service portal and knowledge search

[Christine A1]

I see that a knowledge base must be selected to have any articles available for view/search. Once I selected a v3 knowledge base, the articles became available. I have the IT kb associated now to the ootb service portal.

My knowedge base set up is as follows:

• 1 v2 kb called Knowledge which is ootb. I created two more (IT ,TEST).
• 6 articles in the IT kb that i can search on in category 'General'.
• majority of my articles still sitting in the Knowledge kb and most of them in the category 'General' as well. 

When viewing the articles, i can see all articles across kb that reside in the 'General' category.

However when searching, I can only have a successful search from the IT kb which is defined on the service portal definition page.

I am confused with the implementation approach with respect to  bringing up additional kb's and service portals and would like to know best practices with regards to visibility vs search vs category naming etc.

For ex. what is the point of naming a specific kb when ootb you display cross kb articles.

If we are looking to bring other groups up as itil users in snc, do they have to have their own service portal or can they just have their own catalog that groups all of their specialized record producers.

if users are unable to search kb's that arent associated to the service portal by definition, i see it as a problem to manage this by roles. need guidance here as well.

 I read the definition for the Knowledge Base field on the service portal create form:

Name of the knowledge base you want associated with the portal. The knowledge base you select here determines what information appears for the knowledge base page. For example, if you select IT, only the article categories defined for the IT knowledge base appear in the KB categories widget.

--- this is not what i see happening.

[Christine A1]

I learned from customer support that in Jakarta, there is a 1:1 knowledge to category naming convention. In Istanbul it doesnt look like that is the case. Looks like an upgrade is in our near future.

[Rahul Jain11]

This functionality is available from Helsinki as well, where you can define the categories separately for each knowledge-base.

In Helsinki new field "kb_category" has been added referencing to "kb_category" table. This new table consists the categories related to knowledge-base along with the hierarchy you define between these categories.

[Rahul Jain11]

Hi Christine,

In my understanding you have issue with search the articles from different KBs not linked with the service portal.

To fix this, you could define the search sources within your portal for the "kb_knowledge" table with filter to show only the "published" articles. You can create multiple search sources for same or different tables to show the results based on the filter criteria set.

The above part solve your issue related to the search of the articles.

To visibility or accessibility of the articles, servicenow gives two different ways to handle that and depends on teh version you are.

a. Based on Roles: This controls the accessibility of an article based on the role assigned to the article. If user have that role then he/she can see that article in the search results else not.

b. User Criteria(works with v3): User criteria helps more to control the accessibility of the articles to the user based on their profile attributes rather then role based. You could define the user criteria at knowledge base level as well as article level. You can try the following links to read more:

user criteria for a knowledge base (available from Helsinki version)

User Criteria for an article (available from Istanbul version)

Thanks,

[Christine A1]

thanks. by default it is showing published. I have also review the search source. Searching is as expected.

However the default view when selecting the ootb Knowledge widget from landing page in Istanbul is showing all articles from categories that have the same naming convention across kb's. I was expecting to see only articles from the kb referenced in the service portal configuration.

thus the problem with having category names duplicated across kb's.