Filtering Knowledge searches by Audience

[turnea]

Hi everyone,

We have been having some issues with trying to filter our search results based on a custom field with a drop down that we call "Audience" which contains "Internal to Group" (we have another field called "Knowledge Group" which is essentially the author's default support group), "IT All", and "Everyone".   We've just discovered that the Audience field is not actually filtering anything - when we search for items that are listed as "Internal to Group" and we are not that group, it comes up in the search results.   We hadn't really noticed this as we have not opened the Knowledge Base up to everyone at this time.

After some discussion, it seemed that the only option we were given was to use the OOB "Roles" field.   Though it would function for the public and IT only articles, there isn't a way that we can utilize the "Internal to Group" type without adding 50+ separate roles.  

Ideally, we want to leverage the "Audience" field to get these search results to show the proper articles according to the audience.   With the internal to group side of them, it would need to reference the user's support groups to see if they exist in them.

Has anyone had this issue before or has anyone tried similar search result filtering in your instance?   Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Amandah

[Uncle Rob]

Hey Amandah,

Can you give some insight as to why the segregation is a requirement?   Answering that will help you figure out if "the side effects are worth the medicine".  

[turnea]

Hi there,

We are promoting the Knowledge Base as being IT's only portal going forward, and there are a number of security documents or other types like these that are only to be viewed by a small group of people and should not be open to everyone in IT.   Having the ability to keep articles within one group was a big selling point due to the security/privacy issues that were foreseen.   If we can't lock it down from the Audience field, I'm not sure how we can figure out an alternative that would work for us.

Thank you,

Amandah

[Uncle Rob · Accepted solution]

That's certainly a problem.   I've been hoping and dreaming for Catalog Item style "visible for / not visible for" on Groups, Department, Company, Location, etc for a long while.  

The thing I'd stay away from is introducing custom fields to control search.   Search just doesn't have enough "above water" configuration.   What I mean by that is the bulk of what you see on search mechanics is deeper than we have access to control.   For example, in Fuji's contextual search I think it will only check against role.

If there's compartments of secrecy in the group ecosystem, I think going the role route may be your only option.

[turnea]

Hi there,

Thank you for the information - I'd agree that I wish Knowledge would function much like the Service Catalog - I'd say it would make much more sense in the long term.

From what I see here, you don't think that there would be any other way to segregate the articles from search results (and I'm assuming it can't be done through permalinks either) besides roles?   If we were left with roles only, do you know of any way that a role could be made dynamic (aka that an "internal" role could involve pulling the list of groups that they are a part of that they can read) in some way?   I feel like it may not function that way, but hoping that maybe there's something that we can do.

Thanks again,

Amandah