You are here:
Knowledge Author Creates Articles from Incidents
Help a knowledge author turn a verified incident resolution into reusable guidance. Support teams and employees can find the guidance through configured channels. To make the guidance available to Agentforce, add Salesforce Knowledge to an Agentforce Data Library.
Use Case at a Glance
Persona: A knowledge author responsible for converting incident evidence into accurate, findable, and governed articles
Job to be done: Capture a reusable solution from an incident without exposing record-specific, sensitive, or unverified information
Starting point: A resolved or well-understood incident contains enough evidence about the issue, symptoms, workaround, root cause, and resolution
Successful outcome: A reviewed article describes the reusable problem and solution, follows the correct structure and visibility rules, relates to the source incident, and reaches its intended audience.
Use this scenario to determine whether incident information is ready to become shared knowledge. Use the related Help topics for steps to configure Knowledge, create or edit articles, classify content, manage approvals, and publish articles.
Select an Incident with Reusable Information
Start with an incident that produced a repeatable insight. Strong candidates include recurring issues, hard-to-diagnose symptoms, useful workarounds, verified fixes, or solutions that reduce future handling time. Skip one-time events whose details don't apply beyond the original record.
| Evidence | Knowledge Author Question | Decision It Supports |
|---|---|---|
| Reuse value | Is another employee or support agent likely to encounter this issue? | Create an article, or keep the information on the incident. |
| Verification | Which observations and actions are confirmed? | Separate proven guidance from assumptions. |
| Scope | Which systems, versions, users, or conditions does the solution cover? | Define prerequisites, applicability, and exclusions. |
| Safety | Does the incident contain personal data, credentials, internal URLs, or confidential details? | Remove restricted information and set the article’s visibility. |
| Existing knowledge | Does an article already cover the same need? | Update, relate, or create content without duplication. |
| Outcome | Did the workaround or resolution succeed, and how was success checked? | Write testable resolution and verification steps. |
Salesforce Knowledge supports articles that IT teams can link to Incident, Problem, and Change Request records. For details about the available Knowledge features, see Knowledge Management for IT Services and Lightning Knowledge for IT Services.
Base the Article on Incident Information
Review the incident subject, description, category, related and parent incidents, investigation notes, workaround, and resolution summary. Resolve contradictions before authoring. If essential information is missing, ask the incident owner to provide it or document what’s missing rather than inventing an explanation.
Write for the next reader rather than copying the incident chronology. Remove names, record numbers, timestamps, conversations, and environment-specific details unless they affect the solution. Preserve symptoms, conditions, diagnostic signals, safe workarounds, resolution steps, and verification evidence.
Search Knowledge before drafting. Compare the incident with existing published and draft articles, and update an existing article when it already covers the topic. Creating nearly identical articles splits feedback across articles, reduces search precision, and increases maintenance.
Choose the Right Article Structure
Use the record types and layouts available in your org. Your admin can create these custom
record types for Knowledge: Known Error (developer name: Known_Error),
Troubleshooting Guide (developer name: Troubleshooting_Guide), and How-To
Articles (developer name: How_To_Articles). Authors don’t see these options
unless the custom record types are created.
Use a concise title that reflects the reader's problem or goal. Complete the fields that the chosen structure requires, such as summary, issue, workaround, root cause, and resolution. Include prerequisites, ordered actions, expected results, and a clear verification method when they help the reader act safely.
For steps to create and edit articles, see Create and Edit Articles. For details about IT Service record types and fields, see Create Custom Record Types for IT Service Knowledge Articles and Create Custom Fields on Knowledge Articles for IT Services.
Draft with Einstein or Author Manually
When Einstein Knowledge Creation for IT Service is turned on from the Features page in Salesforce Go, Salesforce deploys two prompt templates: Create Knowledge Articles from Incident and Create Knowledge Articles from Problem. From an incident or problem, use the in-product action to generate an article draft. Don’t confuse this action with Draft with Einstein for email.
Treat generated content as a draft, not as verified information. Compare every claim with the incident and trusted technical sources. Remove unsupported conclusions, sensitive details, duplicate text, and references that apply only to the source record.
Manual and AI-assisted authoring follow the same quality requirements. The author remains responsible for accuracy, scope, discoverability, safety, and maintenance, regardless of how the first draft was created. For details about generating articles, see Create and Edit IT Service Knowledge Articles with Einstein.
Classify, Review, and Publish
Assign the categories, language, record type, and visibility settings that make the article discoverable without making it available too broadly. Test searches using terms that employees and support agents use. Confirm that the visibility settings match the article’s intended audience.
Route the draft through the configured review or approval process. Ask a technically qualified reviewer to confirm the diagnosis, steps, safeguards, and verification criteria. Ask the content owner to confirm structure, clarity, duplication, classification, and ownership.
Publish only after the article passes review. Employees and support teams can access the article only through channels that the org has enabled and that the article’s visibility settings permit, such as the console, portal, Slack, or Teams. Publishing an article doesn’t automatically make it available to Agentforce. For publishing behavior, see Publish Articles and Translations. For classification behavior, see Create Data Categories for Articles.
Validate Reuse and Maintain the Article
Return to the incident and confirm that the article is related to the incident or appears in Knowledge search results. Search as a support agent and, when appropriate, as an employee. Confirm that the intended audience can find and use the article without access to the source incident.
Measure reuse through article associations, search behavior, views, feedback, and resolution outcomes. Revise the article when product behavior, affected versions, safeguards, or recommended steps change. Archive content that no longer represents a supported solution.
A verified article is successful when another person can use it to resolve or avoid the issue. Article count alone doesn’t show that incident knowledge is accurate, findable, or reusable.
Confirm That Incident-to-Knowledge Authoring Is Ready
Before you begin, confirm that Lightning Knowledge is enabled and that knowledge authors have the required permissions. Confirm that the necessary record types, layouts, fields, categories, authoring actions, approval processes, and visibility channels are configured. To make these articles available to Agentforce, add Salesforce Knowledge to an Agentforce Data Library. See Enable Lightning Knowledge for IT Services.
