Traktip: Knowledge Base Visibility Restriction Options

It’s time for another Traktip!

Use Restriction Options to Control Visibility of Knowledge Base Articles and Categories

Your knowledge base articles are public by default. You have the option of marking them private, but what if you want to only allow a small group of people to view the article? Or you have an entire category of articles you want to limit?

Restriction options give you the ability to limit specific articles or categories of articles from your general users to only set groups or organizations. If you’re handling customer support, you could create articles that are internal to your company, or visible only to certain customers. Perhaps you have an IT team that has an entire category of technical articles that other users don’t need to see.

Who Can Set Restriction Options

A knowledge base article can be created with anyone with the permission “Can add, edit and delete Knowledge Base Articles” while categories require the permission “Can add, edit and delete Knowledge Base Categories and Sub Categories.” However, restrictions can only be set by someone with “Can access and maintain Administration functions” or the “Sys Admin” parameter.

How to Set up Restriction Options

All restrictions are set in “edit” mode once an article (or category) is created. Remember that you’ll be restricting to a particular group or organization, not from it. If you set a restriction on a category, every article within that category will be restricted.

Here’s how:

1. Navigate to Knowledge Base in the left menu
2. Pull up the article or category you want to restrict (either by using a search parameter or the article number)
3. Click Edit in the right menu
4. In the Restrict To section, to the far right, click the word add
5. In the popup, select the group or organization to restrict the article to (you can select multiple if that applies)
6. Click Update in the popup (the popup will then close)
7. Click Update on the article or category

Bonus Tip: Additional Restrictions

You can use the same process to set restrictions on other values throughout your Issuetrak site, including issue types, subtypes, task groups, and Issue Templates (formerly Quick Picks). This gives you control over who has access to select those values from a drop down. These restrictions are set by users with the “Can access and maintain Administration functions” or the “Sys Admin” parameter. Once an individual value is created, such as an issue type, editing it will give you the restriction option.

As always, if you have any questions or would like to see this in action via a quick demo, we're happy to help!