16. Knowledge Data Categories
You’ll notice under the knowledge selections and set up are these entries for data categories and those would be data category mappings and assignments. Now, before we can set these up for knowledge, we need to create data categories. Now if we search for data category we will see those same two designations or menu items for knowledge, data category assignments and mappings. But you’ll also see data category setup and then default data category visibility.
So the idea here is that we need to do the data category set up, then we can do assignments and mappings. Now to further make things complex is that it appears that these are being used interchangeably. As far as the naming of this goes, this is data category, but there’s also if we click on Data category set up, these are also referred to as category groups and these are hierarchies of data categories.
And so for example, a category group named Location might contain a geographical hierarchy of continents, countries, regions and states. Use this page to manage category groups and the categories that they contain now as well, another thing to note is that there’s keyboard shortcuts available on this page. Let me click on that and that opens a new window with a legend for the different keyboard shortcuts and what’s supported. And you won’t be tested on this, but in case you want to set up categories and not use your mouse but use keyboard shortcuts instead, this particular page does support that. So there are certain areas of salesforce that do support keyboard shortcuts.
The other thing to reference is the help for this page and I’ll link to both keyboard shortcuts and this help article. And another thing to note is that these data categories, not only do they apply to salesforce knowledge, it also applies to ideas, answers and chatter answers. But they don’t say knowledge here in the headline, they refer to it as articles.
So oftentimes you’ll also see knowledge referred to as knowledge articles or just strictly articles. So let’s get back into our data category set up and let’s create a group and we’ll just follow the example here of Location. I’m just going to copy this here and paste this in the description and click Save. And so how this works is you create the category groups along the left and then there’s the categories in that group. And this does indeed create a hierarchy. They mentioned before that these groups are hierarchies of data categories.
And so you see the nesting here. Under all there will be individual categories. So we could then just follow this example here and let’s say that we have continents and you can press the inner key to quickly add a category. And then as well you can press the tab key to indent or demote this category as a child. And it would be shift tab to promote the category up a level. But I want to just hit tab and that indents this further. This is like the nesting nature of a hierarchy here. And then underneath continents would be countries. And then we’ll hit enter to do another category and then we’ll tab. The next is regions. We’ll hit enter and then tab and then states.
So that’s kind of cool. And then we could go even further if we wanted to go crazy with this. I don’t think I can go any deeper in the nesting that I’m trying to tab. And that’s all she wrote. So it looks like about four or five levels. So we’ll just say provinces that will be at the same level as states and let’s just cancel out of this. So we’ve created data categories now, and we’ve got one category group called Location. And then under the Location category group are the categories and subcategories of continents, countries, regions, and then other regions of states and provinces.
So you could continue on, but at this point, let’s next do what’s specific to knowledge since we’re still working in knowledge and let’s look at now data category assignments. But before we do that, we need to make this an active category group. So clicking this flashlight looking icon makes it active. And what I failed to do, I didn’t save my work, unfortunately. So let me recreate that. So what I need to do is add a child category and I’ll recreate that. And I may have it a little different here, but just going off the memory, the main point here is I’m wanting to have a hierarchy of categories here inside of this category group. So the all important Save button at the end of this, let’s click Save.
And so now we’ve got the ability to expand all and see our categories in the category group known as Location and it is active. So now let’s look at default data category visibility. And there’s no visibility that’s been set, so let’s click Edit. And so you can select other than none, which is what is selected currently. We could select all categories or Custom. And if you select custom, then you can then designate which specific categories you want to set visibility on. Now it just defaults to all. So let’s just select all categories and click Save. I want to be sure that we’ve made that visible. And now if we go into data category assignments in the category group, the one that we’ve created is called Location.
Let’s click Edit and it’s here that you can select which of these category groups can be used for salesforce knowledge. Now we’ve only created the one and it is selected and available for knowledge. I’ll go ahead and click Save here and let’s look at finally data category mappings. All right, so what you accomplish with doing data category mapping for knowledge is this has to do with filtering knowledge articles once they’re written, which will write some knowledge articles in the next lesson.
