Written by Sujain Thomas
There are many advantages to be realized from implementation of salesforce knowledge within your organization; from readily accessible information across the organization to easy monitoring and evaluation and customer engagement through content creation and sharing.
Once you have decided to implement salesforce knowledge, there are important considerations to make during the set-up process in order to ensure that your teams reap maximum benefit from the platform. This article provides a guide to help you navigate the set-up and configuration process.
- Decide who your data users are
Deciding who needs access to your knowledge base internally and externally will make it easier to determine the publication channels, data categories and article types that you’ll need. SK contains features that enable you to set who among your internal users can update, maintain and publish new content into the knowledge repository. As you select these internal users, define who will write, edit and publish articles as well as the flow of the entire process. You can configure groups or individuals to have particular responsibility over the knowledge base and its articles. Use your current role/responsibility structure to help in the definition of user permissions.
- Define who has ‘read-only’ access as well as their licensing arrangements
SK allows organizations to publish articles to as many as four publication channels, and you have control over the articles and fields that will be displayed to various users/groups. The four channels to which you can publish are internal app and partner, public and customer knowledge bases. Defining the visibility settings and publication channels will be easier once you set which external and internal users will access the articles. You should also factor in the needs of licensed and non-licensed users and the kind of content to be displayed.
- Decide your preferred knowledge exposition channels
Salesforce Knowledge allows you to use communities for exposition of Knowledge articles to customers or partners. These communities, like in Salesforce Git can be easily configured as groups of both licensed and non-licensed users according to their needs vis-à -vis your knowledge article repository. For instance, you can create a community which includes both internal and external users who require access to the organization’s support documentation. Based on this need, a support community could be created, made up of all users and articles affiliated to support, allowing them to easily access what they need.
Another option is setting up the public-facing knowledge base through the Public Knowledge Base channel for Salesforce Knowledge App, available on App Exchange. Proper setup of your SK articles repository heavily relies on your understanding of article types, data categories and publication channels.
- Decide the languages in which content will be published
Using Salesforce Knowledge, you can publish both internal and external user articles in multiple languages. You can define whether or not you need this feature according to your audiences’ locations and languages of communication.
- Define how content will be added from current storage
You need to understand the existing sources for content in order to define how articles will be added to your SK, as well as the required data categories and article types. Having deep insight into your current content organization structure as well as issues users have with the current system will help you correct these errors as you setup the new repository. You will be able to improve on former storage organizations and get another chance to review content that is still usable and that which should be updated or archived.
Author bio:
Sujain Thomas is a certified Salesforce Git and CRM consultant, with more than two decades of experience in the field. She likes to share information about upcoming Salesforce technologies that could benefit organizations.
