Knowledge Management
Purpose
Knowledge Management captures reusable answers so that resolution does not depend on a single person. Articles live on the kb_knowledge table inside knowledge bases, organised by category and governed by ownership groups.
Article lifecycle
Articles move through Draft, Review, Published, and Retired. Draft is editable and invisible to consumers; Review is where approval workflow runs; Published makes the article available to its audience; Retired removes it from active use while preserving history. Versions are retained so that edits to a published article can be reviewed without losing the last approved text.
Visibility
Who can see an article depends on the knowledge base, its user criteria (can read, cannot read, can contribute), and the article state. A published article in a base the user cannot read is still invisible - this is the most commonly missed distinction.
Feedback and quality
Readers rate articles and leave feedback, generating feedback records and tasks for the owning group. Article flags on incidents and problems let agents nominate content for creation or update. Knowledge blocks let reusable fragments be embedded across articles. Knowledge-Centered Service practices capture knowledge at the moment of resolution, typically from an incident, rather than in a separate documentation project.
Traps
Assuming Retired deletions - retired articles persist. Assuming publishing alone grants access without user criteria. Assuming the article body is the only field that matters - short description and metadata drive search relevance. Assuming approval is automatic once an article is written.
Worked example
An agent resolves a novel incident and captures a fix. The draft is created from the incident, routed to the owning group for review, approved, and published to the internal IT base. A user in the finance group with no read access to that base still cannot see it, even though it is Published. Rule of thumb: state controls lifecycle, user criteria control audience; both must allow access.