Part 1 of this series gave your workers a Knowledgebase where they can create new articles, edit existing ones, or search the KB for information when responding to customers. At this point you can use the KB, as is, for your internal use or you could expand its audience by opening it up to the public. To do this you need to set up a Community Tool where your users can explore and search the KB through a public-facing web site. To create a KB community tool, click ‘helpdesk setup’, the ‘Community Tools’ tab and add a new ‘Public Knowledgebase’.

Note the Support Center also has a KB module, however the ‘Public Knowledgebase’ tool is strictly for the KB and the KB only, so I’m going to focus just on that. Access the configuration page by clicking ‘Public Knowledgebase’ in the left “Communities” column.

There are only a few options you need to worry about, the ‘URL’ and the “Public Topics”, the rest you can leave as default if you wish. Community Tools are independent of the Helpdesk interface and should be installed in a unique directory on your web server. It could really be anywhere, in its own sub-directory or on a separate web server — as long as it’s publicly accessible that’s all that matters. So for example if your Helpdesk is installed at /localhost/cerb4/ then you could install it at /localhost/cerb4/kb . The file path you choose gives the KB its own unique URL that you’ll want to include in the ‘URL’ field.

The “Public Topics” correspond to which top-level KB categories are exposed to your users. So any articles in this category and its sub-categories will be available to the public at large.

After you save your changes, the last step is to actually install the KB on your web server. Copy and paste the contents of ‘index.php’ into a index.php file on your web server, e.g. /localhost/cerb4/kb/index.php , and you’re done with setup. The KB community tool is now ready for your users.

To check out what your users will see, visit the Knowledgebase URL in your web browser. You can drill down into the public categories, search for articles, print out any information you need, and subscribe to the most “recent changes” feed.

Unless you want to expose more categories to the public, you never need to mess with the KB configuration again. If you do, simply add more topics from the ‘Community Tools’ tab and save changes, the index.php file will update automatically so you don’t have to re-copy and paste. Just keep adding new articles to the KB through the internal Helpdesk interface (see part 1), and you continue to extend your informational resources out to both your workers and your users.

-joegeck@wgm