Pega Knowledge

PRODUCT OVERVIEW GUIDE

Version 8.3
 © 2019
Pegasystems Inc., Cambridge, MA
All rights reserved.

Trademarks

For Pegasystems Inc. trademarks and registered trademarks, all rights reserved. All other trademarks or service marks are
property of their respective holders.

For information about the third-party software that is delivered with the product, refer to the third-party license file on your
installation media that is specific to your release.

Notices

This publication describes and/or represents products and services of Pegasystems Inc. It may contain trade secrets and
proprietary information that are protected by various federal, state, and international laws, and distributed under licenses
restricting their use, copying, modification, distribution, or transmittal in any form without prior written authorization of
Pegasystems Inc.

This publication is current as of the date of publication only. Changes to the publication may be made from time to time at the
discretion of Pegasystems Inc. This publication remains the property of Pegasystems Inc. and must be returned to it upon
request. This publication does not imply any commitment to offer or deliver the products or services described herein.

This publication may include references to Pegasystems Inc. product features that have not been licensed by you or your
company. If you have questions about whether a particular capability is included in your installation, please consult your
Pegasystems Inc. services consultant.

Although Pegasystems Inc. strives for accuracy in its publications, any publication may contain inaccuracies or typographical
errors, as well as technical inaccuracies. Pegasystems Inc. shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions
contained herein. Pegasystems Inc. may make improvements and/or changes to the publication at any time without notice.

Any references in this publication to non-Pegasystems websites are provided for convenience only and do not serve as an
endorsement of these websites. The materials at these websites are not part of the material for Pegasystems products, and use
of those websites is at your own risk.

Information concerning non-Pegasystems products was obtained from the suppliers of those products, their publications, or
other publicly available sources. Address questions about non-Pegasystems products to the suppliers of those products.

This publication may contain examples used in daily business operations that include the names of people, companies, products,
and other third-party publications. Such examples are fictitious and any similarity to the names or other data used by an actual
business enterprise or individual is coincidental.

This information is the property of:

Pegasystems Inc.
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142-1209
USA
Phone: (617) 374-9600
Fax: (617) 374-9620
www.pega.com

Pega Knowledge

Document: Product Overview Guide

Software Version: 8.3

Updated: July 2019

[2]
 CONTENTS
Overview of Pega Knowledge ....................................................................................................................... 6

Pega Knowledge Features ............................................................................................................................. 7

Knowledge authoring portal ........................................................................................................................... 7
Knowledge dashboard ........................................................................................................................ 7
Authoring, approval, and publishing content ................................................................................... 7
External article approvals ................................................................................................................... 8
Archive content .................................................................................................................................... 9
Auto-translation support .................................................................................................................... 9
Re-translate articles ....................................................................................................................... 9
Taxonomy editor ................................................................................................................................. 9
Bulk processing.................................................................................................................................... 9
Content security................................................................................................................................... 9
Pulse ................................................................................................................................................... 10
Content tags ....................................................................................................................................... 10
Follow content ................................................................................................................................... 10
Workbaskets ...................................................................................................................................... 10
Navigation panel ................................................................................................................................ 10
Content search and display .......................................................................................................................... 11
Suggested content ............................................................................................................................. 11
Search content ................................................................................................................................... 11
Search results filtering ...................................................................................................................... 11
Boost search results .......................................................................................................................... 11
Top-rated content.............................................................................................................................. 11
Share content..................................................................................................................................... 11
User feedback and ratings ............................................................................................................................ 12
Rating articles..................................................................................................................................... 12
User feedback .................................................................................................................................... 12
Suggest content ................................................................................................................................. 12
Pega Knowledge Help Sites .......................................................................................................................... 12
Help site configuration ...................................................................................................................... 12
Tiles and Classic Help Site Layouts................................................................................................... 13
Knowledge Help Site Deployment.................................................................................................... 13
Troubleshooting and Diagnostics ................................................................................................................ 13
Troubleshooter key features ............................................................................................................ 14
[3]
 Guided Troubleshooting service case ........................................................................................ 14
Reuse questions .......................................................................................................................... 14
Reorder questions ....................................................................................................................... 14
Configure troubleshooter categories......................................................................................... 15
Graphical view of troubleshooters ............................................................................................. 15
Restart a troubleshooter............................................................................................................. 15
Suggested actions ........................................................................................................................ 15
Related articles and attachments............................................................................................... 15
Pega Communities ........................................................................................................................................ 15
Communities key features: ............................................................................................................... 16
Community Moderation.................................................................................................................... 16
Additional community features ........................................................................................................ 17
Fuzzy Search................................................................................................................................................... 17
Search Engine Optimization ......................................................................................................................... 17
REST APIs ........................................................................................................................................................ 18
Knowledge articles ............................................................................................................................ 18
Get article by ID ........................................................................................................................... 18
List articles by category ............................................................................................................... 18
Download article attachments ................................................................................................... 18
Rate article ................................................................................................................................... 18
Article intake ................................................................................................................................ 18
Community posts .............................................................................................................................. 18
Get community post by ID .......................................................................................................... 18
Get community posts by category ............................................................................................. 18
Get user community post ........................................................................................................... 18
Download article attachments ................................................................................................... 18
Search ................................................................................................................................................. 18
Get articles and posts.................................................................................................................. 18
Reporting and Analytics .................................................................................................................... 18
Localization / Language Packs* ........................................................................................................ 19
Accessibility ........................................................................................................................................ 19
Deployment Options ..................................................................................................................................... 19
Pega Cloud ......................................................................................................................................... 19
On-premise deployment ................................................................................................................... 19

