email

Post Site and Community Article URLs

Control Data Integrity with Validation Rules

Article History Tracking

Article Type Templates

Delete an Article Type

Import Existing Information into Salesforce Knowledge

Prepare Articles for Import to Salesforce Knowledge

Create a .csv File for Article Import

Set Article Import Parameters

Create an Article .zip File for Import

Article and Translation Import and Export Status

Knowledge Article Access

Create Public Groups for Knowledge

Assign Article Actions to Public Groups

Define Validation Status Picklist Values

Workflow and Approvals for Articles

Create Knowledge Actions

Modify Default Category Group Assignments for Articles

Filter Articles with Data Category Mapping

Support Articles in Multiple Languages

Support a Multilingual Knowledge Base

Export Articles for Translation

Import Translated Articles

Improve the Article Search Experience

Search Highlights and Snippets

Search Synonyms for Articles

Manage Promoted Search Terms

Enable Topics for Articles

Use More Case Keywords to Find Articles

Set Up the Knowledge One Widget

Compare Article Widgets for Cases at a Glance

Article Widget

Article Case Feed Widget

Knowledge One Widget

WORK WITH ARTICLES AND TRANSLATIONS

Search Articles and External Sources on the Knowledge Tab

Promote Articles in Search Results

Article Search Results

Create and Edit Articles

Smart Links to Salesforce Knowledge Articles

Smart Links to Salesforce Knowledge Articles Through Search

Smart Links to Salesforce Knowledge Articles with URLs

Publish Articles and Translations

Translate Articles Within Salesforce Knowledge

Archive Articles and Translations