Knowledge Base article management/filtering.

mloranc
Mega Expert

‎09-10-2014 11:06 AM

Hello all,

 

I work in ServiceNow in a higher education environment. We have a large portion of area specific knowledge articles being developed that will need to be implemented into our existing public knowledge base. Ideally, this is what I'd like to see happen. Our users have LDAP information loaded that includes if they are a staff, faculty, student, or (empty). I'd like to use this as a base filter for displaying articles that are currently categorized but I still want all of the public articles to remain public. For example, staff member visits the site but is not logged in, they would have access to all articles with the default public order/filtering. The same staff member signs into ServiceNow then visits the knowledge base and is able to see a more customized filtering of the articles relevant to them, i.e. student and faculty related articles are hidden or pushed to the bottom while their articles are bubbled to the top.

 

Is there a good method to perform this type of knowledge organization?

 

Thank you,

-Mike

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Joseph_Wheeler
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

‎09-10-2014 12:02 PM

Ben Hollifield posted a great app on Share called Simple Record Separation that should do the trick for you.   Check out his video for it: http://youtu.be/azXVHPUO4zA



ServiceNow Share



Cheers,



Joe


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servicenowkevin
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

‎09-10-2014 12:36 PM

Michael Loranc we basically do what you're describing at ServiceNow, though with a slightly different approach. We use Internal, Partner, Customer (requires authentication), and Public (no authentication).



I published this discussion recently about controlling access. You might find it interesting. If you have some questions about how we're doing it, maybe Erich Zirnhelt can help.


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mloranc
Mega Expert
In response to servicenowkevin

‎09-29-2014 09:52 AM

Hi,



servicenowkevin That's kind of what could be done, but it doesn't really address what I'm aiming for. All of our KB articles are already Public. I'm looking for a way to keep them public, but bubble sort up the more pertinent articles based on their authenticated role. Any insight, Erich Zirnhelt would be much appreciated!



Thanks!


-Mike


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Erich Zirnhelt
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee
In response to mloranc

‎09-29-2014 10:33 AM

Hi Mike,



I've seen what you are trying to do, but we haven't tackled that here (yet).



The approach I've seen is to apply the role(s) as hidden metadata with a search weight, and append the user's role as a search parameter to the query.



How I might do that here....


  1. assign a ts_weight of 50 to a role field in the KB article (I've not done this for select lists before but for a proof-of-concept I'd use a basic text field)
  2. append the user's role (e.g. faculty) to all search strings (ideally, invisibly)
    • if the roles match, that content floats up
    • if the ts_weight isn't high enough, more relevant content may float higher - this is not necessarily bad


This is just a quick design, and I've not implemented anything like it with ServiceNow yet. I can't be sure it will work as I've expected.



Not sure if this helps, and I'd like to hear if you have any success with this or otherwise.   Might make for a great K15 presentation!


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