Finding Known Errors

[Erich Zirnhelt]

I mentioned in a blog post earlier this week that we have a simple goal: make our knowledge as available to you as possible, as soon as possible, before you need it.

Actions we have taken to address our goal:

• We've improved authoring and validation workflows to remove some of the obstacles that previously delayed publishing new content.
• We've   added a community component by allowing you, as community members, to report product issues within the product areas. This gives you an opportunity to see how many of your peers are affected by the same issue and who may have solution of their own to offer. In turn, this helps us determine issue impact and prioritize content to drive through the publishing workflow.

Finding Known Errors

Today I wanted to highlight the ways in which we've been making known errors easier to find.

1. Publicly accessible articles = Google indexing (and Bing too!)
   • A while back, I shared that we'd been massaging our content, particularly the hidden metadata, to facilitate Google's indexing.   This is as much true for our known error articles as it is for the traditional knowledge base articles.
   • Bonus tip - we also set up an RSS feed to prompt Google to index the most recently updated content. This gets set up as a sitemap in the Webmaster control panel.
2. Searching in HI
   • With our recent upgrade to KM v3 (available in the Fuji release), we chose to separate the known errors from the other support and troubleshooting content. This separation allowed us to simplify the way we controlled the publishing workflow and the read/write access controls. It also means that known errors are far easier to isolate and browse.
   • You can start here.
3. Searching in the Community
   • Our community platform has a great feature where, after entering the text of a question you plan to ask, we float up relevant matches.   We enriched those results by having the community search engine index known errors, giving you a chance to see if we've already recorded the issue before you spend any effort cataloging it.
   • Here's a sample query of a community search.
   • If there's no known error, there might be a community-reported product issue...

Basically, wherever you choose to do most of your diagnostic research, you should have easy access to the hundreds of Known Error articles we've published so far.

Up next...

In my next posts, I'll share how you can interact with our Known Errors, and how we are managing the relationships between community-reported product issues, problems in HI, and known error articles.

• Leveraging Known Errors in HI and Product Issues in the Community
• Known Errors: Behind the Scenes