Find and Manage Knowledge Articles

Learning Objectives

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

• Navigate knowledge management to view and filter articles.
  
• Apply key operations to manage the lifecycle of an article.
  

Take Control of Knowledge Management

In the previous unit, you learned that knowledge management (KM) is the fuel for your AI and the bridge to self-service. While your employees will seamlessly search for and read these articles in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or the Agentic Center portal, you need a robust workspace to build and maintain that library.

In this unit, you cover managing knowledge in the Agentic IT Service Desk—specifically how to find, view, and create articles.

To launch the application, select Knowledge from the dropdown menu in the Agentic IT Service Desk console.

The Article Viewfinder

Finding the right information shouldn’t feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. It should feel like framing a photograph to compose the perfect image. For this unit, you use a similar concept: the Article Viewfinder.

You won’t find a button labeled “Viewfinder” in Agentforce IT Service—it isn’t an official feature name. Rather, it is a mindset for using the knowledge component to view your landscape of information and find the specific focus you need to solve an issue.

Because Agentforce IT Service is built on Salesforce Customer 360, the interface is intuitive and consistent with the other apps you use every day. Quickly sort through your organization’s collective wisdom using list views and filters.

Key Views

Just as a photographer switches lenses for different shots, you can switch list views to see articles in different stages of their lifecycle:

• Draft articles: Work that is in progress or being revised.
  
• Published articles: Content that is live and available to your teams (and potentially your AI agents).
  
• Archived articles: Older content that has been retired but is preserved for reference.
  

Although not always the case, an article usually progresses from draft to published once you or key stakeholders approve it. Over time, some articles are archived when business changes render them obsolete. For example, a resolution for an occasional single sign-on (SSO) glitch no longer applies after your organization switches to a new software vendor.

Key Operations

Just as a camera has specific buttons to snap the picture, toggle the flash, or change modes, knowledge management provides a toolbar of actions to manage the lifecycle of your articles.

From the list view, you can select one, multiple, or all records to perform bulk operations—provided you have the correct permissions. While the specific buttons you see could vary slightly based on the way your admin configures your org, here are the common actions you will use.

Knowledge management also supports version control. You can safely work on a new draft of an article while the current version remains published and visible to users, ensuring your team always has access to answers while you prepare updates.

You can also schedule many of these operations. For instance, you can set a specific date to automatically publish a draft article or define a deadline for an assignment so it gets done on time.

Now that you know where the actions are and what they do, let’s look at a real-world scenario where you would use them to clean up your knowledge base.

Seeing the Lifecycle in Action

Imagine you manage a library of FAQs for your company’s legacy messaging app, Chatterbox. When your organization migrates to Slack, those FAQs on Chatterbox become obsolete. You look at the published articles, search for "Chatterbox," select all the matching articles, and click Archive. You could delete them, but archiving is considered a best practice at most enterprises.

Lifecycle management keeps your library clean, but day-to-day, you usually need to find specific answers quickly. When you have thousands of active articles, you need precision. That brings us back to the ‘finder’ part of the camera’s viewfinder discussed earlier.

Focusing with Filters

When you have thousands of articles, you need a way to refine your shot. You can search and filter to find articles while drilled down into any incident or problem. Of course the UI is the same as incident management and problem management.

Then, you can filter your list by specific fields to find the exact type of record you are looking for.

• Publication Status: Filter by Published, Draft, or Archived to see where the article sits in the lifecycle.
  
• Validation Status: Check if an article has been vetted and validated by a subject matter expert.
  
• Article Record Type: Narrow your search to specific formats, such as a FAQ, Troubleshooting Guide, Known Error, or Roll Back Plan.
  

From Blank Page to Published Solution

Finding an article is great, but what happens when the search comes up empty? That is your signal that a knowledge gap exists. In traditional IT environments, filling that gap means staring at a blank page and typing out a solution from memory—a task most avoid because they are too busy fixing actual problems. Knowledge management gives you two ways to help build out your library: the manual method for standard procedures and the AI-powered method for turning casework into content.

Check out the next unit to learn how to create new knowledge articles from both methodologies.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Work with Articles and Translations
• Salesforce Help: Knowledge Management for IT Services