Best Practices for Service Catalog Items and Knowledge

[Mike Van Vooren]

We are looking to see if there is a better way to associate items in our Service Catalog and support information related to them.  Right now, we have a specific Catalog Item that has a small detailed summary at the top with a "How-to article" button.  That button links to a Knowledge Article that may have additional helpful information, more details around the process surrounding that specific item, or additional clarifying details about how to complete the request. 

When our search works well, users will often see both the Request Item itself and the knowledge article right below it.  We believe this is creating a bit of confusion, especially for the more straight-forward requests where the article should be more of a supporting role and not drawing clicks away from the item itself.

We are wondering if there is a better way to provide all those extra details that the article has without the article itself.  Are there any OOB features within the Catalog space that could be used for these process details, supporting information, or information about how to complete the request?

[Dave Littlejohn]

We leverage the "Related Articles" related list on the catalog item to show kb articles via an OOB widget on the Employee Center portal.

[Mike Van Vooren]

Thank you Dave.  We considered using the "Related Article" awhile back for this purpose.  But instead, we configured it to use Predictive Intelligence to auto populate that widget with articles.  That way, we didn't have the manual overhead of keeping those lists updated.

[James Chun]

Hi @Mike Van Vooren,

I am guessing that these Knowledge Articles and Catalog Items have similar or the same short descriptions or keywords.

I think you can do one of the following:

• Add a link to the corresponding Catalog Item in the Knowledge Article. So when a user selects a KA from the search result, there is always that option to navigate to the Catalog Item.
• Exclude the Knowledge Article from the portal search source. For example, you can store all these 'how to articles' in a separate Knowledge Base and exclude it from the search source. These won't be accessible via the search results but only be visible within the Catalog Items.

Hope it helps, cheers

[Mike Van Vooren]

Thank you James.  We definetely include a link to the Catalog Item from the article, but maybe we can include it higher up for quicker reference.  And yes, the Short Description of the article is often the same or similar to the name of the Catalog item.

I can suggest the idea of the separate knowledge base.  I have long wanted that design where "process" articles were available to search from Incidents but not allow the agents to attach.  We could do something similar with this.  Our current KB design does not allow this to be done easily, but we might be able to do it down the road.

Thank you!