Create and Publish Knowledge Articles

Knowledge Articles let agents answer recurring questions once and reuse the answer, either by sending a link in a ticket or by publishing it to your Public Portal Website for customers to find themselves.

On this page:

• What Knowledge Articles are for
• Categories and folders
• Creating and writing an article
• Publishing
• Cloning an article
• Deleting and archiving

What Knowledge Articles are for

A Knowledge Article is a record holding instructional content that agents can share with customers or with each other. Typical uses are process instructions, like resetting a product to defaults, and recurring product questions, like supported storage or available configurations.

Articles can be shared two ways: as a link inserted into a ticket reply (including from a saved macro), or published to your Public Portal Website as a self-service resource. Articles can be sent to existing contacts or to contacts created during ticket creation.

Categories and folders

Articles live in Folders, and Folders live in Categories. You need at least one Category and one Folder before you can add an article. Categories and folders can also be configured for internal-only documentation rather than customer-facing content.

Creating and writing an article

ℹ️ Articles can only be created inside the Service app. Customers cannot create them from the Public Portal Website.

1. Go to Knowledge Articles and click New Knowledge Article.
2. Enter an English Language Title and select a Folder. A URL slug generates automatically and cannot be edited; it contains the article number, which stays fixed even when the article is updated.

3. Add tag information.
4. Click Save.

To write or edit, open the record and click the pencil icon. The article editor opens in a new browser tab. A table of contents can be built within an article.

Knowledge Article Editor with Table of Contents

Editor features

Heading styles: the toolbar’s text style menu offers Normal, Heading 1 through Heading 4, and Code, letting you structure content the same way a table of contents will later read it.

Text Formatting Style Menu in Knowledge Base Editor

Building a table of contents works off headings 1–4, but only headings with an anchor assigned appear in it:

1. Select the heading text, click the + toolbar button, then More Rich > Add Element ID.

Adding an Element ID to a Heading

2. Enter an ID for the anchor. Matching it to the heading title makes the article’s HTML easier to read later.
3. Repeat for every heading that should appear in the table of contents.
4. Place the cursor where the table of contents should build, then More Rich > Add Table of Contents.

Adding a Table of Contents in Article Editor

The table of contents builds automatically from the anchored headings. If you later edit, add, or delete a heading, the table of contents needs a corresponding manual update. It doesn’t stay in sync automatically.

Editing a hyperlink already placed in an article: select the linked text, and a toolbar popup appears with an Edit Link option to change where it points.

Editing a hyperlink in article text

To check how an article will look to customers, open its record and click View Version in Portal, which opens it in a new tab rendered as the portal displays it.

Publishing

1. Open the article record and click the pencil icon to open the editor.
2. Click Publish. The browser tab closes immediately on publish.

⚠️ Publishing alone doesn’t put an article on your portal. An admin must also add the article’s Knowledge Category under Portal Settings. Until that happens, the article is published but invisible to customers. See Portal categories.

Cloning an article

Cloning duplicates the current version of an article, including all standard and custom fields, while leaving the original intact. The title and URL are excluded, since both must be unique. The clone is created as a draft.

1. Go to the Knowledge Article object and open the article you want to copy.
2. From the Actions dropdown, select Clone This Knowledge Article.
3. A form appears pre-filled with the original’s information. Enter a new title; a URL slug generates automatically.
4. Click Save.

Deleting and archiving

Delete

Deleting an article deletes every version of it and moves them to the recycle bin. The recycle bin shows only the article record itself, but restoring it restores all versions. Use the three-dot menu on the record and select Delete this Knowledge Article, or Delete Draft.

Archive

Archiving is the reversible option. Archived articles are visible by switching the Knowledge object’s list view to Archived Articles, and can be restored with the Un-Archive Knowledge Article option in the three-dot menu.

1 Selecting Archived Articles in Knowledge Base

2 Knowledge Article Context Menu with Un-Archive Option

To archive one article, use its three-dot menu and select Archive this Knowledge Article, then confirm. To archive several, go to the All Articles list view and select them in bulk.