Knowledge base plays a vital role in an IT service desk by acting as the first line of support. It guides employees to troubleshoot commonly occurring tech issues on their own. To make our knowledge base more efficient, we’ve decided to revamp the existing Solutions section in Freshservice. The enhancements that are part of the revamp will be shipped in the upcoming weeks. 


As part of the rollout, we’ve handpicked a few customers(like you) who make the best use of the solutions section in Freshservice. Your suggestions and feedback will help us refine the feature in the upcoming months. 


The first phase of the rollout will feature a brand-new editor and a table view for your solution articles. We’ve also made a few enhancements and additions to how you can organize your solution articles.

 

A Brand New Editor

We’ve built a brand new editor for the Solutions module. The new editor has a clean look, better formatting controls, and a bigger space for editing your documents.


Old editor


New editor



You can easily assign a category, folder, status, etc. without scrolling down to the bottom of the page. 


Table View for Solution Articles

The new table view in the knowledge base gives you a glimpse of all the solution articles in your service desk. You can view information such as the article title, status, number of upvotes and downvotes, etc. We’ve also added new parameters such as views and the number of times a solution article is added to a ticket. These metrics will help you stay on top of your knowledge base.




Better Navigation Between Categories and Folders

For easy navigation between categories, we’ve introduced a new sidebar from where you can switch between categories and folders to view solution articles. You can also reorder folders within a category. 



Articles, Solutions, and Categories

The Add New button also functions as a quick shortcut for creating a new solution, folder, or category. 


 


What you’ve seen until now is just the beginning. In the coming weeks, we’ll roll out new features such as knowledge base insights, approvals, review dates, bulk updates, external document search, etc.  


External Document Search


Every organization enables multiple tools for their employees to get their work done. To populate a local knowledge base with the documentation for every one of these tools results in redundant, outdated articles. 


Now you can help your users search for external articles from within your support portal. Your users can efficiently navigate to right documentation for different tools from right within your knowledge base.


How do I set it up?

  • Under ‘Add New’, click on Article from External URL.




  • Now fill in the following information to create your local link to an external documentation.



  • Click Save to save the article to the Category and the Folder. 



Once you create these local links, Freshservice will crawl that web page and index the data and will not store the content of the article within the knowledge base. Search results for keywords present on that web page will surface this article. 


You can then match the title, tags, or keywords that you provide while adding the external URL if your URL is behind an authentication wall. 


Note: 

  • The external articles added will take up to 24 hours to be indexed in Freshservice’s search. 
  • External articles will now be accessible on the chat.



Insights

You can view the list of articles in your knowledge base that need improvement. You can see the list of articles within the Insights tab. The articles are sorted with the least helpful article on top. The usefulness score of an article is calculated based on the total views, helpful and not helpful votes received by that article. The articles with a positive usefulness score is not listed under this tab.


If you want to set up approvals for your knowledge base, click here. 


Faq's


1. Is it possible to export knowledge-based solution articles?


At present, we do not provide the capability to export solution articles directly to CSV format. However, you can obtain this information in XML format. As an Account Admin, navigate to the "Account" section and access "Other Details." Here, you'll find an "Export now" button under the "Export Data" heading, allowing you to export all your Service Desk data, including solution articles, into XML format.


Alternatively, if this method is not suitable for your needs, you can utilize our APIs to retrieve solution articles in JSON format. You can find more information on accessing solution articles via APIs in the documentation provided at https://api.freshservice.com/#view_solution_article.