Explore features

These are features that impact how your readers navigate your knowledge base.

Rather than full feature sets, these are individual settings you may want to enable or disable:

• Configure your table of contents menus, including adding or removing elements (such as links to the homepage and glossary), and changing their default behavior.
• Use breadcrumbs so your readers always know where they are in your site structure.
• Include additional links in the top navigation bar.

These are features that might:

• Impact how your readers interact with your content, like search, feedback systems, and so forth.
• Impact or are set directly within articles or categories and change the layout or display of your articles, categories, or knowledge base.

Glossary

For each knowledge base, you can create a glossary of terms and definitions. This can be especially useful if you have terms that your readers might not know, you use acronyms that you don't want to have to re-explain every time they appear, or you're trying to standardize the language your readers use to describe things.

You do not need to do anything to enable the glossary feature, but you do have to create your glossary terms and definitions.

You do have to enable certain options, such as:

• Whether to display a link to the glossary in your table of contents (this is usually included by default).
• Whether to auto-highlight glossary terms when they appear in your content, with hover-over definitions. (You always have the option to manually insert glossary terms (with the on-hover definition) into your content, no enabling necessary!)
• Whether to have glossary terms and their definitions returned in search results.

Article Ratings

You can choose to display a "Was this article helpful?" type rating section in your content, using either a thumbs up/thumbs down or a 5-star rating system. These ratings are captured in the Article Ratings Report and can be reset whenever you wish.

You will need to enable the ratings feature, select the rating style, and decide on the rating text to display.

Comments

You can choose to include a comments section in your content to collect feedback or questions from your readers.

You will need to enable the comments feature, determine who can comment and view comments, figure out how you want to be notified about comments, whether they post instantly or require approval, and more. These comments are captured in the Comments reporting.

Contact Form

You can also add a Contact Form to your knowledge base, either to receive email directly or to send contact conversations into a ticketing system. If you are using your knowledge base for product or support purposes, we highly recommend evaluating this feature! It can be a great way to get your customers to reach out directly without having to switch to a different tool outside of your documentation. By default, the contact form will try to deflect the submission by searching the knowledge base and offering related resources, so this can be a first line of self-service defense, too.

By default, the Contact Form comes automatically enabled, and will send to the email address you used when you created the knowledge base. You will need to configure the Contact Form (you can also set it up to directly integrate with Zendesk or Freshdesk). Most ticketing/support systems support an email ticket submission process, so even if you aren't using Zendesk or Freshdesk, you should be able to use the basic configuration to send the contact form submissions to the email address for your support inbox. (We do this with Help Scout, for example!)

Subscriptions

Some knowledge bases contain important software or policy updates, compliance updates, or other critical information. (Or, on the flip side, they may contain blog categories and you'd like to encourage your customers to follow your blog.) For these situations, you can add subscriptions to your knowledge base. Subscriptions work like this:

• A reader can subscribe to individual categories in your knowledge base
• When you update articles in the category, if you use the New or Updated Article Call Outs, the article will get flagged for subscription notification
• On a daily or weekly basis (your choice), a subscription notification email will be sent out to all your subscribers letting them know of New or Updated content.

You will need to enable subscriptions (which includes setting up your SMTP details--you may need some IT help with this!). Once enabled, you'll need to save articles with the New or Updated call outs to trigger the notification.

Related Articles

By default, your content will contain a Related Articles section, and KnowledgeOwl will try to automatically suggest 5 related articles based off of the article titles. You can specify which articles or categories should be displayed within an article by using the Add Related Article option in the editor.

You can also disable the automatically suggested articles across your entire knowledge base, or change the number of automatic related articles displayed (from 1-10).

Synonyms

This feature is one of our favorites, even though it's not one most customers think to ask for! So, let's say that you have a word or phrase that you use often in your documentation, but your readers might use variations of that word or phrase. For example: we use the words "knowledge base" a lot, but some of our customers call it a "knowledgebase", "k base", or "kbase". To keep search humming right along, sometimes a content writer might try to add each of those variations as a search phrase, or work the variations into the body of the text. That approach can solve the problem, but it puts a lot of strain on your writer to remember, and maintain, and update those phrases.

Instead, you can define search synonyms to relate your documentation's terms with the terms or acronyms that your readers might use. These synonyms are incorporated into our search indexing process, so that whenever a reader searches a synonym (like "kbase" in our example), they're returned all the content that references "knowledge base".