Roles, portals, and dashboards in Pega Knowledge ................................................................................ 20

[4]
 KM Authors and KMSysAdmin role dashboard............................................................................... 20
KM Moderator role dashboard......................................................................................................... 21

Primary data entities................................................................................................................................... 23

Further reading ............................................................................................................................................ 24

[5]
Overview of Pega Knowledge
Curious about Pega’s knowledge management application? This document summarizes what you get “out
of the box” with Pega Knowledge: its features and benefits, its knowledge self-service site and
communities support, data model, and the various pre-configured roles and portal.
Pega Knowledge is an enterprise knowledge management application that is part of Pega’s Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) family of products. It consists of a knowledge portal, providing the tools
and capabilities to manage the full life cycle of rich, multi-media knowledge content and the creation and
deployment of knowledge self-service and community sites. The application supports the creation of
guided troubleshooting flows providing both customers and CSR’s with a step-by-step interactive flow to
diagnose common service or product issues. The guided troubleshooting cases can be exposed via Pega
Web Mashup in web self-service applications and can be launched by CSR’s in the Pega Customer Service
interaction portal.
Pega Knowledge is pre-integrated with Pega Customer Service and related industry solutions, providing
simple configuration capabilities to proactively suggest contextual articles with service cases. Pega
Knowledge is also pre-integrated with Pega Sales Automation. Pega Knowledge can also be sold as a
standalone application.
Pega Knowledge helps you address three key tenets driving Customer Service excellence:

• Drive Agent and Customer Productivity

Intelligently guide service interactions and suggest relevant knowledge articles when agents need
them. Enhance customer self-service experiences by presenting the information and answers
they need to effectively resolve their own issues prior to engaging your more costly contact center
resources. Drive rapid product or service issue resolution through guided troubleshooter
diagnostic flows.
• Improve Answer Quality and Leverage Contact Center Expertise

Directly capture and route feedback to authors to evaluate and refine answers. Tap into
traditional tribal knowledge by allowing contact center resources to submit their own article
candidates to the knowledge management team.
• Accelerate Time to Market

Easily author and rapidly publish knowledge, while maintaining a high degree of quality through
the application’s staged authoring and approval workflow. Quickly configure and deploy
knowledge self-service help and community sites, for customers and internal employees or
partners.

[6]
Pega Knowledge Features
Pega Knowledge provides a rich set of features designed to enhance both your customer service
representatives and customer experience, improve user productivity and increase customer satisfaction.
This section describes key capabilities and features of the application that you can use as-is, or extend to
meet your business needs.

Knowledge authoring portal

The authoring portal provides knowledge authors the tools and capabilities required to effectively
manage the complete life cycle of content, from initial creation, handling user feedback/updates, defining
taxonomy and security, and the archiving of content. Configuration tools are also provided to create,
configure, and deploy self-service knowledge sites (help sites), community sites, and diagnostic
troubleshooters.

