notifications for KB article comments

Silas_Sulser

We love Ciresons knowledge base and we've already created more than 500 articles in it.

As you know there is a comment function where users can leave comments about an article.

Thats pretty nice but almost useless, because nobody would monitor these comments manually (I know that I can sort all articles by the number of comments in the kb manager Dashboard, but that's absolutely not convenient).

We've had cases where users made important comments about obsolete article contents, but we were not aware of the existence of these comments.

They asked us why we don't change that content and that was the moment where we even recognized that there were comments.

My suggestion: please implement a feature which sends a simple message to the owner of an article, to inform the author, that there is a new comment.

Otherwise it would even make more sense to disable that feature because its kind of missleading.

Thanks and best regards

Silas

Adam_Dzyacky

Ended up disabling comments because of the lack of workflow.
+1

Silas_Sulser

thanks for your support @Adam_Dzyacky ! Sometimes I'm confused if i'm the only one who has such problems ^^ But actually I'm not.

Tom_Hendricks

I am considering the same, but being stubborn and just monitoring them using a view for now.  Having the same thought as you, but the number of comments is small enough that this is small enough for me to limp along for the time being.

Wendy_Craig

We removed them as well and added a link from every KA to a request offering to leave Knowledge Article feedback. Definitely much clunkier for the users, but the only way we can be sure we'll see the comment that was left. We had cases where users would ask for help in the comments, which was misguided, but from their side it looked as if we had completely ignored them. It was safer for us to disable them, which is a shame.

Sean_Terry

Great idea.

Ryan_Kolter

We would also like this.

Silas_Sulser

Hi folks
I'm sorry to tell you, that we dont need this feature any longer.
Due to a lack of functions in Cireson KB, we moved all of our articles (about 800) to confluence.
Cireson KB might work for small companies, but I dont think it is an option for bigger companies.
We missed the following functions:

• auto-save
• WYSIWYG HTML-Editor (especially dealing with tables is awful in Cireson KB)
  
• comment workflow
• option to resize inserted images
• option to set more specific access-rights
• easy way to reorder categories (this one is also reeeeally annoying if you have to deal with a lot of sub categories, no way to sort by alphabet etc...)
• option to attach any files (for example PDF-manuals from a supplyer etc.)
• drag and drop for images, files etc
• easy way to export a normal, good-looking PDF (issue: https://community.cireson.com/discussion/1909/pdf-generator-button-in-knowledgebase#latest)
• templates to predefine any standard
• option to clear formatting (this one is also very annoying! you always have to copy a certain text to notepad first, to lose formatting..)
• be able to put in a lot of high resolution images (it crashes, if you want to save it, or at least when you want to view it, very annoying if you had a lot of work to set up such an article)

This is constructive criticism, if you could implement that, Im sure more people would use it.

Wendy_Craig

We have also stopped using Knowledge Articles, for many of the same reasons, and are keeping our Knowledge Article content in a separate platform. It's not ideal, especially because we're recreating content somewhere else, but the Knowledge Articles aren't usable enough for us.

Sean_Terry

Wendy_Craig said:

We have also stopped using Knowledge Articles, for many of the same reasons, and are keeping our Knowledge Article content in a separate platform. It's not ideal, especially because we're recreating content somewhere else, but the Knowledge Articles aren't usable enough for us.

Same here. In our organisation it is kept on the Intranet which isn't always easy to find what is needed. It's a shame because this has potential but never gets enough votes. If all the different ideas were merged it may have enough votes and be a major improvement.

Wendy_Craig

Ditto - we moved it to the Intranet where it's sometimes buried and people can't search it as easily as they would be able to in Cireson. I think the Knowledge Articles are a great idea, but have been poorly implemented. 

Tom_Hendricks

Some of us are still using the HTML KB, but actively weighing the pros and cons of either sticking with it despite its flaws or figuring out how/if to integrate with something else.

Search is the biggest problem, currently.  Typing exact phrases found in the title or body might get the desired articles into the middle or bottom of the top 50 results, and that is if you are particularly lucky that day.  People here are generally accepting (not to be conflated with happiness) of the shortcomings with editing the articles, but search is the source of constant and escalating complaints.

Having said that, I have received complaints about nearly every item in @Silas_Sulser 's list at one time or another over the last few years, so I do not disagree and would love to see improvement there, as well.  Those people who are dealing with the shortcomings would be delighted if they were addressed.

I suspect much of this is actually an indictment of the Kendo Editor control that is used for creating content, or the way in which it was implemented.  Perhaps moving to markdown, as seen in GitHub, TFS, and MediaWiki might be a way to get higher satisfaction without trying to re-engineer a 4th-party control or match its features with something custom?  It seems that markdown could be implemented more simply without giving up much functionality or changing much of the rest of the system.

Mat_Barnier

If anyone is interested I have a SQL Trigger function that will generate an email to nominated user/group or the owner of the KB Article when a comment is made, has all the details in the body text. Was looking for this myself and saw the thread, did not see a solution to it and I  needed it, so did it with a Trigger, happy to share.

Konstantin_Slavin-Bo

@Mat_Barnier

That sound very useful, I would be grateful if you'd share that.

