Before you can connect a community to Verint Knowledge Management Enterprise (KM Ent), you must be sure that you are running a Knowledge Management site that is version 15.3 or higher, are using or capable of using OpenAM as an authentication mechanism, and that your Verint Community job service and web application servers can communicate with Knowledge Management using standard HTTP(S) requests. Configuration of your Knowledge Management site is beyond the scope of these articles. Please consult your Knowledge Management documentation for more information.
To configure your community to connect to Verint Knowledge Management, you must be signed into your community as a user in the Administrators role. Then as that user, access the administration area of your community.
Choosing a document author
Knowledge documents are representations of an article in Knowledge Management. Because of this things like the original author information is not available inside of your community, but an author is still required in order to show the documents. By default, the community will use the standard system account to do this, however as will see later you can customize this to show a user that may be a better fit for your community. To do that you must first create that user in community so it is available when configuring the application. You can learn how to create and manage users in How do I add a community member?. This user requires no special roles or permissions, however if your community license is based on users, this user will count as a user or seat in your community. Using the service account will not.
Configuration
In the administration area, select Applications, then Knowledge Collections which will show the configuration screen.
Fill out the form on the right using the following information. Note the data inside the above image is for informational purposes only.
Tenant Id | This is the tenant Id for your Knowledge Management PRO instance. It is provided by your Knowledge Management administrator. For Enterprise customers the tenant Id is 'default'. |
API Base Url | This is the base url of your KnowledgeManagement API, usually the same as the base url of your Knowledge Management site. |
Realm | This is the realm for your Knowledge Management PRO OpenAM instance. It is provided by your Knowledge Management administrator. For Enterprise customers the realm is 'default'. |
Authentication Base Url | This is the base url of your KnowledgeManagement OpenAM authentication site. It should only be the main domain. |
Redirect Url |
Generally nothing needs to be entered here and it can be left blank. If blank the default redirect url will be generated as API Base Url + '/GTConnect/UnifiedAcceptor/FrameworkDesktop.Main'. If however this url is not valid in your OpenAM configuration or a different value is needed, you would enter the fully qualified redirect url here. For Enterprise KM: This field is required for Enterprise sites as it does not conform to the same default as a Professional site. In most cases the url is the same as Professional with the addition of the port. So for example if your site was at 'https://mykmsite.com' then the redirect url would be 'https://mykmsite.com:443/GTConnect/UnifiedAcceptor/FrameworkDesktop.Main'. Additionally you need to verify that this url, including the port is registered as a valid redirect url in openAM. |
Knowledge Management User | This is a user on the Knowledge Management site that can read the documents you wish to show in community. It should be dedicated to this function, not be used by an actual user, and the password should never expire. This user does count against any user based licenses for Knowledge Management. |
Knowledge Management Password | The password for the Knowledge Management user. |
Community Document Author | If you configured a user to act as your document author previously, select it here by typing the username. If not specified the system account will be used. |
Once all fields are completed correctly, you can check the enable checkbox at the top and save.
Synchronizing Data
Before you can start creating knowledge collections the tags and articles from Knowledge Management must be copied to community. This is done regularly using 2 background jobs.
Full Synchronization
This is the process that must run first. It is the more robust of the data synchronization jobs and has the potential to take the longest and use more system resources. Because of this it is scheduled to run only once per day at 3:00AM Universal Coordinated Time(UTC). During this process all tags and all articles are retrieved and added if they are missing, or changes are detected and updated and articles and tags remove that are no longer needed. You can customize the schedule if needed by entering the administration area, selecting jobs, then locating or filtering to the Knowledge Management Synchronization Job. From there select the schedule tab. Note the time here will be adjusted to your user account's timezone and should be taken into account when making adjustments.
Incremental Synchronization
Every 3 hours by default the community will check for changes against Knowledge Management. During this process if an article is found to have a publish date that is newer on the Knowledge Management site than the last time a check was made, it will be added or updated in the community. If a tag discrepancy is detected it will re-synchronize all tags. During this period no articles will be removed from the community. Much like the full synchronization you can adjust the frequency of this job. Enter the administration area, select jobs, then locate or filter to the Knowledge Management Incremental Synchronization Job. From there select the schedule tab.
Manual Synchronization
There may be a situation where you need to kick off a synchronization outside of the normal schedule, like you just set this up for the first time and do not want to wait until the first full synchronization. Both the main application configuration and both jobs have a Sync tab that allows either of the 2 processes to be manually invoked. To know which to invoke, use the following scenarios as a guide:
Run a FULL Synchronization if:
- This is the first time setting up KM and you do not wish to wait
- You need to have documents removed from community that were removed in Knowledge Management and it cannot wait
- A segment in Knowledge Management was updated and you cannot wait for a full synchronization to update it in other articles.
***There may be performance impacts to running FULL synchronizations during normal operating hours.
Run an INCREMENTAL Synchronization If:
- You added a document that needs to be added to community immediately
- You updated a document that needs to updated immediately.
It is recommended to only use the manual process when absolutely necessary.
Compatibility
The feature discussed in this article is only available in Verint Community 10.2 and higher. It also requires that you are running a licensed version of Verint Knowledge Management Pro or Enterprise v15.3 or higher and OpenAM as the Knowledge Management API authentication provider.