What’s new in Dynamics 365 – Spring 2018 – Knowledge Management

Microsoft has releases its latest iteration of Dynamics 365 – Spring 2018. I had previously written about, What's new in Sales and Customer Service. This blog focuses on an updated / new feature – Knowledge Management. I am sure this will be a useful tool for all businesses to build a knowledge management strategy. As employees transition, the knowledge repository should stay and grow as an organizational asset.

Knowledge management allows to create, search, edit, review, translate and publish knowledge articles. Knowledge articles can be any customer issues, F.A.Q’s, new business process training, how to steps that a user can search for and get benefited. Knowledge articles can include images and videos.

Use Cases for Knowledge Management –

1.       Customer Service Management - Knowledge Management is crucial for customer service / call center operations. It allows to store the steps / process for troubleshooting / resolving an issue and make it available for all users. The customer service agents can also email the knowledge article to the customer.

2.       Training – Knowledge Management can also be used for internal training. For example – there is a new sales process implemented, the Sales Manager can define the process steps in the knowledge management article and make it available on the sales entity like Opportunity or Lead. Now any Sales user can than search and refer to the knowledge article to better understand the new Sales process. Another useful feature for training is the Learning Path.

3.       In-house back-office support / IT support – In-house IT routine support calls can by minimized by providing detail troubleshooting steps to end users. So when a user searches for a particular issue like - how to reset password, the knowledge article can provide the answers.

Knowledge Management security and business process –

The knowledge management process can be managed by a user / team. There is a custom security role called Knowledge Manager created OOTB with full access to Knowledge article entity. Customer service manager and rep role users OOTB security role have the read and create capability for knowledge article. Any other users who need access to the knowledge articles (my guess is all users) should have at least read access to the knowledge articles entity.

The business process for knowledge article is shown below –

Knowledge article process

The business process flow for Knowledge article in Dynamics 365 is shown below. There are 3 stages – Author, Review and Publish. 

Business process flow

The business process stages and steps are detailed below –

1.       Author –

a.       User creates a knowledge article. The article status reason is proposed.

b.       Once created the knowledge article is given a major version 1 and minor version 0.

c.       User completes the article and marks it for review.

d.       This changes the status to in review and the bpf is moved to the next stage. Also the knowledge article can be manually assigned / sent to the Reviewer user or to Reviewer team queue (Automating this process is recommended)

Author stage

2.    Review –

The reviewer who is assigned the article can now pick the article and reviews it. If it needs modifications they can reject the article and add a reason. If they are ok with the article they can approve the same.

Review stage

If the article is rejected, the reject reason gets posted in the timeline of the article and it gets assigned back to the user who created the article.

Reject reason post

There is also an additional “Update Content” stage added to the knowledge article. 

Update Stage added

The author of the article can complete the update as needed and assign it back to the reviewer user or team for finalizing and publishing the article.

 3. Publish

If everything is correct, the reviewer add product associations and can also add an expiry date.

Publish stage

Once complete the article is ready to be published. The manager can publish the article now or on a future scheduled date. Also set the expiry date and status of the article after it expires as shown below.

Publish article

In addition to above the following functionality is also available

1.       Article translation into multiple languages

2.       Article views / analytics

3.       Article linked to records like Case

4.       Article versioning capability

Hope this helps in getting started with and implementing a knowledge management strategy. Thanks for reading.

Mihir Shah

365WithoutCode