Knowledge dashboard
The knowledge dashboard provides key charts and actionable article usage information needed to
effectively manage your knowledgebase.

Authoring, approval, and publishing content

− Guided content creation process to intelligently move content through Authoring, Approvals, and
Publication stages.
− Author, Approver, and Publisher roles allow more delineation of KM resources, separating who can
approve, and/or publish content. Alternatively, a KM author can be assigned all three roles to
immediately author, approve, and publish content.
− Approve, withdraw, or Reject content – Add notes when rejecting content so the editing author
knows what changes need to be made.
− Create rich content using a Rich Text Editor (embed images, animated gifs, multi-media, source
tagging, hyperlink external links). WYSIWYG
− Multi-language content management – Support linking of translated articles to a master language
version, with automated notification when any edits are made to the master article (e.g. requiring
similar edits to the translated versions)
− Content templates – Allow authors to create and utilize content templates to foster consistency
when creating similar content, such as FAQ’s, how-to’s, or other articles that require pre-formatting
for consistency across authors.
− Default content templates – Pega Knowledge administrators can select a default template that
becomes the content template each author must use when creating new articles. When enabled,
certain formatting options such as font, size, left, center, and right aligned rich text editor options
are restricted. The administrator has the ability to override these rich text editor restrictions. This
feature enforces formatting consistency throughout the knowledge authoring organization.

[7]
 − Automated duplicate check for new article creation looks for articles with similar titles.
− Specify a URL as content (e.g. reference an external or internal web page)
− Preview content as an end user would see it to ensure content is high quality and is visually
appealing to the end user.
− Specify content Publication and Expiration dates – Automatically publish and/or archive content on
specified dates
− Internal Only – Allows content to be flagged as “internal” so only employees have visibility to this
content.
− Specify content language – Flag content with the language it was written in. Search and display will
honor the end user’s browser language (related content will be displayed under any available
preferred language content).
− Specify content review dates – Set a configurable review date for content, ensuring a continuous QA
process. Authors are notified via email when an article is ready for its scheduled review.
− Link content to multiple categories – Authors can link content to one or more taxonomy categories
supporting flexible categorization of content.
− Authors can print articles providing the same view as a CSR.
− Create articles with both internal and external sections. Authors can mark sentences, paragraphs,
or entire sections as internal only. External users will not see these internally-marked sections.
− Reference other articles within an article. Two display options are offered: reference articles within
the body of the article and/or reference articles in the Related links and attachments area, outside
of the article body.
− File attachments – Attach files to content, allowing end users to view more detailed information and
answers. End user browser file type support required (e.g. MS Office docs, PDF, standard image
types, etc.).
− Tags, file attachments, and web links are all easily managed through a single gadget.
− Auto-tagging – Configurable option to pass article title, abstract, and body to the Pega AI text
analyzer and returns suggested tags that are contextual to the article. Authors can delete, or add
other tags manually.
− Content Import/Export – Supports exporting multi-language content for external translations and
importing once the content has been completed. Also aids in importing external content from
legacy KM systems.
− Versions and Audit history – Authors can view the article versions and an Audit history that provides
a more detailed view of article transitions and status changes, including which author made the
edits.

External article approvals

Knowledge administrators have an option to specify a knowledge expert at the taxonomy category level
that extends the article approval flow with an assignment requiring the expert’s approval prior to moving

[8]
to the publication stage. External approvers outside of the Pega application ecosystem are also
supported by adding their email address.
Approvers receive an email with a Directed Web Access (DWA) link that displays the article in a limited
review mode and allows editing of the article and the ability to approve or reject the article. Once
approved or rejected, the article is routed back to the appropriate authoring and approval flow for
further processing.

Archive content
Retire (archive) content that is no longer relevant. Archived content can be reopened and edited in the
same manner as published content.

