Knowledge articles are articles that are written and maintained by Service Desk technicians and are a way of providing your staff and/or customers with a clear and common understanding of your services. They can be internal only or made available to your customers via the Customer Portal, allowing you to keep your staff and customers in the know by sharing insights and experiences of your services.

Like other Service Desk records, knowledge articles can be linked to incidents, problems, changes, releases and even other knowledge articles. You can also create tasks to help in the drafting and review process for new articles.

Knowledge management helps to identify, create and share service related insights, experiences and initiatives to staff, customers (where appropriate) and your organization. When implemented effectively it helps move knowledge from the individual to the organization as a whole. It can also act as a resource for customer self-service, freeing up your service desk and reducing incident rates and resolution times. An in-depth description of knowledge management can be found on Wikipedia's ITIL page. Read our blog 'Getting Started with Knowledge Articles'

Administrators can configure knowledge article settings to suit the organization's needs. The settings for knowledge articles can be managed on a per-service basis, as detailed in the following related articles:

• Set Categories
• Add Custom Fields
• Set Up Triggers
• Create, Configure and Manage Services

Learn how to create, publish and remove knowledge articles as well.

Objective: Providing your staff and/or customers with a clear and common understanding of your services

Knowledge management helps to identify, create and share service-related insights, experiences and initiatives to staff, customers (where appropriate) and your organization. When implemented effectively, knowledge management helps move knowledge from the individual to the organization as a whole. It can also act as a resource for customer self-service, freeing up your service desk and reducing incident rates and resolution times.

The following are examples of information you might publish as Knowledge Articles:

• Overviews of business processes and services provided to your customers
• Training material for each of your services
• Policies or procedures for using or changing your services
• Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about your business processes and services
• “How To” guides and articles