In a few of my past blog posts, I have shown how to use Articles in Dynamics CRM 2011, including: The Lifecycle of an Article, How to Create an Article, and How to Create and Edit an Article Template. While these show how to use some of the basic functions of an Article, I also want to show the steps you should take before you decide to Create or Approve an Article.
Depending on your security roles, certain users can create and approve Articles. This is so you can restrict who can actually publish Articles (such as a service manager), but still let other users inside your organization create Articles.
The main use of Articles is so that one person with knowledge on a topic can write the document, and then anyone else inside the organization can use the Article to help a customer. This saves getting the person with knowledge on the subject to deal with every issue.
When you come to writing an Article, you should be thinking of topics or problems that customers have had in the past, or that you can see happening in the future. A good way to think of this is FAQ’s. Once you are happy that the Article covers the problem, you can submit it for approval.
Once an Article is submitted it needs to be approved. When approving an Article you should be checking that the Article provides a solution to the given question or problem, and that it does so in a way that anyone can understand it. A good way to test this is get someone with little knowledge on the subject to go through the Article to see if they can follow it.
At this stage you can Approve the Article if it covers the problem is such a way that it can be easily understood, or if the Article needs changing you can Reject it, and provide a detailed reason why it has not been approved.
However while the Article is in an unapproved state, it can still be edited. So for minor changes such as spelling and grammar, the Approver can just change it themselves without having to reject it and getting the author to fix the small errors.
Finally, after approving the Article it will be published, and can be used on emails for support purposes. If for any reason you need to make a change to the article after it has been published, you will need to unpublish it to make the changes, and then go through the approval process again.
That’s all there is to it. If you stick to these simple guidelines you will soon have a very powerful knowledge base that anyone in your organization can use to help a customer with a problem.
Stay tuned until next week when I will be showing how to comment on an Article in Dynamics CRM 2011.