Searching and managing Knowledge Base articles

SECURITY  All security levels that have Can access Knowledge Base in the Knowledge Base & Documents section of their security level enabled

NAVIGATION  Quick Search > select Knowledge Base

NAVIGATION   > Home menu > Search > Knowledge Base Articles

NAVIGATION   > Service Desk menu > Search > Knowledge Base Articles

NAVIGATION  Ticket page > Knowledge Base > Search Knowledge Base

About the Knowledge Base search page

On the Knowledge Base search page, two tabs are shown:

  • Search (default): On this tab, a limited number of filters appear. However, a Match filter lets you specify if you want to perform a partial or a full match search, and you have the option to sort the search results.
  • Advanced Search: On this tab, additional filters are available. If the Documentation Management feature is enabled, you can also specify that you want to include documents created in the Documentation Manager, not only Knowledge Base articles, in the search results.

On both tabs, you can choose to include articles that were created in Taskfire.

If you access the Knowledge Base Search page from most Autotask pages, the Search and Results areas are empty. You must click Search, with or without specifying search criteria, to return results. If you access the Knowledge Base search from the Ticket page, a search is automatically executed and returns results that are specific to the ticket.

  • To display a list of all records of a given entity in your Autotask instance, click Search without applying any filters.

Search results containing more than 25, 50, or 100 records (depending on your Records per page setting) are paginated. Use page navigation to view additional results. At most, 5,000 data record will be retrieved at any one time.

The Active filter defaults to Active on the Organization Your Autotask instance may be configured to use one of the following terms instead: Account, Business Unit, Client Company, Customer, Site. Search, Contact Search, My Organizations, and My Contacts pages, as well as on the global Search by Organization, Contact (First Name), Contact (Last Name), and Contact (Email). The counters in the My menu also reflect only active entities.

NOTE  There are several options for phone number filters. The Phone filter will look for a contains match that includes any characters (such as - or () ) entered in the filter box. The Organization Search and Contact Search pages have a Phone (numbers only) option that will ignore special characters in the filter and the results. It will do a contains search for just the numbers entered in the filter box. The Contact Search page also allows you to do a Phone (Starts With) search. It will search for phone numbers that start with the value entered in the filter box.

The following uncommon filters appear on the search tabs:

Filter option Description
Match (on the Search tab only)

Any Term (OR): Select this option to return all articles that contain any of the search terms.

All Terms (AND): Select this option to return only articles that contain all of the search terms. In the content, the terms do not have to be adjacent or in the order they appear in the search field.

Include articles created in Taskfire Select this check box to include content created by Taskfire users.

Include IT Glue results

(on the Advanced Search tab only)

This check box will appear if your administrator has enabled the IT Glue integration. Select this check box to include documents saved in IT Glue with the search results. Refer to Integration with IT Glue.

For definitions of other filter fields, refer to Adding and editing Knowledge Base articles.

The following tool buttons appear above the results list:

Tool Button Description

Many Search pages (but not the widget drill-down tables) allow you to create a new instance of the selected entity. This button is visible before you execute a search:

  • Click New.
  • Contract, Ticket, and Project entities allow you to create several different entity types. Click New and select an option.

For help with populating the fields, refer to the context-sensitive Help of the page that opens.

The Column Chooser allows you to customize search results tables throughout Autotask. It determines the following:

  • Which columns are displayed on the table
  • The left-to-right display order of the columns

NOTE   Column Chooser settings on search results tables and some standard reports are part of the user settings stored on the Autotask server. You can log in from any computer and have your column chooser settings applied to your Autotask session. To clear the data stored in your Autotask instance and reset the column chooser settings to the Autotask default settings, click Reset Settings in My >  Miscellaneous > Settings.

To customize the table, do the following:

  1. Click the column chooser icon above the search results. The Column Chooser page opens.

Columns appear either in the Available Columns or the Selected Columns panel.

  1. Double-click a column name or select one or multiple columns and click the left or right arrow to move columns to the other panel.
  2. To change the display order of the columns, select one or multiple columns in the Selected Columns panel and click the up or down arrows.

NOTE  Top-to-bottom order in the Selected Columns list becomes left-to-right order on the Search Results list.

  1. Click Save & Close.

NOTE  If the characters + # appear after the column name, then that column may have multiple items returned for some rows. If that occurs, the first item will appear in the row followed by + and the number of additional items returned. To display the list of additional items, hover over the item in the column.

Click the refresh icon to execute the search on the current table again, using the same search criteria to find new records that were added since you first performed the search.

This button appears on the Knowledge Base Search tab, but not the Advanced Search tab. The following options are available:

  • Relevance (default): The search engine determines relevance by a point system and calculates it as follows:
A match on... ...counts as this many points for each match

Article ID

20

Tag

15

Ticket number (searching related tickets)

10

Error code

10

Keyword

10

Article title

5

Article body

1

Relevance is the sum of all points for the content. If there is a tie, results are sorted next by Last Modified Date (descending), then by Title (ascending).

  • Created: Results are sorted by Date Created (descending).If there is a tie, results are sorted next by Last Modified Date (descending), then by Title (ascending).
  • Edited: Results are sorted by Last Modified Date, descending. If there is a tie, results are sorted next by Title (ascending).
  • Title: Results are sorted by Title (ascending).

Manage Knowledge Base

Opens the Manage Knowledge Base page. Refer to Knowledge Base administration.
Menu Option Description

View

Article Detail

Opens the selected article in View mode. Refer to Viewing articles and documents.

Article Version History

Opens the Version History page. Refer to Managing article and document versions.

This option is disabled if the item Content field contains legacy HTML content. Refer to Updating legacy HTML formatting in the Content field.

Article History

Opens the Article History page in a new window. The History table functions like other entity history tables. Refer to Entity History.

Actions

Edit Article

Opens the selected article in Edit mode. Permission to add Knowledge Base articles is required. Refer to Adding and editing Knowledge Base articles.

Copy

You can copy an existing article and use it as a template for a new article. The copied article is opened in New mode. Permission to add Knowledge Base articles is required. Refer to Adding and editing Knowledge Base articles.

Delete

Opens the deletion confirmation dialog box. Click OK to delete the article. Permission to delete Knowledge Base articles is required.

Global articles cannot be deleted. Refer to About global knowledge base articles.

Copy to Clipboard

Article ID & Title

Copies the Article ID and Title to your clipboard.

Article URL (Link)

Copies the link to view the article to your clipboard.