Glossaries are useful to understand the meaning of terms relevant to the contents of of your KB site. The KB glossary is easy to use and there are a few ways to access it and display terms your KB pages.
From the KB Admin Tools, navigate to the Documents tab > New Glossary Item link.
This will lead to the Creating a New Glossary Item screen. The image below shows part of the Creating a New Glossary Item screen. Toward the bottom of the image is the Type dropdown menu circled in red. In this screen, this field defaults to the Glossary option.
There are only two required fields, the Term and the Body. After selecting whether you want this item to be found in the Internal/ or External KB sites, complete all other applicable fields and select Submit to save your work.
You *may* create a Glossary item from the New Doc link. Navigate to KB Admin Tools > Documents tab > Creating a New Document link; fill in the appropriate fields and select the Glossary type from the dropdown menu. Please be mindful to complete the four required fields: Title, Keywords, Summary and Body. After selecting whether you want this item to be found in the Internal/ or External KB sites, click the Submit button to save your work.
The image above shows the Creating a New Document screen with the Type dropdown circled in red. The Type field defaults to Document in this screen. You must select Glossary from the dropdown menu to create a Glossary item. While you can, indeed, create a Glossary item using this screen, we do not recommend it, because you will need to complete a number of required fields, some of which will not "carry over" when you switch from the defaulted Document type to the Glossary type.
Under the Documents tab, when Glossary Items are listed with other types of documents, the Title column will contain the name of the Glossary Item followed by "[Glossary]" to help distinguish these items from normal KB documents.
When searching by "Type" and selecting "Glossary" from the drop down menu, you will see only the glossary terms, their definitions, and options to activate all on one screen. You may activate/ inactivate multiple Glossary Items all at once. Glossary review options are the same as those of regular documents.
Regular KB search results include Glossary items which are set to the status of Active. Glossary items will appear in the search results just like other documents. The image below shows a search on a Live Site for the term "SharePoint". The search yields 6 results. Items 3 and 6 are circled in red are Glossary items found among the documents yielded from the search.
Clicking on the Glossary Item link in the search table will yield a window with the Glossary Item and Definition, Glossary Search Bar and Glossary Search Bar: Select Topic, along with Indexed Glossary Browsing. The image below displays a Glossary Item link clicked from a search in the Live Site. The SharePoint Glossary Item and Definition is displayed. From this screen, you may search for other Glossary Items by entering a specific term in the Glossary search box and/or selecting a Topic from the dropdown menu.
Groups that have Glossary items may want to place a Glossary link in their KB side modules. Please know that you need Admin permissions to manipulate Side Modules.
In the example below, we have created a Side Module called "For Your Reference" that will only appear in the internal site.
glossary.php
in the Link URL field.In any document, you can use the IncludeDoc tag on a glossary item. The term will appear in the document (which we will refer to here as the container document, the document which contains the embedded Glossary term) with a dashed underline. Hovering over it will reveal the definition in a tooltip. The cursor will appear as question mark icon upon mouse-over.
When embedding a glossary term in a document (e.g. the container document, as it contains the IncludeDoc glossary term), please include the glossary term, itself, in the Keywords field of the container document.
The reason for this is: when a search is performed on the KB, it looks for text in the keywords field/ or body of the document. Only the document ID of the glossary term will be found in the body of the container document, not the actual glossary term itself.