Importing knowledge base articles

IMPORTANT  If you are importing data into a Full Language Support Autotask instance (check in Help > About Autotask), imported files will have to be saved differently. Refer to Multi-byte character support.

Many Autotask customers maintain documented solutions to common problems in an external knowledge base such as Sharepoint. While you can now create article references to external content, you can also import existing articles from a .CSV file into your Autotask knowledge base.

NOTE  This feature is available for knowledge base articles, but not for documents. For an explanation of the difference between articles and documents, refer to About Knowledge Base articles.

The CSV import file can have up to three data columns. The columns must display the following headings:

• Article Title (required)
• Article Details (required)
• Category (optional)

The import template is available for download in two places, on the Import Articles page described below and the Autotask Downloads page. For more information on the Downloads page, refer to Autotask downloads.

NOTE   Imported CSV files do not support article formatting. Articles longer than one paragraph may need to be edited and formatted after importing into the knowledge base.

To import knowledge base articles, do the following:

1. To open the page, use the path(s) in the Security and navigation section above..

2. Click the Import icon to open the Import Articles page.

3. To download the import template, either click Download import template on the Import Articles page and then open or save the file, or navigate to > Admin > Features & Settings > Application-wide (Shared) Features > Downloads and select the download arrow for the Article import template.
   1. Copy the article titles and article details, and optionally the categories of your articles into the template. If you want to import categories and subcategories, separate the subcategories with a > character. Do not use spaces around the character.
   2. Save the file in CSV format. Other file formats are not supported.

NOTE  There is no duplicate-checking during the import. Delete any duplicates from the .CSV file before running the import.

4. On the Import Articles page, click Browse (or Choose File) and locate your file.

NOTE  The file must be no larger than 5 MB. If it is larger than 5 MB, you will receive the error message, "Import file exceeds maximum file size (5 MB)."

5. Select options from the following fields:

Import All Articles As: Publish To	Select a publishing option to determine who can view the knowledge base article. Choose from the following options: Internal & All Organizations: When this option is selected, the content item can be accessed by all internal users and all Client Portal users at all customer organizations who have access to the knowledge base. For information about using the knowledge base with the Client Portal, refer to Managing client access to articles and documents in your knowledge base. Internal Only (default): When this option is selected, the content item can be accessed by your internal Autotask users only. Internal & Organization: When this option is selected, the Organization field appears to the right of the Publish To field. The content item can be accessed by your internal users and by Client Portal users with Knowledge Base access at the organization you select in the Organization field. If you select this option, you must also select an organization. Internal & Classification (articles and article references only): When this option is selected, the Classification field appears to the right of the Publish To field. The content item will be available to your internal users and users who have access to the Knowledge Base through organizations that have the specified classification. When you select this option, use the drop-down list to select the classification. If you do not select a classification, you will receive a prompt to do so; otherwise, this content will appear for internal users only. Internal & Territory (articles and article references only): This content will be available to your internal users and users who are in the specified territory. When this option is selected, use the drop-down list to select the territory. If you do not select a territory, you will receive a prompt to do so; otherwise, this content will appear for internal users only. NOTE  If you publish content to an organization that gets merged with another, or a territory that gets deleted, the Publish To status will automatically default to Internal Only. NOTE  The notification panel will only show external contacts if the Publish To setting is Internal & Organization. For all other Publish To selections, external contacts will not be listed.
Visible to Co-managing Users	By default , new articles and documents are visible to co-managing users. To hide the article or document from this group, clear the check box.
Active	The default status is Active.
If Article Category Doesn't Exist:	Select an option to determine how to handle imported articles when the specified category does not exist in the knowledge base. There are three options: Assign Article to "All Articles" Category: This is the default. Create Article Category: Knowledge Base will import the article, create a new category (as a sub-category of All Articles) that matches the category in the CSV file, and put the articles into that category. If the CSV file contains nested categories (category > subcategory), Knowledge Base will replicate the hierarchy. If the category in the CSV file is more than 4 levels deep, including the All Articles category, you will receive the error message, Categories/subcategories cannot be nested more than 4 levels deep (including the "All Articles" category) for that article. NOTE  When creating categories during the import, Knowledge Base does not support the following special characters <, >, and &. You can include an ampersand when manually creating categories. Do Not Import Article: Articles with a category that do not match an existing category will not import.

6. Click Import in the top of the window to start the import.

When the import is complete, a message indicates the number of successful and failed article imports. When you click OK to acknowledge the message, a log file will open and indicate which articles failed and why.