Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management Overview

Serena Request Center includes Knowledge Center for managing knowledge base articles and announcements. The Knowledge Management application allows you to manage the submission of new articles, specify whether articles are public or private, and monitor changes to existing articles.

The Knowledge Management application has two main types of users:

Contributors submit articles and add content. They edit the content of the articles, and can use the embedded HTML widget to add formatting such as italics and bulleted lists. Contributors can save the articles as drafts, which stores the data in the database until the article is ready to be sent to the publisher for final approval.
Publishers review articles before they are made available to users. The publisher can send the article to additional team members for approval. When the article is ready, the publisher posts or publishes the articles to Knowledge Center.

After it is published, the Knowledge Management item is closed and the content is copied to Knowledge Center, where the material becomes available to users. Users can comment on and rate an article; the comments and ratings are stored in Knowledge Center. Urgent announcements are displayed in the banner bar of Request Center. When users start to submit issues into Request Center or the Incident Management application in Serena Service Manager, a keyword search of Knowledge Center is performed, and links to related articles are displayed. If one of the articles addresses the issue, users can click a button to submit and then immediately resolve the issue.

The content of published articles cannot be edited directly in Knowledge Center. Instead, a new item is submitted into Knowledge Management using the Update this item link on the published article. The new item must proceed through the Knowledge Management workflow. When the change is published, the updated content replaces the existing content in Knowledge Center, while the comments and ratings remain unchanged.

Key Benefits

HTML Editor for easy formatting of article content.
Four distinct types of articles to distinguish types of information within Knowledge Center.
Distinct user roles for publishers and contributors to ensure quality of Knowledge Center content.
Tracking of approvals to ensure knowledge base article quality.
"Public" or "private" visibility into published articles. Users cannot view a "private" article if they are not assigned to the visibility group associated with the article.
The Yes, resolve this issue button on articles viewed from submit forms allows users to automatically submit and then immediately resolve requests and incidents. These issues are created with a "low" urgency, a "single user" impact, and a "5" priority. This increases the accuracy of service desk metrics, because issues with self-service resolution are accounted for properly.