Key Articleforge – Managing the Reuse of Knowledge Artifacts

Key articleforge is a web application designed to help you create, review and manage articles. Whether you need to generate content for your website, blog or e-book, key articleforge can get the job done in minutes.

Managing the Reuse of Knowledge Artifacts

The reuse of articles can be an important part of managing the article life cycle. For instance, you might decide that a Validated article should only be visible to Partner and Customer groups after it has been reviewed a few times. Or, you might set the article to External automatically as its reuse count hits a certain threshold.

To control who sees which KCS articles, we use article audience (external, partners, internal). This allows you to define business rules that restrict access based on the level of confidence and audience that users have in an article.

Article Audience and Governance

For an organization with a mature KCS implementation, we recommend that you manage your article audience with an Article State Matrix (example shown). This reference document maps the audiences against the Knowledge Article attributes that affect visibility (state, knowledge domain, special considerations) and defines access rights.

Article Confidence and Audience

The KCS article confidence field is a very valuable indicator of the trust that users have in an article. Therefore, it should be stored as part of the article metadata so that it can be made visible to the users who need to refer to it.

In addition, we also recommend that you make sure that the audiences to which your knowledge is shared are appropriate for the type of information being shared. For example, if you are sharing sensitive, regulated information that requires compliance reviews, then it is essential to be able to control who has visibility to that information.

You can do this by enabling the ability to set article audience to a specific user or group within the KCS platform, as well as defining custom audiences with your data in the Knowledge Base.

When creating a new knowledge article, the following fields are prepopulated: Title, Purpose, Content and Additional Required Fields. Depending on the article, these fields may need to be edited as necessary before saving the article.

Requires Approval and Publish Without Approval

The Requires Approval field is automatically set to Yes when the article is created or updated, and one or more Approver(s) can be selected from the Approver(s) lookup. Once the document is approved, an approval record is added to the table of Approvals in the article’s Progress tab. If there are any Approval Notes to be entered, these notes are also pushed to the Approval Notes field in the article’s Progress tab.