How Category Visibility Differs from Other Salesforce Models

These settings are unique to articles and questions and differ from other Salesforce models:

Exclusive to articles and questions

Category group visibility settings determine who can access articles and questions. Although they are standard objects, articles and questions do not have organization-wide defaults, sharing rules, or manual record sharing.

Access

Category group visibility settings are based on the user’s role, permission set, or profile. Child roles cannot see more categories than their parent role. To change a user's visibility to categories and therefore categorized articles and questions, you must change the visibility settings for the user's role, permission set, or profile, or, if custom data category visibility is not assigned, make certain categories visible to all users.

Broad interpretation of visibility settings

To ensure a wide range of relevant information, category group visibility is broadly interpreted. Setting a category as visible makes that category and its entire directly related family line—ancestors, immediate parent, primary children, other descendants—visible to users. For example, consider a Geography category group with continents such as Asia and Europe at the top level, various countries at the second level, and cities at the third level. If France is the only visible category selected, then you can see articles classified with Europe, France, and all French cities. In other words, you can see categories that have a direct vertical relationship to France but you cannot see articles classified at or below Asia and the other continents.

Note Only the first-level categories in the category group are visible on the Answers tab. In the Geography example, only the continent categories appear on the Answers tab; therefore, if France is the category selected as visible in category group visibility settings, zone members can see questions classified with Europe.