Tom_Hendricks

@Mat_Barnier I would also be very interested.  This is something I was beginning to look at but really do not have the time to pursue for a while.

Mat_Barnier

Here it is, no warranties or otherwise. Expect you can read it and can adapt as required. Need to have the DB Mail configured on SQL Server obviously too. Works just fine.

CREATE TRIGGER MailUser ON ServiceManagement.dbo.KnowledgeArticle$Comment

   AFTER INSERT AS

   BEGIN

    -- If updating delete the trigger first by running then run this script to install TRIGGER

    -- USE ServiceManagement

   -- DROP TRIGGER MailUser

    -- Also installing service account needs to be able to run triggers so set with appropriate service account substituted below (once off)

    -- EXEC sp_ADdRoleMember 'DatabaseMailUserRole','DEV\svc-SM-CiresonCB"

       -- Decalare variables used in processing the query and populating the email payload

          DECLARE @Comment sysname;

          DECLARE @CreatedDate sysname;

          DECLARE @EmailBody nvarchar(4000);

          DECLARE @RelationshipID sysname;

          DECLARE @KnowledgeArticleId sysname;

          DECLARE @Title sysname;

          DECLARE @CreateByName nvarchar(100);  

          DECLARE @CreateById nvarchar(100);  

          DECLARE @OwnerName nvarchar(100);  

          DECLARE @OwnerId nvarchar(100); 

          DECLARE @Subject nvarchar(100);

          DECLARE @Rating sysname;

          DECLARE @UserGUID sysname;

          DECLARE @OwnerEmail sysname;

       -- Get keys from the Inserted row

          SET        @RelationshipID = (SELECT RelationshipID from INSERTED);

          SET        @KnowledgeArticleID = (SELECT KnowledgeArticleID from INSERTED);

-- SET @KnowledgeArticleID = 7

-- SET @RelationshipID = 37

          -- Query the Cireson KB database tables and get the data, users etc and populate into the variables declared using key from inserted row

             

          SELECT     @Title = KnowledgeArticle.Title,

                           @Comment = KnowledgeArticle$Comment.Comment,

                           @CreatedDate = KnowledgeArticle$Comment.CreatedDate,

                           @OwnerId = CI$User_1.UserName,

                           @OwnerName = CI$User_1.DisplayName,

                           @CreateByName = CI$User.DisplayName,

                           @CreateById = CI$User.UserName,

                           @UserGUID = CI$User.Id,

                           @OwnerEmail = CI$User_1.EmailAddress1

          FROM              KnowledgeArticle

                           INNER JOIN KnowledgeArticle$Comment ON KnowledgeArticle.ArticleID = KnowledgeArticle$Comment.KnowledgeArticleID

                           INNER JOIN CI$User ON KnowledgeArticle$Comment.UserID = CI$User.Id

                           LEFT OUTER JOIN CI$User AS CI$User_1 ON KnowledgeArticle.Owner = CI$User_1.Id

          WHERE            KnowledgeArticle$Comment.RelationshipID = @RelationshipID

         

          -- Set created date to local time zone from UTC SQL Storage

             

          SET @CreatedDate = (Select DATEADD(MILLISECOND,DATEDIFF(MILLISECOND,getutcdate(),GETDATE()), @CreatedDate) as UTC_To_LocalTime)

      

          -- Get Users rating for this article if any

          SET @Rating = (SELECT Rating FROM KnowledgeArticle$Rating

                         WHERE KnowledgeArticleID = @KnowledgeArticleID

                         AND UserID = @UserGUID)

        -- Check KB Owner and set address for notification, KB Owner or owerride 

        IF (@OwnerName IS NULL)

        BEGIN

         SET @OwnerName = 'No Owner';

         SET @OwnerId = ' ';

         SET @OwnerEmail = 'mat@systemology.com.au'

        END

        -- Or Override recipient - Clear it for notify owner of article

        SET @OwnerEmail = 'mat@systemology.com.au'

        -- Set the email payload variables

       

        SET @Subject = 'Knowledge Article Comment: ' + @KnowledgeArticleID

          SET @EmailBody = 'Article ID:' + @KnowledgeArticleID + CHAR(13) + CHAR(13)  +

                     'Title: ' + @Title + CHAR(13) + CHAR(13)  +

                     'Created date: ' + @CreatedDate + CHAR(13) + CHAR(13) +

                     'User Making Comment: ' + @CreateByName + '(' + @CreateById + ')' + CHAR(13) + CHAR(13) +

                     'Article Owner: ' + @OwnerName + '(' + @OwnerId + ')'  + CHAR(13)  + CHAR(13) +

                     'User Rating: ' + @Rating + CHAR(13) + CHAR(13) +

                     'Comments: ' + @Comment

          -- Send the email through the SMTP gateway  

          -- Can send notification to Article Owner by using @recipients = @OwnerEmail,

          EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail 

                     @profile_name = 'DB Mail', 

                     @recipients = @OwnerEmail,

                     @body = @EmailBody ,

                     @subject = @Subject;

END

GO

Silas_Sulser

@Mat_Barnier : Thanks for your solution! Be careful, your mail address is still in the code.