Create and define knowledge articles
An effective knowledge management solution is more than just a repository of issues and solutions. It should be easy to navigate, provide clear and concise solutions, have current and relevant information, and be easily accessible across platforms.
As you get ready to build a knowledge repository and define specific knowledge articles in Microsoft Dynamics 365, it's important that you understand the overall vision for the repository. Here are some questions to consider:
- What will the article be used for?
- Who will consume the article?
- What must be included in the article to make it most useful to the people who consume it?
- Is the article related to a specific product?
- Will the article need to be available in multiple languages? If so, which languages?
- Is the article time-sensitive?
This list represents just a few of the things that need to be considered. Each organization will have specific requirements that must be met.
Dynamics 365 provides several options that will help you create and manage articles based on organizational requirements. It features a rich text editor that makes it easy to include items like images and videos in articles. This helps explain things better and make the articles more engaging. Additionally, you can write, edit, search, publish, and translate articles to make them more effective and relevant to your audience.
Article creation
Knowledge Articles are created from within the Customer Service Hub or within the Customer Service workspace. They can be created by anyone with the specific permission to do so. In addition to being able to specify who can create articles, people in an organization can also be designated as article approvers.
Content tab
When an article is first created, you should enter the following information in the Article content section on the Content tab:
- Title: The title communicates the subject and purpose of the article in a concise manner.
- Keywords: Keywords are used to search the knowledge base for articles. Separate the different keywords with commas.
- Description: The description provides a short overview of the article. This text appears in the search results and is used for search engine optimization.
Use AI-suggested article keywords and descriptions
Identifying which keywords and descriptions to use is important but can be difficult at times. One way that can make it easier is to use AI suggested keywords and descriptions.
Important
Administrator must enable this feature before presenting to the users. For more information, see Configure AI suggestions for article keywords and description
Once you save the knowledge article, the View suggested keywords and description link is displayed. When you click this link, you'll be presented with a dialog that includes suggested keywords and a description.
Based on the content analyzed, you'll be presented with multiple keyword suggestions. You individually select the keywords you want, or you can select to insert all the suggested keywords. Keywords are limited to 4000 characters total. You'll be provided with one suggested description. You can edit the description before you apply the suggested changes. Descriptions are limited to 155 characters total.
Important
The model takes the first 2,200 characters to generate suggestions. To get good suggestions, you must describe the problem to be solved within the first 2,200 characters in the articles.
Designing article content
When you design a knowledge article, you must make sure that the content isn't only relevant to the people who will consume it but also easy to consume, so that user can fully ingest all the content that's presented. For example, you can add a link to a video that demonstrates the procedure or process that's presented, links to other relevant content, or embedded HTML to provide more dynamic content. The Dynamics 365 content designer supports these advanced styling features and more.
The content editor is in the Content section. It consists of three tabs:
- Designer: Write and edit the article content. This tab includes enhanced and rich text editing capabilities.
- HTML: View an HTML preview of the article content. You can also write and edit the article on this tab.
- Preview: See how your content will look like on devices like desktop computers, tablets, or mobile devices.
For more about the different capabilities of the content editor, see Create and manage knowledge articles.
Add a file attachment to a knowledge article
When you're creating a knowledge article, you want to attach files to it to help provide comprehensive information for your customers. For example, you have some detailed instructions stored in a Microsoft Word document that you want to use as part of the article. You can add attachments from the Content tab using the Attach files from option.
You can select Files from the following locations:
- My Device: Allows you to select files that are stored on your local device.
- Previous Uploads: Opens a search pane where you can search and select from files that were previously uploaded.
You must save the article before you can attach files to it. While there's no limit to the number of articles you can attach to a knowledge article, the attached file can't exceed 32 MB. Your administrator may limit the file size for knowledge articles.
The Attached files section displays the knowledge article attachments in a tile view horizontally above your message. The default setting for the maximum number of files that can be displayed is five attachments before the page forward functionality is displayed.
For your attached files, use the following commands:
- Select: Allows you to select one or more attachments by clicking the box that appears on the attachments. You can either Remove or Download the selected files.
- Sort: Allows you to sort records by a specific filter, such as file name or size.
When you publish your knowledge article, if you've attached files to it, the attachments can be accessed by knowledge consumers through Knowledge Search.
Summary tab
The Summary tab has lots of other information that's relevant to the knowledge article. Much of this information is updated by the system as changes are made to the article. But you can edit some of it. Here are the two main fields that you might need to update:
- Internal: You can mark the article for internal use only. In this case, people from outside your organization won't be able access the article (for example, from a portal). This setting can be useful for articles that focus more on internal processes that aren't relevant to external users.
- Status Reason: You can specify the status of the article to indicate whether it's proposed, in review, or waiting for review.
Some information on the Summary tab doesn't appear until the article record is saved for the first time. For example, Related information and Timeline are two important panes that become available when the record is first saved.
Timeline: This pane shows all the related activities that are associated with the knowledge article. You can also add activities directly to the record.
Related information: This pane provides access to records that are related to or associated with the knowledge article. You can open the following records by using the buttons along the right edge of this pane:
- Related Versions: This record shows a complete version history of the article. You can view the previous versions of the article, and can even revert to a previous version if you have to.
- Related Translations: This record shows a list of the different translations that are available for the article.
- Related Categories: This record shows the categories that the article is associated with. Categories are used for article location and analytics. They help provide better article organization when articles are used in a portal knowledge base.
- Related Articles: This record shows any articles that are similar to the article or that have been related to it.
- Related Products: This record shows the products that the article is associated with.
For more about creating knowledge articles, see Create a knowledge article.
Other tasks, like creating article translations, working with versions, and setting publishing options, will be covered in later modules.
Knowledge article templates
Organizations are always looking for ways to be more efficient. When it comes to the creation of knowledge articles, organizations might have different formats and layouts that they want to use for different types of articles. For example, you might want information laid out differently when working with procedural articles, vs working with Q&A articles.
In Dynamics 365 Customer Service, knowledge article templates help knowledge authors simplify the process of creating knowledge articles. They also assist knowledge managers and authors maintain consistency in branding, language, and structure. When an author chooses a template to create an article, certain fields in the template are prepopulated with values, allowing the author to focus on the main content of the article.
Knowledge articles templates are created by defining the necessary fields such as Language, Title, Keywords, and Subject. These fields will be prepopulated when the author creates the article using the template, reducing the efforts to fill in these fields.
Knowledge article templates are created in the Customer Service admin center app by selecting Knowledge in the Agent Experience group and going to the Article Templates section. When defining an article template, there are three sections you'll need to provide data for:
Template Data:
Name: Defines the name of the article template.
Owner: Defines who the owner of the template is.
Article Data: Defines article fields such as Title, Keywords, and Subject that are used in any knowledge article that's created based on the template.
Content: Define a structure that will be used in any knowledge article that's created based on this template.
To learn more about creating Knowledge Article Templates, see Create templates for knowledge articles.