Salesforce Knowledge Developer Guide
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Develop with Salesforce Knowledge
Salesforce Knowledge gives your website visitors, clients, partners, and service agents
the ultimate in support. You can create and manage your company information and securely share it
when and where it is needed. Most features are declarative and let you point-and-click your way to
a successful implementation. However, with the Force.com platform, you can also code your way to
case deflection, happier customers, and more productive support agents.
Articles capture information about your company's products and services that you want to make available in your knowledge base. Articles in the knowledge base can be classified by using one or more data categories to make it easy for users to find the articles they need. Administrators can use data categories to control access to articles.
Articles are based on article types, which rely on:
- Article-type layouts to organize the content in sections.
- Article-type templates to render articles.
- Article Type
- All articles in Salesforce Knowledge are assigned to an article type. An article's type determines the type of content it contains, its appearance, and which users can access it. For example, a simple FAQ article type can have two custom fields, Question and Answer, where article managers enter data when creating or updating FAQ articles. A more complex article type can have dozens of fields organized into several sections. Using layouts and templates, administrators can structure the article type in the most effective way for its particular content. User access to article types is controlled by permissions. For each article type, an administrator can grant “Create,” “Read,” “Edit,” or “Delete” permissions to users. For example, the article manager can allow internal users to read, create, and edit FAQ article types, but let partner users only read FAQs.
- Article-Type Layout
- An article-type layout enables administrators to create sections that organize the fields on an article, as well as choose which fields users can view and edit. One layout is available per article type. Administrators modify the layout from the article-type detail page.
- Article-Type Template
- An article-type template specifies how the sections in the article-type layout are rendered. An article type can have a different template for each of its four channels. For example, if the Customer Portal channel on the FAQ article-type is assigned to the Tab template, the sections in the FAQ's layout appear as tabs when customers view an FAQ article. For the Table of Contents template, the sections defined in the layout appear on a single page (with hyperlinks) when the article is viewed. Salesforce provides two standard article-type templates, Tab and Table of Contents. Custom templates can be created with Visualforce.
- Channel
- A channel refers to the medium by which an article is available. Salesforce Knowledge
offers four channels where you can make articles available.
- Internal App: Salesforce users can access articles in the Articles tab depending on their role visibility.
- Customer: Customers can access articles if the Articles tab is available in a community or Customer Portal. Customer users inherit the role visibility of the manager on the account. In a community, the article is only available to users with Customer Community or Customer Community Plus licenses.
- Partner: Partners can access articles if the Articles tab is available in a community or partner portal. Partner users inherit the role visibility of the manager on the account. In a community, the article is only available to users with Partner Community licenses.
- Public Knowledge Base: Articles can be made available to anonymous users by creating a public knowledge base using the Sample Public Knowledge Base for Salesforce Knowledge app from the AppExchange. Creating a public knowledge base requires Sites and Visualforce.
- Publishing Cycle
- Salesforce Knowledge Articles move through a publishing cycle from their creation to their deletion. The publishing cycle includes three different statuses: Draft is the stage when a new article is being created or an existing one is being updated. Articles with the Online status are draft articles that have been published and are now available to their different channels. Eventually, when a published article is at the end of its life, it can be moved to the Archived status or sent back to Draft to be updated in a subsequent version.