images in knowledge articles ?

[#1]

Hi. We are in the mid stages of a service desk toolset review and I have a question about knowledge articles.

Commonly work instructions created by the service desk consist of images and text. However it doesn't appear that you can embed images directly in the knowledge article, they have to be linked to from essentially a web server path. This means there is then no connection between the article and the image, and either could be deleted independent of the other.

Firstly is my analysis correct. Secondly if it is, what does everyone else do ? Do you continue to put it in a word doc and then just upload the word doc, or make a rule that everything has to be described rather than use images ?

All in all, its looking a promising product !!!!!

Steve

[CapaJC]

Hi Steve. I'm not an expert, and someone else probably has a better answer, but here goes.

Embedding images in KB articles can indeed be done as you describe, but you can also attach images to the KB article itself (using the paperclip "Attach" capability on the record when editing). Then, when you click the "Insert/Modify Image" icon in the KB article's Text field, you have a select box called "Link Type" where you can specify URL or Attachment. You can then select your attached image.

Suboptimal, surely, and not easy to do if you've thousands of articles w/ images, but the capability is there. The images for an article can be tied directly to the kb_knowledge record in your instance.

--J

[airwin77]

If you add a field to your knowledge base, or any Task you can use the User_image option. The easiest way to achieve this would be to go to the dictonary and add a new record, create the field on the task table, name it whatever you want, then select user_image. You will need to but a max size in. Then go personalize any form that you want to add this field to, your name might not be listed where you think it should be, so look thru the entire list to find the new field you created. Once this field is on a form you will have a link that reads "Click to Add", navigate to the picture you want to use, and then click ok. You then will see the picture you selected as an embed picture.

Likewise there is one other way that you could achive this in a little different method. If you create a field, and then set the type as "html". This will give you a box / window that will be an html area where you can copy and paste pictures to, and then add content.

[kardeasa]

Hi, Is there no way to use snippingtool and just past a picture into an incident i any of the fields?

[airwin77]

One would think that there would be a way to paste a captured image, however I've tried everything and haven't found any option that yielded anything that functioned this way. I could certainly see a practical use for why one might want to take a windows screen capture and attach it to a ticket or task, however I guess this might be a future feature?

If you're using the copy paste option from a photo that exist already as a saved photo, this could be a saved photo anywhere, then you could create an HTML field and it will allow you to paste the picture. However the image has to exist as a saved picture somewhere, so the screen capture option wouldn't work unless you saved it as a picture, and then copied the picture.