It’s great when you’ve got tools to use for creating valuable help texts that will be useful for your customers. They don’t have to bother your contact lines just to ask about something so basic; you can simply create a help center with articles about your company and FAQs to help your customers seeking quick-to-find information.
Salesforce Knowledge is one such tool for creating help articles that you may publish on the platform and on your personal company website. In Knowledge, it’s actually easy to create and publish high-quality articles that will surely be of help to your end customers.
Creating your help texts requires the creation of article types as well. This post will give you an overview of Article Types in Salesforce Knowledge.
Article Types Defined
An article type helps you control what kind of fields to be used in the articles, and what specific information is needed inside these fields. Article types also helps you manage how your published article is displayed.
Article Type Details
When you create article types, you’ll be asked to fill in the following detail information:
- Label – Refers to the article type name that will be used to reference the article type in Salesforce user interfaces.
- Plural Label – a plural name for the previously defined Label.
- Gender – Specifies the label’s gender, as appropriate.
- Starts with a vowel sound – Lets you set your labels if they should be preceded by “an” instead of “a”.
- Object Name – This is the article type name to be used in referring to the object under the Force.com API platform.
- Description – This is an optional description of the article type. While it may be optional, this is highly recommended to help you determine differences in each of the article types you’ll be creating and viewing on a list.
- Track Field History – This option is used when you want to track your article’s full history, including its versions.
- Deployment Status – When set to In Development, article managers cannot choose this article type when creating new articles. Select Deployed once you’re through with creating this new article type.
In summary, article types are special controls that let you define how your articles will be displayed. It also delineates the fields and related information that needs to be used in the particular articles you are creating.