Overview

The Articles system area can be used to record useful knowledge-base articles that can be referenced by Users through the main application and, if published, by Callers through the self-service portal. 

Articles can be associated with Ticket Categories so that when a Ticket is correctly Categorized then the relevant Articles appear in a Suggested Articles tab in the Ticket details.

Articles should be categorized to better group similar Articles together. Please note: Articles can be linked to Assets and associated to Clients. The link between Articles and Clients can be used to control what Articles a Caller can see in the self-service portal, e.g. the Caller is only able to read those Articles that are linked to the Client that the Caller belongs to.

Articles provide the knowledge base library for your Vivantio and can be created by different methods. A user can create an article on ticket close based on the solution; or articles can be created in the Articles area using the New button. Text can be typed or copied and pasted into the article and images easily uploaded. When uploading an image and specifying a size, the image is not automatically resized and compressed; it will still be uploaded at native size but will have HTML attributes applied to resize it for display. Users should take care to use image files of an appropriate size for web display.

Giving an article, an Article type, assists users when searching for Knowledge Base articles. The Article Type is one criteria that users can enter when searching the Knowledge Base. All articles have a category as well as a type. The software will use the category to match articles to calls and then suggest which articles may be most helpful. If you use the Knowledge Base a lot and store many articles, the software may return a lot of suggestions.

The article type is another way of reducing the number of matching articles so that you can find exactly the right one. For example, if you store user guides in the knowledge base you may want to search for all user guides relating to a particular product. To do this you would configure an Article Type of “User Guide” and list each of your products as a separate category (see categories and sub-categories below).

Other article types could be Frequently Asked Questions (which would be answers to common customer questions), Technical (detailed documents which your technical staff would use to resolve a problem), Policies and Procedures (to ensure that Service Desk staff apply standard procedures).

When adding or editing an Article, an option is provided to specify a series of comma separated keywords, along with a lookup to allow selection from existing keywords to ensure consistency and to improve the quality of the search results. When adding Articles, specify relevant keywords; these are then utilized when searching Articles from within both the main application and the Self Service Portal.

Navigate to the Admin Area > System Areas > Article > Configuration

Guidance