Creating a Knowledge Base Article

Transcript:

In this video, we're going to learn how to create and manage Knowledge Base articles, also known as KB Articles. We'll cover both how to create them in CloudRadial directly and how to pull them in from other sources.

As usual, let's start off with some rationale. Why should you put your KB articles within CloudRadial? Simply put, because a good KB article can show a user how to perform a function or task clearly and concisely. At their best, they can be used to mitigate submissions by offering instructions on how to address issues or follow processes. They're definitely worth investing time into, even if they aren't directly written within CloudRadial. Tying in the KB component to the portal adds extra value and helps improve the client experience by reinforcing your portal, is the one stop shop for their needs. It reinforces that your investing in the play and they should be investing in it too.

Let's take a look at where they are and how they work. Like any type of content, you can either create these articles on the company level as a one off or within the Partner > Content area for quicker and more scalable distribution.

Let's look at how to create one off. Let's head over to Company > Knowledge Base within this one company. If we've push articles out before, we'll see them here.

To add a new one, we need to use the add button at the top right.

Articles are comprise of categories which groups multiple articles together in the background. You can actually see the various folders with articles beneath them. Those are the categories.

The Subject is the title of the article. Name this something clear cut and explanatory to make it easy for clients to identify the article subject matter.

Tags help bundle articles together with common tags shared between them. This can help you index your articles more effectively.

The Author field is a way to put your name to something, which not only helps in humanizing the portal, but also makes it clear what content is owned by you versus the client.

The Publish Date simply controls when the article to say it was published. Note that this will not hide the article until a future date. It's simply a marker of when you want it to be dated.

Most importantly, there's the space to write the article. You can do anything as simple as plain text article or as fancy as embedded videos. We always encourage MSPs to experiment with the editor to discover a style and presentation method that works best for them. There isn't a right way to write an article.

At the top you'll either one or two different options depending on whether you have Hudu, a documentation system integrated in your portal. Besides the editor, you'll have the option to pull in your article from a URL. Doing so will cause CloudRadial to render the article as a PDF when the user submits the request to read the article. This option can take several seconds, so it's only recommended for articles that have to be in the portal and that you don't want them to navigate away to.

If you want to link off a third party documentation, we recommend the following as a best practice, toggle the option on below the article for URL and then toggle the option beneath to open the URL in a new window. This ultimately achieves the same effect we want. People use the port to get their documentation, no matter where it lives.

Lastly, there's an option to pull an article from Hudu. This is something that we covered in the Hudu video as well. In a nutshell, connecting to Hudu allows you to pull the article directly by performing a lookup similar to other integrations with CloudRadial.

Lastly, we have the Other Settings options. You can choose whether to make this article partner managed, meaning that you're locking it to be only modified by people with partner level permissions.

You can also choose to pin the article to the top of the category which will bold, it as well as add it to the front page, which will then make it available directly on the sidebar on the right hand side of any home page.

One final note, when creating articles for specific companies from within that specific company, you'll also have the option to add an attachment. This isn't available in creating KB articles in the Partner > Content area. It's a special function that is just for files created at the company level.

All content created at the company level will have a tab at the top to determine which User Groups can see it. If you need to change it, feel free to do so otherwise by default, all content that you create will be set to be visible to the Everyone group. In this sense, KB articles are no different.

You can also sort and find articles in few different ways. You can use the search bar at the top of the KB section,

or use the categories on the right hand side to find your desired article.

Now that we've seen the overview of the KB articles, let's see how they differ within the Partner and Content area. They're listed as the first content type under Articles.

Selecting anyone of the content packages there, we can either add a new article or edit an existing one to see how it looks. I'll go ahead and add a new one to no surprise you'll see that the options are basically identical to what we just saw, other than the option add attachments and some other options to control the content that can be done at the content package level, like adding a User Group.

If you're wanting to distribute PDF documentation to an Entire company. Stay tuned for an upcoming video on CloudRadial's Quick Start guides. Quick starts are a close relative of KB articles but KB Articles give you more flexibility on how to display information.