You do not need to do anything to enable the synonyms feature; you just need to start creating synonyms. Once you add synonyms, you will need to reindex your knowledge base for search, which will temporarily disable search until the index completes.

Search function & weights

While we're talking about synonyms, you should also know that there are a number of options of search that you can tweak. These include options like pagination and sorting, whether to use highlighted occurrences of the search phrase or a set meta description in search results, whether to allow filtering the search by top- and second-level category, fuzzy searching, and more. If your content is primarily written in a language other than English, you can also specify the language it uses.

As you create and save content, your knowledge base will automatically index six fields:

• Title
• Permalink
• Body (the text in the editor)
• PDFs added to the content
• Meta description
• Search phrases

You have the option to change the search weights associated with each of those fields, which will change the order of your search results.

PDFs

All articles, custom content categories, and topic display categories get PDFs of their content automatically generated. You can change some of the settings for these individual PDFs in Settings > PDF. You cannot disable this generation, but you can turn it off for individual articles. Contact us to help remove the PDF icon from your entire knowledge base.

You can also choose to generate a PDF of your entire knowledge base (and make it available for download) or create custom PDFs for specific sections of content--these can be great for onboarding materials or training packets, for example. You do not need to do anything to enable these features, but you will need to generate the PDFs.

Content templates and reuse

KnowledgeOwl supports several different ways to create content templates or reuse content. These include:

• Topic articles: flag an article as a topic and you can embed the entire article's contents in other articles
• Article templates: flag an article as a template and you can create new articles from that template
• Snippets: reusable pieces of code or text you can add to articles, your Style Settings, and more
• Shared content articles: synchronize the body and title of articles in different categories so you only have to edit that content once
• Shared content categories: for customers with multiple knowledge bases, sync an entire category and its contents between your knowledge bases

You do not need to do anything to enable these features; see the linked documentation on how to turn articles into templates or topics; create and use snippets; and create shared content articles and categories.

These are features that allow KnowledgeOwl to integrate with other websites or software. (Some of these are cross-listed in other features sections, as well.)

Some of these are quite full-featured and some would require some developers to help you make full use of.

Contextual Help Widget

If you'd like to display your knowledge base content in another website or application, the contextual help widget might be a great feature for you. The widget can be tied to a hyperlink or menu option in your site, or you can use the built-in "?" icon and choose where on the page to place it. When opened, the widget will display three tabs for your reader:

• Knowledge tab: includes a search bar to search your entire knowledge base and allows readers to navigate through the knowledge base entirely in the widget.
  
• Recommended tab: provides a list of recommended articles and categories, which you can customize for each URL in your site
• Contact tab: provides a widget version of the contact form

With these resources, your readers can get a lot more self-serve help and use your knowledge base a lot more actively, all from within your own site or application!

To get started using the widget:

• You choose some configuration options for your widget. (You can Customize widget tabs, headers, and text as well as the Widget Contact Form, as well as change the widget look and feel to match your branding.)
  
• You or your developer copy the widget embed code from KnowledgeOwl and paste it into the website or application you'd like to display the content. See Widget 2.0 installation for more details.
  
• Optional: within articles and categories, you can define Recommend on Pages. When the widget is opened from those pages in your website or application, the article or category will appear as a Recommended resource. You can change the order of the Recommended content using Widget reporting.
• Optional: If you have technical resources to help, you can also use the widget in Single Page Applications or use widget methods to open the widget to a specific tab or to a specific article/category.
  

If you'd like to see this contextual help widget in action, we use it in two places:

• In this support knowledge base, the Contact support link in the upper right will open the widget directly to the Contact tab.
  
• Within app.knowledgeowl.com, the Help link in the upper right will open to the Recommended tab with relevant content.

Both uses of the widget show all three tabs in action.

Contact Form

You can add a Contact Form to your knowledge base, either to receive email directly or to send contact conversations into a ticketing system. If you are using your knowledge base for product or support purposes, we highly recommend evaluating this feature! It can be a great way to get your customers to reach out directly without having to switch to a different tool outside of your documentation. By default, the contact form will try to deflect the submission by searching the knowledge base and offering related resources, so this can be a first line of self-service defense, too.

