lost the abilty to permalink to KB

[itbackoffice]

Hopefully I'm wrong here but it seems another really useful feature of version 3 has vanished when moving to version 4....No ability to hyperlink to KB articles?

This is making the KB unusable for us as we always email links for people to refer too when they are experiencing technical issues that we've documented a fix on....

[jstanden]

Hey there,

Add your knowledgebase to Fetch & Retrieve, and when you search for the articles you'll get links to include in replies.

The reason this doesn't happen from the knowledgebase directly is you can have any number of 'Community Tools' exposing KB topics to various websites. Cerb4 itself doesn't know which one you'd intend to use. There's also no guarantee Cerb would know what URL you deployed tools to (they can go anywhere; that's the point).

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Fetch_%26..._Knowledgebase

Thanks!

[wils]

I also miss access to the permalinks from within the GUI (have not found it if its there).

I note its possible to get the permalink it in human readable format if logging in as a customer, it would be nice to have the same access from within.

Regarding F & R: I was trying to use the example in

http://wiki.cerb4.co/wiki/Fetch_%26_..._Knowledgebase

but on a password protected KB. Any idea?

[joegeck]

Originally Posted by wils

I also miss access to the permalinks from within the GUI (have not found it if its there).

I note its possible to get the permalink it in human readable format if logging in as a customer, it would be nice to have the same access from within.

Yep, I don't think you're missing anything here unfortunately. From what I can tell, proper URL links are only available from public KB articles in the Support Center (e.g. http://www.cerberusweb.com/support/kb/article/000001) and NOT internally through the worker KB in 'research'. After double checking myself, I believe all you get is a full link to the topic itself, which will show the worklist with all the KB articles in it. However, clicking into an article opens up a (peek) window for editing without changing the base URL.

Originally Posted by wils

Regarding F & R: I was trying to use the example in

http://wiki.cerb4.co/wiki/Fetch_%26_..._Knowledgebase

but on a password protected KB. Any idea?

Great question. I was about to blame it on a deprecated article, but the F&R cookbook should still be relevant. Let me ask a developer, Dan@WGM (Hildy), and see if it's something obvious he can point you to.

[joegeck]

Originally Posted by wils

Regarding F & R: I was trying to use the example in

http://wiki.cerb4.co/wiki/Fetch_%26_..._Knowledgebase

but on a password protected KB. Any idea?

Well that was a much quicker turnaround than I expected, but I was able to get a hold of Dan@WGM and it doesn't look good for this one. Apparently there's no clean way to get around the password protection. His only suggestion was maybe an IP-allow from the Cerberus server to the KB server so it doesn't ask for a password when the request originates from there. Beyond trying that he didn't have much else to offer in the way of advice.

[wils]

After thinking some more regarding F&R, there is no point using it for us, as F&R no longer will catch KB articles automagically (using tags).

[as a general comment I think too much emphasis has been put on the F&R, whereas KB functionality has been deprecated - tags, permalinks, private/public]

Back to the topic of this thread. In summary what I'm missing is:

- a way to point a customer to the KB = permalink (we want them to go to the KB, and look it up to get familiar with this way of working, instead of us pasting the contents in the ticket, also allows for changes on the fly)

- a KB reference, ie a number. Before, I could Skype my colleagues, "look at KB00567", and they could find it easily by using:

http://domain.com/cerb/knowledgebase...entry&kbid=567

I got the number in 3.6 by looking at the javascript link javascript:PopupResource(###), not this is gone.

My suggestion is to add a human readable ID to each article, show it in the article listing, in the KB editor, and also implement a "Go to article#" in the support center.

[joegeck]

Originally Posted by wils

After thinking some more regarding F&R, there is no point using it for us, as F&R no longer will catch KB articles automagically (using tags).

We talked about this before in Town Hall, but unfortunately as I mentioned tags are out. There's no tagging system for the Knowledgebase at all and no immediate plans to change that. The one feature request for it is on the wishlist...

[Tags] Re-introduce a tagging system similar to 3.x for the KB and tickets
http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD-920

Originally Posted by wils

[as a general comment I think too much emphasis has been put on the F&R, whereas KB functionality has been deprecated - tags, permalinks, private/public]

From not following the history of the product super closely I could see why you'd feel that way, but believe me it's the exact opposite. F&R was deprecated and brought back as an optional plugin because too many people preferred it over the Google Search Engine (GSE) plugin we were trying to replace it with. So whether or not the KB is further developed has little to anything to do with the forward progress of F&R. (Plus, remember the last post from Jeff@WGM was about a year ago and things have changed...)

Anyway, you can read about our past history and feelings on the subject through the blog.

http://www.cerb4.com/blog/2009/06/02..._improvements/ -- it's mentioned right about the middle of the write-up, and debated in the comments.

Speaking of the GSE, it's worth checking out to see if it's a better fit for you. Unfortunately I'm not positive a) how it works with password-protected sites, b) if it'll give you some kind of permalink for your KB articles.

http://wiki.cerb4.com/wiki/Plugin:Google_Custom_Search

Originally Posted by wils

Back to the topic of this thread. In summary what I'm missing is:

- a way to point a customer to the KB = permalink (we want them to go to the KB, and look it up to get familiar with this way of working, instead of us pasting the contents in the ticket, also allows for changes on the fly)

This might be a stretch and maybe I'm not reading enough into this enough, but is there any reason your workers can't search the public KB through the Support Center like the customers do to find the permalinks? As we talked about a few posts ago, the SC does have permalinks even if the IDs themselves don't "make sense". Now I know it's not as convenient as using the built-in KB search tool found in the reply box, or directly browsing the internal KB in the 'research' menu, but the "capability" is there albeit in a different place. If it's a convenience thing I can sympathize with that, but I want to make sure you're not overlooking the workarounds.

Originally Posted by wils

- a KB reference, ie a number. Before, I could Skype my colleagues, "look at KB00567", and they could find it easily by using:

http://domain.com/cerb/knowledgebase...entry&kbid=567

I got the number in 3.6 by looking at the javascript link javascript:PopupResource(###), not this is gone.

My suggestion is to add a human readable ID to each article, show it in the article listing, in the KB editor, and also implement a "Go to article#" in the support center.

Here I have no alternative suggestions, the idea of a more "accurate" ID number in the public KB URLs is something that's come up in the forums. However that's really where the conversation ended on that one, we never discussed adding an ID in the actual display page. I'll check with a developer to see if there's a logical reason functional IDs are being excluded.

EDIT: I just noticed you filed this in JIRA yourself. That's fine by all means, but next time put a linkback each way for my convenience. Normally I personally am the one that would transfer something to JIRA which I was just about to do, but you saved me the trouble. Plus it helps in the off-chance the request is implemented, I can find this forum and let everyone not watching JIRA know too

Permalink ID functionality for KB articles
http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD-1643