Retaining certain Knowledge v2 features after upgrading to v3

[Sarup Paul]

Starting in the Fuji release, the Knowledge Management application had significant changes made to it in the form of a new version: Knowledge v3. Some of the new features that came with Knowledge v3 include pinning, multiple knowledge bases, and permission flexibility. Since v3 was released, we have already seen widespread adoption of >80% of customers upgrading to KM v3.

However some customers, due to their specific constraints, have requested information on how to stay on Knowledge v2, while upgrading v3. We want to be very clear, that it's not a fully supported configuration, and some features are deprecated/impacted due to the upgrade. If you do decide to retain v2 features, here are a few tips that we would like to provide.

Tips on keeping v2 features but upgrading to v3

• Use the v2 Knowledge Base pages kb_home, kb_view and kb_find to access the Knowledge Base (KB).
• If you have customizations to the Article view, they are migrated to kb_view_customer, and dynamically available via kb_home and kb_find.
• During the migration, all the existing articles are associated with a Knowledge Base - called "Knowledge." This is the only knowledge base that is designated as "v2" version, and as such supports some of the v2 attributes such as ACLs. Retain the "Knowledge" knowledge base to ensure you still have access to v2.
• KM v3 allows to create multiple KBs, so that you can manage your publishing processes effectively. However if you want to retain v2 features, do not create a new Knowledge Base. All new KBs will be created as "v3" KB, and as such do not support v2 features.
• The migration process converts the two-level Topic/Category structure in v2, into a two-level category structure in v3. Some organizations have the need to organize and classify their content, with deeper hierarchies. While the v2 "Knowledge" KB will allow creating more than two levels, those will not display on the v2 knowledge base interface.
• The Topic/Category fields are not available after v3 upgrade. You will need to update or create these values through categories (kb_category). Since the v2 interface refers to Topic/Category. The new changes will not be reflected. You will need to write business rules to keep the kb_category(v3) in sync with topic and category.
• The Social Q&A feature, which came out with Geneva, is not shown in the KM v2 UI. Hence you do not need to enable Social Q&A on "Knowledge" KB.
• The KM v2 UI uses legacy comment features, however with KMv3 we started using LiveFeed for Comments. To switch to legacy comments - set glide.knowman.use_live_feed to 'false.'

Deprecated features that will not be available in Knowledge v3

• News Scroller
• Navigation Add-on

For details on features and upgrade best practices refer to this - All things Upgrade considered on Knowledge v2 to v3.