Dynamics CRM Knowledge Management

Article
04/06/2016

This article will give you an insight into Knowledge Management’s features, including:

Built-in Knowledge Management available for both CRM Online and On-Premise

Rich Content creation – HTML editor

Versioning & Translation

Scheduled Publishing and Expiration

Business Process & Workflows for Knowledge Articles offering full lifecycle

Search control on any entity in CRM

Associate Knowledge Articles to entity records

Track views of Knowledge Articles (by day, language, version and location)

SDK API

Factors to know:

Easy wizard-based setup

Reuses KB Search Widget introduced with Knowledge Management in CRM 2015 Update 1

Introduces new Knowledge Article entity

Knowledge Article entity relies on New Engagement Hub - Service Desk UI

Create/ Update only through Engagement Hub UI

Read-only in Web client

No Impact to customers using Parature Integration for Knowledge Management

Configuration:

System Administrator, System Customizer security role or equivalent permissions

From Settings > Service Management > Embedded Knowledge Search

Kmsettings in OrganizationBase table

IsKnowledgeManagementEnabled flag in MetadataSchema.Entity table

External hosting of Knowledge Articles required outside of CRM

External URL format to formulate external link for Knowledge Articles

Alternatively, enable Knowledge Management from

Customizations->Entities->{Entity Name}

msdyn_<entity>_KnowledgeArticle table to hold associated Knowledge Articles

Accessible from new Engagement Hub User interface

Web client – Notification on old Article entity with link to new KM functionality

Notification cannot be disabled

Knowledge Article Entity

Knowledge Article: New entity that represents Articles, article versions and translations

Article version: a unique Knowledge Article entity record, a combination of major and minor version number

Primary article: An Article version written in the original language

Translation: A Knowledge Article entity record representing the translated content of a primary article

Automatic Translation of Knowledge Articles

Sample solution users download and configure to enable Knowledge Managers to author and translate articles using machine translation using Microsoft Translate API.

You download the Automatic Translation solution from the git repository and import to CRM and the solution will add a sitemap entry for AutomaticKMTranslationSetting entity under Service.

It registers AutoTranslationPlugin for Create message of knowledgearticle entity as Pre-operation in the event pipeline in a synchronous execution mode.

When a Translation is created, the plugin is triggered and passed to the API.

Note: API respects the HTML, fragments only translates the non html content. Currently the plugin handles the auto translation of title, content, description and keywords fields of the translation that is being created.

Content Rules:

WYSIWYG control with full HTML access (only available on interaction centric forms)

Ability to embed referenced images and videos (incl. YouTube, vimeo, etc..)

No JavaScript or client side code allowed. Use Id’s and classes on the content in the editor and embed the script on the portal side. This example will turn images into a slideshow:

$(function(){

$("#slides").slidesjs({

width: 940,

height: 528

});

</script>

Security Roles & Privileges:

Privileges for Knowledge Article and KnowledgeArticle Views

Organization level privileges

Approve Knowledge Articles

Publish Knowledge Articles

New Security Role- Knowledge Manager

Organization level access for all privileges of the Knowledge Article and KnowledgeArticle Views entities.

Rest of the privileges same as Customer Service Representative role

Status vs Status Reason:

Status Reason is customizable e.g. - Published Internally, SME Review

The Status to State mappings

Status Reason (StatusCode)	Status(StateCode)	Description
Proposed	Draft	The article has been proposed by a CSR or customer.
Draft	Draft	The article is in a draft state and isn’t published.
In Review	Draft	The article is being reviewed.
Approved	Approved	The article is approved and ready for publishing.
Scheduled	Scheduled	The article is scheduled to be published in the future.
Published	Published	The article is available externally.
Expired	Expired	The article is expired.
Archived	Archived	The article has been archived.
Trashed	Trashed	The article has been trashed.

State Engine:

State changes are not cascaded to versions or translations

Exception is publisher chooses to publish related translations

In Scheduled and Published state:

Autosave is disabled

Update action is required for making changes

Publish permission is required to update a Scheduled or Published Article

Search:

Search widget uses SQL Full text search

Index uses organization language to index the content

All translations and versions are indexed

KB Search Widget is same as Knowledge Management in CRM 2015 Update 1

Quick find search

Doesn’t use Full text search

Follows standard quick find behavior by matching against fields defined in the quick find view

Full Text Search:

Behind-the-scenes for the Knowledge Article Search Widget that allows multiple search words to narrow results, stemming words to include multiple versions of the same word, and having two different avenues for filtering.

Search results can be returned based on one or more words.

For each word, or search token, that is entered we treat them completely separately. It is an “OR” based search.

For example, depending on the filters applied, searching for “Article Business” will return results with “Article” OR “Business” in the search results.

Users can hard code for searches to include “AND.” Those search queries would have to be entered into the box as “Article AND Business.”

Stemming of terms is enabled so a search for “text” also returns results that include “texts,” “texting,” and “texted.”

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