Auto-translation support
Organizations that prefer to leverage external translation services (API) for supporting article translation
during the authoring and approval flow now have an option using the auto-translation API.
The authoring and approval flow has been modified* to send articles flagged with the translation and
desired language through the auto-translation API. The returned translated article replaces the previous
version and continues through the standard authoring and approval flow.
The auto-translation feature leverages the existing translation management capabilities in the application
where authors can specify additional languages required by the business.
*An organization will need to specify their preferred translation vendor endpoint URL and API key and
enable the auto-translation feature. This information is configured in the TranslationAPISettings data
transform rule.
Re-translate articles
Once a translated article has been published authors have an option during subsequent editing of the
master article to re-translate the linked translations via the auto-translation API.

Taxonomy editor
Create or edit hierarchical content categories (1-to-multi-level categories). Optionally add category icons
that can be displayed on knowledge help sites and communities. Content visibility can also be defined in
the editor by specifying Access Roles within a category (See Content security below).

Bulk processing
Change the status on multiple articles or assign articles to other authors using the bulk processing
capabilities. Bulk processing is restricted to KMPublisher and KMSysAdmin roles.

Content security
Specify Pega access roles to restrict content visibility to certain user groups (organizations, managers,
etc.). Roles are defined by category level with child categories honoring inherited roles from parent
levels. Authors have a configuration option to enable content security on specific Pega Knowledge help
sites. Only end users with the required Access Roles will have visibility to articles at or below the category
where the Access Role(s) was defined.
[9]
Pulse
Collaborate with other KM authors, sharing content ideas, images, and files.

Content tags
Add tags to articles to increase the ‘searchability’ of articles. Tags can serve as synonyms for article
topics. Auto-tagging is also supported as a configurable option that uses the text analyzer in Pega AI (see
Auto-tagging description in this document).

Follow content
Authors can follow content to enhance collaboration during the content creation process.
CSR’s can also follow articles in the Pega Customer Service interaction portal and receive email updates
when those articles have been updated. CSR’s can quickly un-follow articles with a single mouse click.

Workbaskets
Instant access to content routed to specific KM workbaskets such as content suggestions, or content
requiring editing, approval, or publication.

Navigation panel
Provides authors with quick and intuitive access to the main knowledge management pages,
configuration tools, and reports. Navigation links include:
− Dashboard – Provides a snapshot of all content in-progress, configurable charts, KM Portal
navigation, various work tabs, and Pega Pulse for collaboration with other authors.
− Work – Provides access to author’s worklists, workbaskets, and a calendar view
− Knowledge – Groups the main Content search and display page and access to the Troubleshooters
and Help sites configuration pages.
− Community – Create, configure, and publish a community site that fosters customer collaboration to
discuss and resolve common questions and issues. Also provides access to the Moderation tools.
− Taxonomy / Security – Displays the taxonomy categories and provides create/edit access for both
taxonomy categories and security.
− Reports – Provides access to KM reports and the Report Browser to create additional reports and
charts.
− Configurations – Access to common knowledge configurations such as article templates, specifying
languages you want to support when creating articles, community post report reasons, a help site
linking tools to associate help sites with community sites, enabling the AI Auto-tagging feature,
defining Troubleshooter diagnostic categories, and configuring Boost search parameters
− Recent – Displays the most recent content the author has worked on.
− Following – Displays the articles that an author is currently following.

[10]
Content search and display
Pega Knowledge provides efficient search and display capabilities for end users including Pega
Knowledge help sites and communities, self-service applications, mobile applications, and the Pega
Customer Service interaction portal.

Suggested content
Content can be contextually suggested with service cases using the out of the box configuration tools
available in Pega Customer Service. This role-based feature allows managers to specify one or more
articles that are contextually displayed to CSR’s while assisting customers with the service case.

Search content
Quickly and easily search for the content you need by article name (or partial), tags, or other key words.
Fuzzy search compensates for misspelled words in the search string. Results are returned quickly using
the powerful Elasticsearch™ engine. End users can click on an article’s tag and search for related articles
with the same tag.

Search results filtering

Search result filtering provides advanced knowledge search options to help narrow down search results
for end users in the interaction portal, help sites, community sites, and in mobile views of Pega
Knowledge. Users can select search result filtering by taxonomy categories, article titles, article body,
community post title, and community post body. Available categories displayed in the filtering options
are related to the search string to further assist the end user in filtering their search results to quickly
narrow and find desired results. Search filtering is supported in the Pega Customer Service interaction
portal, Pega Knowledge self-service help sites, community sites, and from a mobile device.