By default, the Contact Form comes automatically enabled, and will send to the email address you used when you created the knowledge base. You will need to configure the Contact Form (you can also set it up to directly integrate with Zendesk or Freshdesk). Most ticketing/support systems support an email ticket submission process, so even if you aren't using Zendesk or Freshdesk, you should be able to use the basic configuration to send the contact form submissions to the email address for your support inbox. (We do this with Help Scout, for example!)

Zendesk App

If you are using Zendesk as a ticketing system, you can set up the KnowledgeOwl Zendesk App. This app will help your Zendesk agents by:

• Suggesting relevant articles based on the subject of the message
• Allowing agents to search for and insert links to relevant articles
• Allowing agents to create new articles from an existing ticket 

To use this integration, in Zendesk, you'll need to enable the KnowledgeOwl app. Instructions are at the linked resource above.

Webhooks

Webhooks allow you to proactively subscribe to events that occur in your KnowledgeOwl account. When an event occurs that you have subscribed to, we will POST a message to the endpoint of your specification containing information about the event. Think of these as an automated message about actions happening in your knowledge base.

We offer two types of webhooks: one formatted specifically for the application Slack, and the other containing KnowledgeOwl API object data, which can be used with Zapier or used by your developers to automate processes.

Using Zapier with KnowledgeOwl

KnowledgeOwl has an official Zapier app for creating articles.

You can also use their webhook integration to integrate KnowledgeOwl with a variety of tools.

You might want to test a Zapier integration for things like:

• Sending contact form submissions into a Google Spreadsheet or Salesforce
• Automating social media posts when new KnowledgeOwl articles are published
• Capturing emails sent to an inbox of your choice and automatically creating new articles from them

The API

You can also roll all kinds of interesting integrations using the KnowledgeOwl API. While complex integrations here would likely be best handled by a developer, we do provide some resources for you to get familiar with working with an API and working with the KnowledgeOwl API specifically:

• Using the KnowledgeOwl API for info on generating an API key and using our API
• Check out our Endpoint reference for info on all of our endpoints
• Never used an API before? Check out Working with APIs for some information to help you get comfortable!

These are features that:

• Aren't generally displayed to your readers
• Allow you to classify, categorize, or audit your content or objects within your content

In short: these aren't the features that a reader (or, sadly, a manager) always get excited about, but they're the features that can save you or your content writers a lot of time, energy, and effort.

Manage Articles

Knowledge Base > Manage is our primary export tool for all article metadata. Here, you can view all articles across your entire knowledge base:

• Use a handful of pre-built standard filters based on publishing status
• Create your own custom filters using criteria of your choice (including or excluding content with specific tags, by specific authors, with a specific publishing status, restricted to certain author teams or reader groups, or created or modified within a set date range)
• Search and sort within any filter
• Export any filter to CSV and choose from over 50 different fields of data, including all the metadata fields you see in the editor, version info, rating and view info
• Bulk Edit articles to activate new versions, publish, archive, delete, add tags, and more!

The functionality within Manage Articles will help you audit, update, and report on your content.

Tags

A tag is a word or short phrase that describes an article or category. Articles and categories may have as many tags as you like. Tags can be a great way to add organization and navigation to your knowledge base.

The easiest way to think about tags is to consider them like filters for your content. These filters can be used:

• By your readers using a tag search (which begins with ":" followed by the tag name)
• As custom filters in Knowledge Base > Manage: if you're using tags for these kinds of internal filters only, you can mark tags as "hidden" so they won't show up to readers

Tags can be created in the Tags Library, created individually on the fly as you're editing content, or created in bulk by pasting a comma-separated list of tags into the editor. See Create a tag for more information.

You can merge tags that might be duplicates, and you can generate a tags usage report to see how many articles or categories your tags are added to.

Combining tags with Manage Articles filters can make for a very powerful auditing machine. For example: for this support knowledge base, we have a tag for each page within app.knowledgeowl.com. When an article references a given page (such as Settings > Widget), we add the tag for that page to the article. Then, any time we update the Settings > Widget page, we can head to Manage Articles and run a filter to show all articles that reference that page. It makes content update considerably faster and less dependent on having your content hierarchy memorized!

File Library

When you add any type of file to an article or category in your knowledge base--such as an image, PDF, or spreadsheet--that file is automatically stored in your File Library. KnowledgeOwl provides unlimited file storage for files up to 200MB.

