5.1Hide the Current and Already Related Kbas from the Relating Process

5.1Hide the current and already related KBAs from the relating process

Business Case:

One of the powerful pieces of functionality within RKM and MyIT is the ability to relate knowledge to each other. This helps end-users via MyIT and technicians within ITSM to find content related to each other which saves time and is more efficient. It would prove beneficial for DLA to relate as much content to each other as possible.

During our process of relating articles, we found that the process is prone to error based on how it works and the amount of content you have to relate. This is based around 2 issues. First, if you select an article from the list that is already related, an error occurs. Second, if you were relating several articles at once and encounter the error, the process ends where it failed causing you to have to find out what work and what didn't because if you accidentally select one that did work, an error occurs again.

Here we attempt to relate Skype articles to each other in our test environment. There is one KBA already related.

Here we select the KBAs we want to relate. While in this example there was only one previously related KBA, imagine a situation where there were several KBAs already related and we have to relate the rest such as what we find in our production environment. Notice the KBA that was already related is 2nd from last.

After clicking relate:

After the first article relates, the 2nd errors because it is already related and the process ends where the error occurred.

We must identify the ones that didn’t complete from the same list without an easy way to tell. Imagine again an environment that had a lot of KBAs or were relating a much larger list. What if this happened to you more than once? It is very easy to lose track and this becomes a laborious process.

We identify the KBA that wasn’t related and select it and complete the relating process.