What can you search for?

There are three main sources of information that knowledge management can search through:

• Data captured in business objects as you use the system day-to-day (for example, changes)
• External documents
• Knowledge articles

You can search for information specified in any incidents, problems or changes you may have. You can specify which business objects are included in a knowledge search, and which specific attributes are searched. This helps when a resolved issue recurs, as the resolution information is available to you to help you resolve the issue more quickly.

You can also search through external documents, enabling you to find solutions within existing documentation.

You can create new knowledge articles and add attachments to those articles. Each article goes through a specific process of being submitted, approved or rejected, so that you can monitor what goes into your knowledge database. Analysts and end-users can rate the effectiveness of articles by indicating whether or not an article was useful. If your service desk supports users in different languages, you can create multilingual articles so that users have access to knowledge in their preferred language – even in languages in which Service Desk is not available.

For information about creating a multilingual system, see Creating a multilingual system.

Two additional features of knowledge management are:

• Knowledge domains – the ability to create different knowledge domains for different groups of users, so that their knowledge search results give only answers appropriate to them
• Knowledge classifications (taxonomies) – the ability to create different classifications (or taxonomies) for your knowledge, so that knowledge about different things can be kept separate from each other to improve the accuracy of search results

Knowledge domains and classifications provide related and complementary functionality. Knowledge domains enable you to divide your knowledge database between different types of user, so that users see only information that is appropriate for them. For example, you can prevent customers from seeing internal-only information, or enable only the HR team to see confidential personnel information. Knowledge classifications, however, divide your knowledge database into information about different topics. For example, information about printers, information about servers, information about software, and so on. This can provide more accurate search results because a search can be targeted at the classification for the appropriate technology.