But setting up the data category mapping is important because you can automatically filter and cause certain articles to rise more to the top based on what the case is about. And the way that that’s done is by mapping various case fields and assigning those to a data category group for my location data category group and then the data categories under that. I’ve got geographic type of data categories here. Now for a good example, it would be nice if there was some sort of geographic location here for the case field that I can select. But that’s not one of the options for the mapping. Now I may want to map to a field based on, for example, product, but then it would be nice if I had a product category group. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go into data category setup and let’s make a better example so this makes a little more sense.
We’ve got the category group of location which is active. Let’s create a new category group called Product. I’ve entered a description and I mentioned this is a category group for product related records such as cases. And remember, data categories can be used for more than just cases. But I’m just using this as an example. So I’m going to click Save to create the category group. And now I need to create the categories in the Product category group. And so a couple of different examples of types of products that we may want to do some category mapping for. One would be generators, that’s kind of the default product family that’s in the products inside your free salesforce account. And then as well we could do lawn darts just to have a different type of product and that’s one that we’ve set up previously. And these will not be one, won’t be a child of the other.
So we’ll just give them at the same level. And so now we will click Save. And I actually only got generators but not the other. I thought it would save with lawn darts here, but it did not. So let me add a child, not a child but a sibling, category sibling would be at the same level and let’s say lawn darts again. And you got to click Add and have this blank line down below and then click Save. I misspelled Londarts. Awesome. So now I’ll show you how to edit that and then as well here’s the API name, I’m going to correct that as well and click Update.
So now that we’re done, we need to be sure we click Save. And so now we’ve got an inactive category group for product and you can click this icon here to activate it as well. And so now we’ve got two category groups for one for location and one for product. Now let’s go back to data category mappings and now we will map the case field for product and we will assign category group of product. And so you can also specify a default data category inside of whichever category group you select.
So if there is a product listed in the case field for products, then you could have that surface any articles, knowledge articles that belong long to the data category group of product. And then as well, you could set the default data category for generator related articles or laundart related articles or just all. So I’m going to select all and click Add in order to save that. And then we’re going to go ahead and stop there. And so next it’s time to create knowledge article.
17. Creating Knowledge Articles, Assigning Data Categories and Publishing Articles
A knowledge article and to do that you need to access knowledge. You can do that from inside the App launcher and select all items and select Knowledge there. Or you can go in from the service console and you should have available to you as one of the selectable items from the drop down here as Knowledge is one of the selections and if you don’t you just click Edit and add it there. But we’re going to select Knowledge page and the list view shows recently viewed, but we can show archive, draft and published articles. Now you can create a draft of a knowledge article and then once you’re ready for it to go live and accessible to service agents, then you can publish that article. You can also assign articles to others to review or to approve for example. But let’s create a new knowledge article by clicking New because there’s no knowledge articles in our right now.
And here’s where the record type comes into play on the knowledge article. And we previously created knowledge record types and we can create a knowledge article for software hardware. As far as the record type, let’s just do Software and click Next. And then we see here that we have a title and a URL name for our knowledge article fields that are available. But what we want to do is we want to look at editing this page layout to add some additional fields. So to do so, I’m going to click the Gear icon and we’ll go to Edit Object to get to the Object Manager for the knowledge object and then we’ll go to page layouts much like we would for any other object. And there is only one page layout regardless of the article type based on record type. If you look at page layout assignment we’ve got the two record types for hardware and software but they’re all assigned the same knowledge layout.
And then as well Master is if you don’t have a record type assigned to your profile then you would have just the Master record type but it’s still the same page layout. So I’m just going to click on any one of these links to go to the knowledge layout page layout and we’ll see here all of two fields here for title and URL name. Now we may want to add a lot of additional fields such as article created date for example. Let me make this a two column layout as well. I tend to be a two column type of person. Let’s go ahead and do article number created by create a date. Let’s go ahead and include publication status. We can do versioning as well, version number and then there’s a lot of visibility options. So what we could do is we had to add a section actually for visibility on these knowledge articles so we could drag down a new section here called this Visibility.
