Knowledge Base Best Practice for Attachments

[JimCheffer]

We are expanding our use of the knowledge base and the discussion about attachment document type comes up. Some people like PDF versus Word document. PDF looks nice but then we need to store the Word document somewhere. Has anyone discovered a best practice in this area. We would like knowledge to be the one source of truth so keeping the Word document with the article makes sense. Our knowledge makers will be about 5 people so control is not a big issue. Anyone out there run across this issue. Also any Knowledge best practices out there as well. Thanks in advance.  

[valerie_gallot]

We have the same requirement: SN Knowledge base must be the only place to store both PDF and Word documents (otherwise maintenance will be really complex... )

We implemented the following process: all changes must be done in a SUB object, and publishing a SUB will create/update the related KB object.

Attachments are copied from the SUB to the KB in the "publish" UI action.

We plan to add this customization: if there are 2 attachments with same name, and one is PDF and the other is Word, then we will keep only the PDF in the KB object.

By doing that, all end-users will only see the PDF, which is better.

And the author will have access to the last Word document (in the SUB object) when the attachment needs to be reviewed.

It is not yet implemented so I cannot share the code ! I will share as soon as possible.

[JimCheffer]

Thank you for the info. I am confused by SUB object. Can you explain further?

[valerie_gallot]

An ITIL user may want to propose an article from an incident or a problem. He can post a "submission" directly from the incident/problem form, and a knowledge_admin user is supposed to review this submission and if ok click on "publish" -> this will cretae a new KB article.  

This is the OOB behavior.

We extend this behavior: all our articles have one or several related "submissions". Submissions are visible only for knowledge_admin. By doing that it is possible to store certain documents in the submission (ex: word document) and certain document in the article (ex: pdf).

[JimCheffer]

Now I understand. We have hidden submission functionality for now. Thank you.

[Mujtaba Amin Bh]

I am also experimenting with Managed Documents plug-in and how the documents can be made available to the end users. It would be great if you can share your experience on the same.