Boost search results

Knowledge administrators can boost or elevate search results by specifying a boost score on article
attributes like title, abstract, content body, and tags. Article attributes with a higher boost score are given
higher relevancy scores during display of search results display.
For example, if an administrator sets the Boost score for “Article title” to 5 (highest value), any articles
that contain the search string in the article title will be displayed at the top of the search results. Other
lower boost scores configured would be returned below the items that have the boost score of “5” in this
example.

Top-rated content
Provides end users with access to the most popular content by ratings and views, fostering the benefits
of knowledge across the enterprise and externally to customers.

Share content
CSR’s can share content with customers by forwarding a link to a configured knowledge Help Site where
the article will be displayed, also allowing the customer to browse your knowledge help site or search for

[11]
other information or answers using a desktop, tablet, or mobile browser. CSR’s can also share content
during a chat session by pushing a link or plain text of the article in the chat conversation itself.

User feedback and ratings

Rating articles
The Pega Knowledge rating system allows users to rate content by selecting a simple thumbs-up or
thumbs-down icon. Your knowledge team has direct access to related reports and charts to constantly
monitor the overall health and perceived value of your knowledgebase, allowing you to take action where
under-rated articles need help.

User feedback
CSR’s have the ability to send written feedback on content to authors to continuously improve content
value and usage. Feedback is routed to a “Knowledge Content – Suggestions” workbasket where an
author can review the feedback, see where or what context the article was viewed, such as within a
service request or search result. Authors can disposition the feedback as Accepted or Rejected and have
out of the box reporting for trend analysis of article feedback.

Suggest content
Content suggestions are routed to a “Knowledge Content – Suggestions” workbasket for review and
action by a KM author. Privileged Pega Customer Service users can quickly create draft content
candidates, allowing the enterprise to harvest more “tribal knowledge” from their contact center experts.
− Pega Customer Service provides two suggested content options:
 Customer Service representative role (CSRs) are presented with a simple text box to quickly
enter a draft article or article idea.
 Customer Service manager roles are presented with a rich text editor and additional fields to
populate such as article title, abstract, and the ability to select the recommended taxonomy
category.

Pega Knowledge Help Sites

Pega Knowledge provides built-in capabilities to easily configure and deploy knowledge self-service sites,
supporting simple integration with your existing self-service web pages. Help sites can be quickly
configured, styled, and branded using the configuration tools in the authoring portal. The configuration
tool automatically generates the javascript and HTML needed to quickly integrate the help site with your
self-service pages. Both ‘official’ curated knowledge (articles) and/or community functionality
(discussions) can be delivered through this capability.
KM authors can easily create KM help sites that display relevant categories and content for customers.

Help site configuration

Authors access the help sites configuration tool from the main knowledge portal navigation panel

[12]
 The configuration tool allows authors to create, configure, and brand help sites to match their
corporate standards
The configuration tool supports the ability to style key UI elements like article links, category labels,
and upload a banner image without requiring access to the Dev Studio or skin rule
Preview how the help site will look to end users
Highlight featured content, web sites, or even documents (file attachments) using the Featured
content gadget.
Enable search engine optimization (SEO) for individual help sites
Enable site security for specific help sites, which honor the taxonomy category security (content
visibility restrictions)
Specify which taxonomy categories and related content you want to display on your help sites
Enable other gadgets like Top rated content, Recently published, and Suggest content gadgets

Tiles and Classic Help Site Layouts

Two layout templates are provided, “tiles” and “classic”, that provide professional-looking
knowledge self-service sites out of the box.
Breadcrumbs allow intuitive end user navigation to previous pages or back to the home page
End users can also search for content with the same Elasticsearch features that CSR’s enjoy.
The Suggest Content gadget allows customers to submit new content topics that are automatically
routed to a KM author’s workbasket for consideration.
A ‘More like this’ section displays the help site articles and posts based on the tags associated with
the current help site article. The More like this section displays a maximum of four related articles or
posts; two for related articles and two for related posts.

