One of the drawbacks of Knowledge Management prior to Serena Request Center 5.2 was that articles had to be published one at a time from the user interface. This made importing articles impractical for some use cases and programmatic article creation impossible. The reason for this is that our only interface to publish articles was a REST interface which could not be called in an orchestration. SBM 10.1.3 introduced the RESTCaller, which added the ability needed to publish in an orchestration. As of version 5.2 we introduced an ability to mass publish articles and a workflow and methodology for doing bulk importing of articles.

If you are on an earlier version of Serena Request Center you can add this to your process application as long as you are on SBM 10.1.3 or later.

Changes in 5.2

In Knowledge Management for Serena Service Manager 5.2, we added a few items to facilitate the importing of articles.

1. Submit to Pending Review - Submit transition that adds imported items into a Pending Review state
2. Pending Review - New state where articles can be reviewed, edited, and mass published
3. Mass Publish - Transition used to publish one or more articles into the Knowledge Base
4. PublishArticle - Orchestration workflow that uses the RESTCaller to publish articles into the Knowledge Base

Use the Import Data feature in SBM Application Administrator to import items into the Pending Review state. When you are ready to publish imported articles, create a Listing report, then use Mass Update feature to "mass publish" imported articles.

Importing Items

The process used to import articles for creating new items as well as updating existing articles is described in detail in the SSM 5.2 documentation which can be found here: Importing Articles

The basic idea is to have a spreadsheet that contains the required fields and use the standard SBM Import Data feature to import the data into the system. If your spreadsheet has column names that match the field names in the Knowledge Management process app, then you can use the auto map feature for a very simple setup.

You can use this sample spreadsheet to get started:

KM_Import_SAMPLE.xls

Note: HTML can be used in the content and content label sections for formatting.

Mass Publish Transition

Out of the box, the Mass Publish transition is only available from the Pending Review state. This is primarily for backwards compatibility reasons. All of the work to publish the article is in the PublishArticle orchestration, which can be added to any other transition. In 5.2, we supply a report called "Imported Articles in Pending Review" that you can use to get to the articles after they are imported. From the report, simply select the articles that you want to publish, click the Update All Checked button, and choose the Mass Publish transition.

Programmatic Import

It is now possible to programmatically submit, update and publish articles using SBM Application Engine Web Services. For more information, see the Web Services Developer Guide. The workflow would involve two steps. First, use the SBM Web Services to submit an article using the Submit to Pending Review transition. Then, transition the item with the Mass Publish transition.