Terms to Know

• A KB document is a single complete piece of knowledge content. A document consists of, at a minimum, a title, summary, and body, as well as relevant keywords.

• The KB Admin Tools is the editing environment for the KB. This is where you will go to create new documents, edit and manage existing documents, and manage aspects of your KB group space like settings and users.

• A group space is the sum total of your campus unit's "footprint" in the KB. It consists of your area of the KB Admin Tools, as well as the live site(s) you publish your content to.

• A live site is how we refer to the user-facing website(s) where your content is published. Most groups in the KB have two live sites—one that is external (public) and one that is internal (behind authentication).

• Most live sites are technically subsites (aka subdirectories) under your campus domain. This is true for UW-Madison, as all groups are subsites under the kb.wisc.edu domain. This means that your live site URL will look something like kb.wisc.edu/your-site-name.

• A Unified site is a central aggregator of content for a campus domain. At UW-Madison, the Unified KB is found at https://kb.wisc.edu. Groups can opt to have their external content automatically indexed in the Unified KB alongside other groups' content. Not every institution using the KB outside of UW-Madison has a Unified site.

How content moves between environments

Documents are created in the KB Admin Tools. In order to publish a document and make it available for end users to view, you must choose which site(s) you are publishing the document to, then you must make the document active, aka publish it. Publishing a document effectively "pushes" it out to your live site(s). To learn how to publish a document, please see KB User's Guide - Documents Tab - How to Create and Publish a Document.

Not only can you opt to publish a document to your own external and/or internal sites, but you can also share documents with other group's sites. This is done by establishing a sharing relationship with another group.

Regardless of where a document is published, the group that created it retains ownership of the document, and it can only be edited from that space in the KB Admin Tools.

Drafts vs published documents

When working in the KB Admin Tools, the documents you create will always be associated with at least one status. One status we've already discussed—"Active"—is used to publish documents for end users to read.

When you create a brand new document, it will first have the status "In Progress". In Progress is the most common status for draft versions of documents. The other draft status is "In Review", which is used when a document is ready to be published but first requires review or approval.

Please see KB User's Guide - Documents Tab - Status for a definition of each of the four statuses.

It is possible for a document to be published with the Active status, while also having a second draft version with either the In Progress or In Review status. In this scenario, your end users will see a different version of the document on your live site (the Active version), while authors viewing the document in the KB Admin Tools will be able to see the draft version. It is only when your draft version is re-submitted as Active that it will overwrite the previous version on your live site(s).

Please see KB Author Training - Revisions for more information on how document versions are controlled and accessed.

Archiving documents

When a document is no longer relevant and needs to be removed from your live site(s), you can archive it using the "Inactive" status. This can also be used for drafts that you decide not to publish. Inactive documents can only be accessed via the KB Admin Tools, so this status effectively archives documents you may need to reference for historic purposes.

Please see KB User's Guide - Documents Tab - Inactive Documents for more information on this status.

You also have the option to move documents to the "trash" by deleting them. Deleting a document does not actually delete the contents, but allows you differentiate between true archived documents and those whose content was never meaningful (e.g. test documents, duplicate documents, etc.). For more information on deleting documents, please see KB User's Guide - Documents Tab - Changing a Document's Status to "Deleted".