Why are my KB articles and Additional Information not visible in Request Offerings?

Csaba_Rozinyak

Hey!

Thought I'd try out the Cireson Community .

We have a few Request Offerings (3 to be precise) that contain KB articles (4 on total). The articles are specifically customized for the individual Request Offerings. These are KBs created via the SCSM console (Library) that are attached to the Request Offering via the built-in Request Offering console wizard. Regardless of whether a simple text is pasted into the KB article directly or whether the KB article contains a SharePoint link (pointing to for instance a PDF), the Request Offering for some reason won't show the Additional Information section at all in any of these offerings. This did not use to be the case but I am not sure when this started. We have upgraded from v3.7 to 5 recently though.

The portal we are using is version 5.0.10, both in production and pre-production.

All links in the KB articles are valid and they open the specified file when directly opening outside of the offerings. The files referred are placed on SharePoint sites that are generally available for anyone.

Setting Items in Admin Settings - the way I can see it - does not contain any setting to limit Knowledge Articles or to hide the Additional Information section, but we do not seem to have any difference in any setting between production and pre-production. Yet in pre-production I can see the Additional Information section. So the problem only persists in production, and seemingly only on the Cireson portal.

For the purpose of approvals we are still keeping the old MS portal alive. When opening the Request Offerings there I can see the related KB articles among "help articles" that are related to the offerings. Of course these behave in a different way by design so I do not expect an Additional Information section to show up, but the relation can be seen there.

According to the release notes of 5.0.5 the following has been an issue earlier but I am not sure if it means the exact same thing:

IR43115 - SCSM KBs linked to RequestOffering are not linked appropriately

Of course it should not be relevant for us in v5.0.10.

I haven't found any relevant content on the Community or on the Cireson support portal.

Anyone with any ideas?

Kind regards,

Csaba

Tony_Collett

Knowledge Base Articles in the Console are independent to the Knowledge Base provided by Cireson Portal. If you want to link a KB article to a Request Offering, you will need to create the KB Article in the Portal and link it to the request offering using 'Related Items' in the Knowledge Base Article edit page

Csaba_Rozinyak

Hello Tony, thank you for your response. We are aware that Cireson delivers a separate Knowledge Base solution but we have never used it yet the KB articles DO show up in Additional Information without linking them using Related Items as you described above. As I also mentioned previously we are running the same version (5.0.10) of the portal in both production AND pre-production, and in pre-production it does show up without using the Knowledge Base solution provided specifically for the Cireson Portal. We still find this very odd. We have a workaround in which we create an HTML link and put it under Instructions including a help text, however this is not the expected behaviour and therefore we think the root cause of the problem must be elsewhere.