Knowledge articles, an added feature in SAP CRM 7.0, behave like standard one order objects. They can be very useful to an organization, and SAP CRM 7.0 supports various features and functions related to knowledge articles, including:

• Categorization of knowledge articles, which facilitates faster searches for specific information
• The option to link various documents (e.g., uniform resource locators such as Web sites and portal help links) to a knowledge article as attachments
• The authorization scope functionality, which allows you to restrict access to certain knowledge articles
• The ability to maintain knowledge articles in multiple languages. For example, SAP NetWeaver Search and Classification (TREX) currently supports knowledge base searches in 15 languages.

Knowledge articles are also configured like one order objects, so they can support the following standard features:

• Text determination procedure
• Status profiles
• Partner determination procedure
• Action profiles
• Date profiles

In this article, I expand on all these features except for action and date profiles, which are standard one order functions.

Text Determination Procedure

The standard knowledge article supports the text types shown in Figure 1. You can add new text types as required by your organization and maintain each text type as language dependent, which means that each text type can be saved in multiple languages.

Status Profile

The standard SAP CRM 7.0 system provides the status profile CRMKNOAR with the following statuses:

• Draft
• In revision
• Published
• Obsolete
• Cancelled

You can define additional custom statuses if you wish. The knowledge article search searches all of these statuses, and it does not omit obsolete or cancelled knowledge articles. If you need to search for an article based on a particular status, you could enter that status as search criteria. If you would like to filter out certain statuses completely from your results, you can pass that as a parameter to the query using custom logic. For example, you can enhance the view CRM_KNOWART_S/KASearchView and method EH_ONSEARCH of the implementation class to add the code in Figure 2 as a search parameter (Figure 2).

This code can be useful if you are using auto-suggest functionality and you do not want to use obsolete or cancelled knowledge articles. You can use the same code in the corresponding workbench component to remove unnecessary items from search results, but the steps to perform this are beyond the scope of this article.

Partner Determination Procedure

SAP CRM 7.0 defines the partner determination procedure KNOWART. Partner determination is a standard feature in one order objects that helps to automatically determine the partners in any transaction (e.g., the person creating the knowledge article becomes the author). The following partner functions are available automatically, but you can customize and add other entries if you wish:

• Employee Responsible
• Reporter
• Author
• Knowledge Manager
• Reviewer

Authorization Scope

  Authorization scope is a new customizing option available only for knowledge articles—it is not available in any other types of transactions. You can use authorization scope to restrict knowledge article use to a particular set of people (e.g., for internal purposes only). Start by following menu path Customizing IMG > Customer Relationship Management > Master Data > Knowledge Article > Define Authorization Scopes (Figure 3). Next, go to the SPRO menu Customer Relationship Management > Transactions > Basic Settings > Define Transaction Types and assign this authorization domain (i.e., KNOWLEDGEARTICLE) to the transaction type by entering it in the Auth. Domain field (Figure 4).     Once this assignment is done, you can control the creation or search of the knowledge articles using authorization object CRM_AUTHSC.

TREX Setup

The knowledge article search functionality works as a standard order search unless TREX is set up. If TREX is not set up, the system takes only the following parameters under consideration:

• Process type
• Posting date
• Changed at date
• Object ID

Therefore, it is useful to set up the TREX server for knowledge articles so that the search is more effective with keywords, categorization data, and so on. To search with TREX, the settings you need to make are found by following menu path Customer Relationship Management > Enterprise Intelligence > Software Agent Framework (Figure 5). First, click Name and Configure Search Engine.

Enter the Search Engine Name (Figure 6). For the purposes of this article, I entered the name STANDARD.

In the next screen in the wizard, enter the Search Engine Type. Select the EXTENDED Program Extended Search Engine and enter the relevant information for Communication Type and Process Class (Figure 7).

In the next screen, you can maintain knowledge articles for the languages you need and then continue through the wizard to complete the process (Figure 8). Do not change any other settings. Next, you need to configure the compilation. For this example, enter the index name KA and select the language required for compilation (Figure 9). You can also define the schedule for the delta compilation duration (Figure 10). Any new knowledge articles that are created are compiled and indexed based on the schedule that you provide. I recommend setting this job to run once a day.

In the next screen that appears, configure the application by entering the Application Name as KA and selecting your preferred language (Figure 11).

Next, skip the rest of the steps and maintain the search query parameters as shown in Figure 12 to complete the process.

Create Knowledge Articles

Click the New button in a search results list to create a new knowledge article (Figure 13). When you create a knowledge article, you can categorize it as a pre-defined categorization schema by providing specific keywords that can be used for search and various text types, such as Problem Description and Solution Description. It is also possible to add various attachments to the knowledge articles, much like you can with a one order transaction. This is useful for various tasks, such as when you maintain your Internet settings in a Word document. You could attach this document to a knowledge article that is sent to an end user. In addition, the Adminstration tab allows you to assign a status, authorization scope, priority, and validity dates, as shown in Figure 14 (the lower half of the screen in Figure 13).

Compile Knowledge Articles

  After you have completed the steps described above, reset the number range for the knowledge article by following these steps:

• Enter transaction code SNRO
• Open the number object CRM_KA
• Edit the object so that the Buffering setting is X Main Memory Buffering and the No. Numbers in Buffer setting is 1 (Figure 15). This step is important because the TREX compilation sometimes fails with the error message “multiple operations failed” due to additional numbers stored in the buffer.

Next, navigate to the CRM WebClient UI in either the IC_SSC_AGENT or IC_AGENT role and create a knowledge article in the required language. Then, log back in to the CRM WebClient UI with the IC_MANAGER role and follow menu path Knowledge Management > Create: SAF Compilation Administration. Filter by Knowledge Search: Interaction Center WebClient, select the appropriate row (i.e., KA with the language you previously selected for it), and select Compile Completely from the Action drop-down menu (Figure 16). Once complete compilation has occurred, you can select the action Compile Changes Only for the new knowledge article. If the TREX index is corrupted at any stage, select the Delete Index option and then the Compile Completely option from the drop-down menu.

Search for Knowledge Articles

Workbench component CRM_KNOWART_S is available for searching knowledge articles, and you can add it to the navigation bar profile using the logical link IC_KNOWS. You can search for knowledge articles based on various parameters (Figure 17). Along with results based on these paramaters, the search results show all open transactions in the current session so that it is convenient to add them to the transaction. After the search results display, click the articles you require and attach them via the Add to Cart button. Now the knowledge article is transferred as a related article in the selected transaction (i.e., the one available in the Reference drop-down menu in Figure 17). In addition, when you click the Add to Cart button, you can send articles via email (Figure 18). The email contains all data on the knowledge article as a PDF attachment. Now that have seen how to use knowledge articles for existing knowledge within your organization, you can efficiently reduce the time it takes to help customers or employees with known issues.