Set Up a New Kind of Article

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Create a new kind of article using Lightning Knowledge.
Determine what to include in the new page layouts.
Check that Knowledge is set up correctly.

Add Procedure Articles to Knowledge

Ursa Major is a Southwest-based supplier of solar components and systems. Its Salesforce admin is Maria Jimenez. Recently, she set up Salesforce Lightning Knowledge so customers, partners, and support agents can use knowledge articles to solve problems.

Her best resource for articles is Ada Balewa, a star agent. Ada knows almost everything there is to know about Ursa Major’s products. Her notes served as the basis for the first round of frequently asked questions (FAQs) articles in the knowledge base.

The FAQs have been great at helping customers find answers to common questions. For example, “How much money do I save if I install a solar hot water heater?” Answer: “For some households, up to 85% of your bill, but the average is around 50%.”

Now Maria and Ada want to add a different kind of article to the knowledge base: procedures. Luckily, Lightning Knowledge makes it easy to create any kind of article they need. With procedures, Ursa Major can show customers and installers how to perform tasks, such as installing a solar hot water heater. Unlike FAQs, procedures provide step-by-step instructions and safety warnings. Also, while anyone can access the FAQs, only authenticated customers and employees can access the procedures.

To add procedure articles to the knowledge base, Maria must create a few new page layouts in Lightning Knowledge. Before she can do that, she works with Ada to define the different types of information to include in procedures.

Define the Procedure Page Layout

Maria and Ada meet to go over what to include on the page layouts. They did this once before when they created the FAQs.

Basic information. This section includes things like the article name, URL, and summary information.
Audience and purpose. For FAQs, the audience was everyone and the purpose was answering a question. For procedures, the audience includes specific roles like installers, and the purpose is helping the reader complete a task. For example, installing a solar hot water heater is a common task for Ursa Major installers.
Warnings. Some procedures need warnings to keep people from being injured and equipment from being damaged.
Steps. These are the core of the article. First, you do this, second, you do that, and third you do that other thing.
Properties. This section provides information about the article such as when it was published, who wrote it, and who can see it.
Internal notes. Ada would like to include a field that only her agents can see with notes about the case.

That’s a good list of fields, but Maria’s not finished. She needs to know what actions readers take on articles. Ada thinks it over for a minute and says that reader actions are the same for procedures and FAQs. After reading an article, they can post about it or set up a poll.

Next, Maria asks what actions procedure authors take on procedure articles. Authors write and edit articles, so they perform more actions. Ada points to the action list they created for FAQ authors: Edit, Delete, Publish, Change Record Type, Edit as Draft, Submit for Approval, Assign, Archive, Restore, and Post.

Maria now has all the information she needs to start setting up procedures in Knowledge.

If you completed the Knowledge Basics for Lightning Experience module in a Service Cloud trial org, you might recognize some of the examples that we reference in this module. However, to complete the hands-on challenges in this module, you need to create a Trailhead Playground. You won't see the same examples in your new Playground, but you can complete the challenges to earn this badge.

Ready to Get Hands-on with Lightning Knowledge?

Create a Trailhead Playground now to follow along and try out the steps in this module. Scroll to the bottom of this page, click the down arrow next to Launch, and select Create Playground. It typically takes 3–4 minutes for Salesforce to create your Trailhead Playground. You also use the playground when it's time to complete the hands-on challenges.

Set Up Lightning Knowledge

Before you can work in Lightning Knowledge, you must set it up. After you enable Knowledge, you can’t disable it.

Here are the steps Maria took to enable Knowledge in her org.

If you want to follow along in your Trailhead Playground org, use your own name instead of the names used in the examples.

From Setup , choose Service Setup.
Select the Knowledge Setup tile.
Click Start.
Select a Lightning Knowledge author and click Next. Maria selects Maria Jimenez and Ada Balewa.
Maria skips entering the data category information. She’ll set that up later. Click Next.
Click Finish.

Here’s how Maria double-checks that Lightning Knowledge is enabled.

From Setup , choose Setup.
In the Quick Find box, enter Knowledge Settings.
Select Knowledge Settings.
Verify that Enable Lightning Knowledge is selected.

Now Maria has a clear idea of Ada’s needs and confirms that Lightning Knowledge is set up. She’s ready to create page layouts and a record type for the procedure articles. Let’s see how she does that in the next unit.

Resources