Knowledge Base: Definition of Terms

This is a quick translation sheet to orient you to TDX knowledge terms.

Owner

• Articles should be owned by a Group.

Knowledge Base Permissions/Roles:

• Client/Customer/Public: This is the baseline access level for anyone who visits servive.purdue.edu. Customers can view published public knowledge base articles and can comment on them if they have logged into the system.

• Purdue IT Technicians: Anyone Purdue IT employee who has access to the TDNext ticketing application should have this basic level of access. Besides public articles, they are also able to see internal articles visible only to Purdue IT Staff or just their immediate TDX team.
  
  Individuals in this role can also see articles of any “status.” The status of an article (as shown in an articles sidebar) indicates whether the article is complete or still being worked on.

• Purdue IT KB candidates: This role gives the user all the permissions of a Purdue IT Technician, but also the ability to write and edit their own articles, which they can then submit to their Team Lead for review and publication. Individuals who complete this training course will be initially placed into this role.
   
• Purdue IT KB Contributors (Team Leads): This role expands on the contributor role, giving the user ability to review and edit articles, address feedback, edit archived articles, and review and approve drafts from their team. This role can approve internal facing articles for publication and can submit articles to be published in the public facing knowledge base.
  
  As part of this role, users should know that TDX grants them the permissions to edit any article in the knowledge base. However, users should not edit or update any article that does not belong to their team, unless they have explicit written communication to do so. TDX does provide a history of changes made to an article to help track when changes were made and by whom.
   
• KB Publisher: This role includes all components of the Team Lead role, but also gives the user the ability to publish articles directly to the public knowledge base without needing to submit it for review. This role is granted to users who have extensive experience in using the TDX knowledge base.

Status

• The article's Status identifies where it is in the knowledge workflow. Ownership and Status combined affect who can edit an article.  
  • Approved. The article has been verified and published to the internal or public knowledge base.
  • Submitted. The article has been written but is waiting to be verified by a team lead. These articles are not visible to non-Purdue IT Technicians and cannot be shared with customers.
  • Not Submitted. The article is still in draft form and has not been verified.
  • Rejected. This article was submitted for review by a team lead, but was rejected because it was wrong, redundant, or for some other reason.
  • Archived. This article is outdated and no longer relevant. It may include a link to a more recent article. These articles are viewable internally, but not by the public.

Published

• An Approved article that is not also Published is approved for daily IT support operations, including any articles meant for support staff across teams and tiers.
• Public-facing articles that have been Approved and flagged as Published in TDX are pushed to the knowledge base and are available when logged into TDX.
  • Only Purdue IT Knowledge Editors can flag articles as Published.

     

Subject

• This is the title of an article.
   

Article Summary

• The Summary field displays in search results for knowledge articles, both within the Knowledge Base and when searching for knowledge from an Incident. Article summaries are ideally under 100 characters and should contain information based on knowledge article type.

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