Enabling Knowledge Management Advanced - Best Practices or Lesson Learned?

[Elliot Acosta]

Hello all! 

After reviewing and testing the Knowlege Management Advanced plug-in, I am planning to enable it on our instance because I believe my organization will benefit from version control, feedback tasks, and templating. However, I ran into some issues with creating custom templates (article fields aren't appearing in form view, UI policies from standard arent applying to custom), so it got me spooked that there might be other downstream impacts I'm blind to. 

Anyone on this form have some best practices or lesson learned when they enabled the plug-in? Things they wish they realized before turning it on? Anyone decide not to use the plug-in, could you let me now why? 

Thanks for any assistance!

[Riya Verma]

Hi @Elliot Acosta ,

Hope you are doing great.

when an RITM is created the existing workflow is copied into a "Workflow context" on the workflow context table. And we cannot attach a new workflow in existing RITM's.

if you feel you HAVE to use the new workflows what i would probably do is write a fix script that will create a new request for all of the items that are open.. and cancels the existing items out... this WILL result in them having to be re-approved etc and would have to be EXTENSIVELY tested.. to test this when you create the loop to loop through open items of that type use an IF instead of a while.. that way each iteration only does ONE item... then when you are sure it is right you can flip it to a while..

[Elliot Acosta]

Hi Riya, 

Thank you for the response but I am confused as to how this relates to Knowledge management or the Knowledge management advanced plug-in. Could you provide some further context? 

[Leri Andrews]

I cant help with the specific issues except to say that I've had the same templates now for 5 years because they are so difficult to modify.  Having said that, they are indeed useful.  Some tips (beware, some of these might be not OOTB):

1.  Make some sections compulsory

2. Provide help text underneath each section

3. Pre-populate various sections to provide guidance e.g. the short-description filled 'HR <insert country> - How to <insert process>'

4. Make sure the author can preview it properly as it will look on portal with the correct CSS

5. Enable the Tiny MCE toolbar buttons you need and get rid of the rest

6. Work out how your author will know there's a feedback task (will they get an email? will you show the feedback on portal?)

7. Version control may mess with your dashboards/reports so you may need to add filters