In an effort to get you the information you need before you need it, we've started promoting high-impact content from our various sources (product documentation, this community, knowledge base) through a variety of channels (blog posts, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus).
Sharing KB articles has been warmly received, except that we were only allowing signed in HI users to see them. Last week we changed that. (If you want to take your knowledge base public, this page is a great place to start.)
In order to enable unauthenticated access to our articles, we needed to take several steps:
- Create a new Audience: Public
- We had already customized our access control so the authors simply have to pick the intended audience from a list of values: Internal, Partner, Customer. To this list we added Public.
- Update the user interface for users when they are not logged in
- We did not want our users to arrive on an article and have no path out of it, so we added a Login button. HI users can then log in and access the other HI functionality. (You may have also noticed that the search box we show at the top of every KB article is missing - we will be bring that in for unauthenticated users soon.)
- Manually switch selected articles to Audience = Public
- Our content team has been focusing their efforts to make the majority of our customer-visible articles public in the coming weeks.
- Update our documentation
(There were other steps taken to enable web crawling, but I'll share those in a later post.)
We've already noticed an increase in article views, so this is proving to be a welcome change. As much as possible, our future sharing efforts will refer to publicly accessible articles.
