Using the Knowledgebase to share resources the way you want

From Cerberus Helpdesk Wiki

If you’ve been using Cerb4 for a while, you know there’s more to it than just sharing e-mail responsibilities -- the software prides itself on being a suite of collaboration tools. And while most of these features are fairly self-explanatory, like the tasks system and the feedback plugin, one of the more complex tools to grasp is the Knowledgebase. Compared to everything else, the Knowledgebase requires a bit more understanding to use it to its full potential.

At its core, the KB is a collection of informative articles your workers create inside the Helpdesk, as a way to keep “documentation” relevant to your organization available for reference. When used properly, it can serve as a collaborative resource for both your workers and your clients to search through when they need to find information. You might think of it as a FAQ of sorts.

[edit] Knowledgebase Vs. Fetch & Retrieve

If you’re familiar with the Fetch & Retrieve tool, the Knowledgebase will sound very familiar, almost too similar perhaps. Both serve the same general purpose as an information resource and both are used for retrieving documentation collected and updated by your organization. But that’s where the similarities end; it’s the few differences that makes the KB valuable in its own right, and worth using in addition to F&R.

• Unlike F&R which “taps” into existing outside resources such as blogs, wikis and forums, the KB is a single resource created and maintained internally within the Helpdesk. All of your workers can edit and develop new KB articles, so if you don’t want workers making changes to your external F&R resources, you can let them generate content for the KB instead.

• All or portions of the KB can be opened to the public at large. With the public KB in place, your customers can go to a single search portal and find any relevant information without bothering your staff with e-mails. By locking out portions of the KB users can only see the information you want them to see. At the same time, workers can maintain a “private” section of the KB for your organization’s own internal use.

With those details out of the way, getting the KB production-ready requires two stages of configuration corresponding to the two use cases just mentioned. The first half consists of creating your KB articles and prepping it for your workers to use within the Helpdesk. The second half is directed at deploying your KB to a public directory, where clients can access it outside of the Helpdesk.

[edit] Creating Internal KB Topics

Before starting you may need to enable the 'Knowledgebase' and 'Usermeet Communities'. Click 'helpdesk setup', 'Features & Plugins', and turn on both.

The Knowledgebase lets you create articles for your internal team, the Usermeet Communities lets you open it to the public.

So the first thing you have to do before anything else is create your basic categories, to house your KB articles. Categories are loosely structured in a tree-like hierarchy, with a parent having multiple children (I say loosely because the KB can have more than one root). In this case the roots are referred to as top-level Topics, where all other Subcategories spawn from.

You can place articles in more than one topic or subcategory so it can be found from drilling down multiple paths; you can nest multiple subcategories too.

• TOPIC A
  • Subcategory 1
    • Subcategory 1a
      • Article a
  • Subcategory 2
• TOPIC B
  • Article b
  • Subcategory 3
  • Subcategory 4
    • Article c
  • Subcategory 5

To start filling out your content go to the main KB editor, click ‘research’ at the top menu, then the 'Knowledgebase’ tab.

When you create multiple root-level topics in succession, you need to click 'Top' each time to go back to the root BEFORE you add the next topic. Otherwise you'll make subcategories.

Topics and subcategories can be anything you want to help organize your KB articles into logical groupings. I’ve created two generic top-level categories here: Private (internal) and Public (external), to make it clear that one category will be for internal use and the other will be opened to the public. In real life, the “private” category might be the name of the software your workers are training to use, while the “public” category could be the name of a product you sell to your customers.

Any articles outside the tree, go into an Uncategorized Articles area you'll see at the top level. Usually these end up here as a result of deleting the last category housing an article. You can leave these here indefinitely, but remember your customers won't be able to access them until you move the articles to a public topic or category.

Once you create the topics you have a couple of choices; you can either create subcategories or go ahead and begin creating the actual KB articles. Clicking the ‘Add Article’ button will bring up an “editing” window where you can fill in all the details of your new KB article.

Choose a topic or subcategory, click 'Add Article' and fill in the title and content.

Here you create a title, pick which topic or subcategories it belongs to, and write down the content of the article in html or plain text. Once you save, the article will appear in your ‘Articles’ list at the bottom.

At this point the KB has all the key components configured and is ready for use!

[edit] Everyday Use

From the main KB tab your workers can of course browse the KB tree and look up information, but they can also search the KB while they’re answering tickets. As you write your replies you will see a button named ‘Knowledgebase’; click the button, pick a category if you wish, and then start a search. The titles of any relevant articles will appear and clicking one will open a pop-up window with the contents of that article. The feature is designed for you to copy and paste any information you find useful right into your reply.

Search the KB for answers, then copy & paste the contents directly into your e-mail replies.

[edit] Exposing Topics to the public KB

You can use the KB as is for your own internal use OR you could also expand its audience by opening it up to the public. To do this you need to set up a Community Portal Support Center where your users can explore and search the KB through a public-facing web site. Click ‘helpdesk setup’ then the ‘Community Portals’ tab as explained in detail in Deploying a Support Center. Don't be confused by the fact we created a Support Center, newer versions of Cerb4 bundled the standalone KB into a module you can customize as you please.

The KB module is now part of the larger Support Center, but you can disable the other modules to make a standalone KB.

If you want to hide the 'Knowledgebase' link on your public site until your users register and login, first enable the Registration module, second select "Logged in" for the KB module, and finally turn on the "Allow customers to log in" option above it.

Let everyone or only those registered see the KB.

The last step is the most important for actually publishing your KB. Checkmark which internal KB topics you want to make public and save changes. Any articles inside (including those in the subcategories) will be exposed to your users, so be careful you don't release any sensitive information!

Select which topics you want to let your clients see and deploy!

Finally it's time to check out the results! Visit the Knowledgebase URL in your web browser to see what your users will see. You can drill down into the public categories, search for articles, print out any information you need, and subscribe to the most “recent changes” feed.

Through the public portal your clients can browse all the articles in the public topic and its subcategories.

Unless you want to expose more categories to the public, you never need to mess with the KB configuration again. Keep adding new articles to the KB through the internal Helpdesk interface, to extend your resources out to your customers. If you do want to open up more of the KB, simply add more topics from the ‘Community Tools’ tab.

Originally adapted from two blog posts [1] and [2]. Heavily modified to bring it up to speed with 4.3 .