Make this two column as well click OK and then I’m going to drag all the visibility related fields down into the visibility section and then we’ll reorder those as well. So let me do this, let me give a summary field and let’s stop there at this point. Well, let’s see, I want to signify more of what’s possible with knowledge articles. We see some assignments here. Let’s do a section for assignments as well. I just thought I was about done. I was kidding. It’s what my daughter says. She’s four, by the way, at the time of this recording. It’s like oh, I’m just kidding. All right, so shift click to grab these, drag them down to the assignment related area. A few other things that I want to look at. Let’s look at related lists to see what we have here. We can have related lists for cases, files or promoted search terms, and then as well, approval history. I’m going to go ahead and drag all these down here for related lists in this way.
For example, in the cases related list, anywhere that this knowledge article has been associated in a case or referred and saved to, then the cases that has occurred will appear here in the related list. If there’s any files that you want to add to the knowledge article, you could do that through files and then promoted search terms and then mobile and lightning actions. You have a lot of options here, but in order to drag these, we need to override the predefined actions in order to make these available in Lighting experience, I’m going to click override and then I can drag down the mobile and lightning actions. So you can archive knowledge articles.
You don’t want to delete articles necessarily, but you could archive them so that agents can still access them if they were used in an old case. But you don’t want them pulling up as a knowledge article for new cases. For example, let’s add Printable View as a button option, submit for approval, edit so is a good option. You could assign this to someone else through the assign button and you may want the ability to change the record type and you may want to give people the ability to delete a knowledge article. So let’s click save and click yes. And then what you could do from here is you could clone this or create a version of this so that you have two different page layouts, one for hardware and one for software. But let’s just keep the one page layout for now. Now if we go back to our new knowledge article and let’s reload this, we see our new page layout.
Well, it kind of got confused. Let me go back to the new knowledge tab. It popped over to a different tab here. So you see that there’s a few different fields that are available now, and some of these are read only fields, such as the created date, the article number created by creative date and it defaults to Status of Draft. So more of these will come alive once we click Save. And so the URL name this is important designation is that this is not an actual URL of an external resource or anything like that. I tabbed out of the title field and it filled in the URL name with the dash for space. And this will be the URL at the end of your salesforce instance.
And you can change this. You can change the URL. I’ll show you what this looks like here. In a minute you can enter a summary. I’m just giving you an example here. For sake of time. I’ve just entered in some just generic information here. But let me click save. And so now you see a lot of these fields of filled in such as article number created by and Date. And then you see some of the buttons here that we selected in the page layout such as Edit, Assign, Change, Record, Type, Submit for Approval and Delete. Now here is where the data categories come in and we can assign this Knowledge article to a data category. So we could click the down arrow and select Edit. And this is having to do with router installation. That sounds like a product oriented data category. And so I’m just going to select that and click Save. And so this Knowledge article belongs to the data category of product. So if we’ve got a case that has product filled in, then this would be filtered and this would fall into one of the suggested articles then based on the fact that there’s a product filled in. For example, now you’ve got your related lists here for cases, files, Approval, history and Promoted search terms. And then you’ve got your versions here. We’ve got this in Draft mode.
All right, so I want to go ahead and publish this Knowledge article. And it looks like that I forgot to add that button to my page layout. So what we can do is we can click on the Gear icon. And now that we have a Knowledge article in addition to Edit object, we now can select the Edit page from the Gear icon. So I select edit page. That takes us to the Lightning app builder. And then in the details, we can click anywhere in the details. This refreshes and brings up the link to the Knowledge layout for the page layout that we’re viewing. And then we can go into that page layout once again and go to Mobile and Lighting Actions. And here’s the Publish button that I forgot. Let me click and drag that down and need to drag it down into the Mobile and Lightning experience section here and click Save. And so now if we go back to our other tab where we had our Lightning App Builder, let me just click on Back and select Leave. I’m not saving the Lightning page.
And so now we have the publish button here. So let me go ahead and click on that. And another thing to note as you publish knowledge articles, which is the title of this one, was Router Installation. You see it here as well is you can either publish immediately or you can schedule the publication on a certain date and time. But I’m going to publish this now and click Publish. The reason I want to do that is I want to show you what that looks like then. All right, so now we see that the publication status is published and it gives Is the version number of one. And right now it’s only visible in the internal application of salesforce. But we could make this visible in a public knowledge base. We could make this visible to customers and partners in various communities as well, if we so desired. But what I want to do next is I want to show you how you can surface these articles inside of cases.