This knowledge base-wide File Library offers a number of advantages:

• As you add more files to KnowledgeOwl, you can encourage your content creators to insert files From Library instead of uploading new every time. This encourages reuse of existing screenshots and files. (For this approach, we recommend uploading named files/screenshots rather than pasting images or screenshots in.)
• You can upload multiple files at once directly into the File Library, which can speed up content creation.
• When you need to update a file, you can head to the File Library and update the file there. This will automatically update all of the articles or categories that reference it within a few minutes.
• You can delete files from the File Library, which will remove them from the "Insert From Library" options in the editors. (You can also use File Library to restore deleted files.)

File Labels

File labels are basically tags, but for the files in your File Library. A file label is a word or short phrase that describes or categorizes a file. Files can have as many file labels as you like. They can be a great way to add organization to your file library.

The easiest way to think about file labels is to consider them like filters for your files. These filters can be used in the File Library to make it easier to find files you need quickly.

We recommend using File Labels for groups of content you like to access at once. (For example, we use them to distinguish "brand assets" like Linus logos/icons from our support screenshots.)

These are features that control what your authors or readers can see or do. These features directly relate back to the "Who" and "By whom" portions of the Purpose & audience.

As a reminder:

• An author is someone who can access app.knowledgeowl.com and create and update content, change knowledge base settings, or so forth
• A reader is someone who views your knowledge base

Custom author roles

When you assign an author to a knowledge base, you must designate what role that author has in the knowledge base. The role defines which actions the author can (and cannot) perform.

Your knowledge base comes with two pre-built author roles: Editor and Writer. An Editor can perform all actions in a knowledge base, including customizing any setting. A Writer does not have access to customize settings but can perform any action related to creating and editing content. For a more detailed breakdown of these two roles' permissions, see What is the difference between an editor and a writer?

If you have a team of authors, these two standard roles might not be nuanced enough. You can create custom author roles and assign them to individual authors, allowing you to get very fine-grained about what an author can and cannot do. (For example, customers with an internal review process will often have a role that can create and edit drafts but cannot publish or edit published articles.) If you do create custom author roles, we recommend documenting what the roles are and what permissions you gave them; templates for this documentation are included with the detailed list of custom author role permissions.

Author teams

Some knowledge bases include knowledge from different teams or departments. Sometimes, it makes sense to limit who can edit certain content, to avoid someone mistakenly editing the wrong thing. You can create author teams to help achieve this:

1. Create author teams for the content you'd like to restrict editing on.
2. Assign the relevant authors to that team.
3. Then, restrict a category, subcategory, or article to that team.

Authors who aren't a member of the team will be able to see the content, but will be prevented from editing it in any way. Authors who belong to the team will be able to edit it.

If you'd like to prevent authors from even seeing content belong to other teams, you'll want to use reader groups (see below).

Reader groups

For knowledge bases that require individual reader accounts, you can restrict access to some content by using reader groups. In this process, you:

1. Create reader groups
2. Restrict content to those groups
3. Assign individual readers to those groups

Readers who don't belong to the group won't see the restricted content anywhere; readers who do belong to the group will be able to see it as normal. You can test reader group access by using the View KB, View Category, or View Article links within the KnowledgeOwl app and then using the Change Reader Group option in the admin footer to see what different groups can see.

If you're using Single Sign-On, you can pass reader group membership over directly from your IdP, or you can set up Custom Attribute Map rules to assign SSO readers to groups.

You can also assign authors to reader groups. 🤯

By default, authors have access to all content, even that restricted to reader groups.

The one exception to this is: if you have checked one of the reader group boxes in the author's details, that author will only be able to see public content or content restricted to the group they belong to. If content exists that belongs to a group they aren't a member of, they will not be able to see it anywhere -- not in the knowledge base itself, but also nowhere in app.knowledgeowl.com, including Manage Articles, the Articles interface, the Find Articles search...it will be as if that content does not exist at all.

We mention it here because sometimes that functionality is very helpful if you are giving contractors or freelancers access to your knowledge base. You can restrict them to a "Contractors" reader group and only add that group to a very specific category of content.

If you don't mind that an author can see content, but you just want to prevent them from editing it, author teams are a much better solution.