8 reasons to upgrade Knowledge Foundation to Knowledge AdvancedUpgrading your Oracle Service Cloud instance

1. Natural language processing

Oracle offers for a lot of languages natural language processing in the search engine. This means that users do not have to enter their search query in the exact similar way it is described in the article. Although your users can formulate the same question in a lot of different ways, they are all looking for the same article containing the answer to their question. The natural language processing will consider stemming of verbs, automatic processing of synonyms which you do not require to enter manually, and the use of intents. When you are on the August 17 release, about 40 locales are supported. When you upgrade to Knowledge Advanced, your fix rate should improve a lot!

2. Industry dictionaries

Out of the box the following industry dictionaries are supplied:
• Customer help
• Computer
• Finance
• Insurance
• Telecom
So if you are using your knowledge base to support one of those areas, a lot of industry specific language components will be available. This will save you a lot of time in adding synonyms and industry specific terms to the dictionary or as synonyms.

3. Article feedback

Both agents and customers can provide direct feedback on articles if they think something is wrong with the article. This feedback ends up as a task assigned to the owner of the knowledge article so it can be acted upon quickly. Due to this direct feedback your article quality index will improve and you will be able to better help your customers.

4. Federated search

Most organizations have their knowledge scattered over multiple systems. In the cases where it is not possible to migrate all items to a central knowledge base, the federated search comes to the rescue. You can index any web-accessible collection with knowledge advanced. After the articles have been indexed, they will be included in the search results among other results from knowledge advanced. When external articles contain product names, they will be linked to those products automatically so when users filter on those products, also the external items pop up in the results.

5. Smart excerpts

Having a clear title for every single article is important in any knowledge base since it should help users to quickly decide if it is worth opening the article for them. However, Knowledge Advanced shows in the search results in addition to the title a small part of the article with the section in which your search terms have been found. This provides users with an additional piece of information the evaluate if this is the article they have been looking for.

6. Multi Lingual

If you are working with people in multiple markets who are not all speaking the same language, Knowledge Advanced offers extensive support for multiple languages. A translation workflow is available for articles in which authors have access to a side by side view so they can work efficiently. Users can see articles in all available languages, and direct customers to an article in their native language, even if the employee does not speak that language. Employees can search in multiple languages at the same time to improve their efficiency. By having the concept of a master document and several translated versions of that same document, it is easy to keep all translated versions in synch so you do not end up with inconsistencies across different languages.

7. Advanced search tuning

If reports or feedback show that for some queries the best matching articles are not showing up in the top results, Knowledge Advanced has the possibility to help the search engine and tune it in such a way that the correct results will pop up. This can be done by modifying the spell check engine, adding synonyms or creating intents. All these actions can be performed for all your languages in one single interface. When adding synonyms, this only has to be done once after which the synonym will be applied to all documents and queries in your knowledge base. The need to do this for every single article has disappeared with this functionality.

8. Versioning

The version management system of Knowledge Advanced is one of the most powerful systems around. Every change in a document will be saved into a new version, and only if the complete workflow has been completed, the changes will be visible to end users. Different versions can be compared to each other in a side by side view in which all changes have been highlighted. Not only content changes, but as well changes in metadata are displayed. In this way you have a full audit trail, including remarks added by the author about the reason why certain changes have been performed. A really nice feature is the future publish option of a new version. With this function you can schedule a new version to be published on a specific moment, without any human interaction. Especially when releasing new versions of a product, this can be very helpful.

Summary

Keep in mind these 8 reasons to upgrade only cover the differences between Knowledge Foundation and Knowledge Advanced. If you currently are running another system, there might be a bigger potential hidden in the future. If you need any assistance in determining if moving to Knowledge Advanced is a good option for you, do not hesitate to get in touch!