Limiting Knowledgebase Articles Access To Specific User Groups or Organizations

Overview

You may want to create knowledgebase articles in your Support Center intended for specific audiences, user groups, or organizations only.

There is no feature to set restrictions at the article level. However, you can restrict categories to specific user groups. User groups can represent user organizations. In Kayako Classic, knowledgebase articles are created under categories and subcategories. You can categorize the knowledgebase articles on the basis of departments, nature of queries, etc., and create the categories and subcategories accordingly. 

Solution

This task involves three major processes to be considered:

• Creating a user group and assigning accounts and users that belong to it (if not yet created).
• Creating categories and assign group restrictions to them.
• Assigning or moving articles into their respective "restricted categories".

NOTE: You need the following permissions to accomplish this task:

• Access to the admin control panel with "insert user groups" permission.
• Access to the staff control panel with "update user" permission. 
• Access to the staff control panel with "insert and update knowledgebase categories" permission. 

To create user groups:

1. Log into the admin control panel. 
2. Click the Users tab on the top toolbar, and then the Insert User Group link.
3. In the Group Name field, enter the name of the group you want to create.
4. Select the desired Group Type for the group.
5. Click the Insert button to save your new group.
6. Next, you need to populate each user group with the user accounts that belong to them. 
7. Click the Staff CP link in the upper right to switch to the staff control panel. 
8. Click the Users link on the toolbar. 
9. On the 'Manage Users' page, find the user accounts you want to group and check the boxes to the left.
10. At the bottom of the screen, under the 'Mass Action' heading, select the group from the User Group dropdown.
    
11. Click Update to move the user accounts to the group.

To create Categories:

1. From the staff control panel click Knowledgebase on the toolbar. 
2. Click the Categories link and the Insert Category button to create a new knowledgebase category.  
3. In the Category Title field, type the category name. 
4. Assign a category scope as needed (Global, Public, or Private).
5. Click the Permissions: Users tab at the top of the window. 
6. On this screen, we can control which user groups will be able to view content in this category. In the Restrict to specific user groups select 'Yes'.
7. Under 'User Groups', leave 'Yes' to the group/s you want this category to be accessible. This will display articles in this category only to the selected groups.
   
   NOTE: You could choose to restrict the category to only the registered group, to limit articles' visibility to logged-in users.  
8. Click the Save button to create your new category.
9. Repeat the steps above to create additional categories.
10. Now, when you create articles, you can save them in the desired category. Or, you may edit existing articles and move them to the desired categories accordingly.

To create articles:

1. From the Staff control panel, click Knowledgebase on the navigation bar.
2. Choose New Article.
3. Select the desired category where the article should belong.
4. Enter the necessary details for the article and click 'Save as Draft' or 'Publish'.