About Knowledge Management

Serena Request Center includes the Knowledge Center for managing knowledge base articles and announcements. The Knowledge Management application enables 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 types of users:

Contributors are responsible for submitting articles and adding content. They edit the content of the articles, adding formatting to text, such as italics and bulleted lists, using the embedded HTML widget. The contributors are able to 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 end users. The publisher can send the article to additional team members for approval. When the article is ready, the publisher is responsible for posting or publishing the articles to Knowledge Center.

Once it is published, the Knowledge Management item is closed and the content is copied to the Knowledge Center where the material becomes available to end users. Urgent announcements are displayed to the user in the banner bar of Request Center.

In Knowledge Center, users can comment and rate the article. The comments and ratings are stored in Knowledge Center.

The content of the 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 same Knowledge Management workflow. When the change is published, the updated content replaces the existing content in Knowledge Center, while the comments and ratings will remain unchanged.

The following topics describe the features found in Knowledge Management:

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 Center 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.