Knowledge Base 2.0 - An introduction

With Helpdesk Pilot 4.4.0, we have also released a new version of the Knowledge Base plugin, version 2.0. The new knowledge base has a host of new features, improvements from the older version making it more useful and adept at handling the requirements of a typical customer support software. Here is an introductory look.

The backbone of the Knowledge Base plugin consists of Categories and Articles. Once you have the plugin installed, you can create various categories or areas under which you plan to put up articles in the Knowledge Base. These categories are associated with departments in your helpdesk installation. This is essential to allow articles under specific categories to be shown in the ticket detail page to help staff members reply to tickets. You can also have any number of sub categories. By default all the sub categories will belong to the same departments as the parent category.

Once you have setup the categories, you can add articles under them. An article is identified by a label and has to belong to a category. Articles can carry one or many attachments. These attachments are stored in the /plugins/knowledgebase/attachments directory. This directory should have 777 permissions (read-write permissions for all). Articles added to the knowledge base will then be visible to customers/staff.

With this new version of the Knowledge Base plugin, you can now have External and Internal Categories. External categories(and its articles) are those which will be visible to all customers, while Internal categories(and its articles) will be available only to staff members. This division of content in the Knowledge Base extends the functionality of the plugin and now lets Helpdesk administrators maintain content relevant to both the staff and customers. By default a category once added as an External category cannot be edited and changed to an Internal Category later. More on this in the Editing Categories Section (Section 5) below.

The Internal Knowledge base is accessible from within the Staff panel making it easy for staff members to access the information quickly and easily. Staff members can browse to Knowledge Base >> Internal Knowledge Base to see all the internal articles alone. The search functionality here will also lookup content only among the internal articles.

The External Knowledge Base is accessible at all times by clicking on the KB link in the top right corner in the Admin/Staff panel. This shows only the external articles and this is the same interface that your customers will also be viewing.

Once articles have been completed, they need to be 'Published' to the Knowledge Base (Internal/External). If an article is half done or is pending approval, it can maintained in Draft mode. All Draft articles will be indicated by 'Draft' (in green) beside the article title. This can be edited once the article has been completed or approved.

Editing a category - You can change the Name of the category or the departments it belongs to. If the departments to which a category belongs is edited, all the sub categories (if present) will also now be a part of the same department.

Deleting a category will delete all its sub categories. Deleting a sub category will delete that category alone.

A category type cannot be edited once it has been added. That is, an external category cannot be edited into an Internal category.

The article name, category to which it belongs - can both be edited.

All articles in both internal and external knowledge base can be searched for through the view pages for each.

The new version of Knowledge Base, version 2.0 also has a new feature that makes it possible to add Customer Group specific articles. This feature works along with the Customer Group plugin for Helpdesk Pilot. When an article is chosen to belong to an external category, you can also choose if you want to make this article available to all customers or only certain customers that belong to a group. If the latter is chosen, the articles will be available only to those customers once they login and view the Knowledge Base from the customer panel.