Manage knowledge management
Authoring, versioning, and consuming articles
Knowledge in Customer Service is built on the KnowledgeArticle entity. Articles follow a lifecycle of statuses - Draft, In review, Published, Expired, and Discarded - each with defined status reasons. Understand major and minor versions: once a major version is published, editing the article creates a minor version (a draft) while the published major version stays live to agents and customers. Approving the minor version promotes it to a new major version. Minor versions are stored as annotations attached to the article, which is why a minor version is never published directly.
Article templates standardize structure. Translations are separate article records linked to the original, so each translation is authored and published independently. The knowledge management control embedded on the case form lets agents search, preview, and link articles to a case, and share a link into an email reply. Article feedback and ratings plus review and expiry dates drive Knowledge analytics and help retire stale content.
Traps: only published articles are visible to customers through a portal; 'In review' is not equivalent to 'Published'; and linking an article to a case does not copy its text into the case. Relevance search must be enabled for knowledge search experiences that rely on it.
Rule of thumb: publish, then edit - never edit a live article expecting customers to see the change immediately. Worked example: a published article needs a price update. The agent edits it, producing a minor draft; the published version remains visible; after review, the minor version is promoted and republished.