Overview
Articles and documents contain several features that are intended to create a connection between a customer problem (described in the ticket) and a solution or information (described in the article or document). So what's the difference between each option?
- Owner Organization is an attribute of documents only. Organization is a required field, and it ties the information in the document to a specific organization. For a more in-depth discussion about the differences between articles and documents, refer to Introduction to Knowledge Base and Documentation Management.
- Publish To is an attribute of articles and documents. It indicates who can view the content.
- Tags are about the classification of content, both on tickets, and articles and documents. They set up criteria for later searches. Refer to What are tags?.
- Relations (Related Items, Related To) are about relevance of content to specific tickets, organizations, and devices. They can also tie articles and documents to similar ones.
Best Practices
Use documents for confidential or organization-specific information
The first decision you have to make is whether to create an article or a document. If the content is about a specific organization, especially if it is confidential in nature, make it a document. Documents cannot be associated with an entire territory or classification of organizations. A document is intended to contain information about a specific organization.
In Document View mode, the owner organization name is listed right behind the Document Category badge.
EXAMPLE A Service Level Agreement for a specific organization.
Use articles for solutions to tickets that are of general interest
Articles are about a problem or a device. If the content is of interest to a wider audience and does not contain any confidential or organization-specific information, create a Knowledge Base article. The more people can read it, the better.
If the View Potential Solutions button is enabled on a ticket, articles that share a tag with the ticket will appear on a Suggested Solutions table, and users can vote if an article contained the solution for a problem. If the button is disabled, there are no potential matches.
Use tags to classify the content of a ticket, article, or document
Tags are all about creating metadata content to establish criteria for later searches. You can manually apply them to all three entities. On tickets, you have additional options:
- Tickets can be tagged automatically. You can enable system settings that automatically apply tags to tickets created in the Client Portal or from incoming email, based on the Title and Description fields. Refer to Service Desk system settings.
- On the Ticket page, you can click Suggest Tags, and Autotask will bring up a list of suggested tags you can apply. Refer to Suggest Tags.
- For tickets generated from Datto BCDR alerts, Autotask is not only able to tag those tickets, but also immediately associate articles that might resolve the issues. Refer to Intelligent tagging for Datto BCDR.
Once tags are applied, you can use them for targeted searches. Refer to Searching the knowledge base by tag. Additionally, tags are useful for reporting on issues at a much more granular basis than was previously possible.
EXAMPLE If you wanted to track how many calls a month you received for paper jam code pj8136, you could apply a tag with that code to every applicable case. Then, by running a report or building a widget that searches for tickets with that tag, you can see case volume at a glance, along with aggregated details about the outcomes of each service call.
Use relations to tie validated solutions to tickets
Relations are about relevance. If an article or document contains the solution to a problem or the answer to a question, you can create a permanent relationship between the content item on the one hand and the ticket on the other. Refer to Related Items.
When you click View Potential Solutions or Add a Solution on a ticket, you are also able to vote if an article contained the solution to the ticket. A banner at the top of the article will let you know how many tickets the article has helped solve.
