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 User 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.
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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 User 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.
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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 2 GB.
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
16 supported languages
The import .zip file must meet the following requirements:
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.
•
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.
•
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.
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Plan Your Knowledge Base Salesforce Knowledge Limits
Salesforce Knowledge Limits Details for Classic Knowledge Details for Lightning 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.
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.
Maximum number of data category groups and active data category groups
5 category groups, with 3 groups active at a time
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.
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