Knowledge Help Site Deployment

Embed knowledge help sites in existing web portals by using the auto-generated embed code and
HTML snippet
Insert a simple HTML snippet into links, buttons, or images to redirect customers to your specified
help site
The HTML snippet includes an article ID parameter which displays the article when the customer
reaches the help site
Each help site created will generate a unique code to ensure redirects go to the intended site
The Link sites mapping tool accessed via the Configurations navigation option, provides an easy way
to map your help sites to the corresponding community sites (when configured and published)
Help site security – An optional security configuration can be enabled which enforces the access role
security model specified at the taxonomy category level. This option is enabled/disabled for each
help site.

Troubleshooting and Diagnostics

The Pega Knowledge “troubleshooter” provides diagnostics capabilities allowing customer product or
service issues to be diagnosed and resolved using dynamic, rich text questions that guide the end user
through a series of steps to help resolve issues. The troubleshooter supports linking related articles with
questions, and the ability to insert images or videos to provide a more visual diagnostic experience.
Suggested actions can be configured to allow an end user to launch a service request from the related
Pega Customer Service application through Pega Web Mashup.

[13]
Knowledge authors create troubleshooters from the Troubleshooters navigation link in the authoring
portal, and can quickly start creating the diagnostic questions and actions through an intuitive
configuration tool. Authors manage their draft and published troubleshooters in different tabs to ensure
separation of completed (published) and draft troubleshooters.
While creating questions, the author will also see a running list of the questions they have added to their
troubleshooter for quick visual reference. A question repository allows authors to reuse questions in
multiple troubleshooters, avoiding duplication of common questions. Questions in troubleshooters can
also be reordered when a new question needs to be added or other resequencing of questions is
required.
Authors also have a graphical view option that displays the troubleshooter in a tree format, providing a
“big picture” view of the full troubleshooter tree and branches.
The rich text editor supports a wide variety of question formatting, inserting relevant images and videos
to provide a visually-engaging end user experience. Launching a Customer Service case is also
supported, which allows a customer to seek additional help if they cannot self-diagnose their issue, so
customers are not stranded. The troubleshooter also supports launching other troubleshooters to
create multi-branched complex diagnostics.
Once a troubleshooter has been configured, the troubleshooter can be run in the Pega Customer Service
interaction portal as a case or in a web self-service portal as a Pega Web Mashup case.
A Pega Customer Service troubleshooter service request, Guided Troubleshooting, allows CSR’s to help
customers diagnose issues. A “Troubleshooter categories” configuration in the knowledge portal allows
organizations to define the relevant Products, Problem type, Sub-problem type, and corresponding
troubleshooter to launch. This provides CSR’s with a simple navigation path to the appropriate
troubleshooter as they’re working with customers.
Troubleshooters that are abandoned by customers during a self-service interaction are automatically
suggested in the Pega Customer Service Next Best Action area for immediate visibility to CSR’s. CSR’s
have the ability to continue in the step where the customer left the troubleshooter or they have the
option to start over.
The troubleshooter service request can also be exposed to web self-service applications using Pega Web
Mashup.

Troubleshooter key features

Guided Troubleshooting service case
Once configured, troubleshooters are available to Pega Customer Service users as service cases and can
help guide customers through diagnostics steps through common contact center channels.
Reuse questions
Authors can reuse common questions in multiple troubleshooters by flagging a question for the
‘Question repository’. This eliminates the need to recreate common questions like “Did this resolve your
issue?”
Reorder questions

[14]
When authors need to add a new question in the middle of a troubleshooter, the configuration tool
allows the author to easily drag and drop the new question where they want it. Validation rules warn an
author if any question visibility conditions are violated.
Configure troubleshooter categories
Authors can configure hierarchically-related Product, Problem type, Sub-Problem type, and the
corresponding troubleshooter that provides CSR’s and end users an easy navigation path to selecting the
appropriate troubleshooter.
Graphical view of troubleshooters
Authors can configure hierarchically-related Product, Problem type, Sub-Problem type, and the
corresponding troubleshooter that provides CSR’s and end users an easy navigation path to selecting the
appropriate troubleshooter.
Restart a troubleshooter
End users have the ability to restart a troubleshooter if they need to. This can be helpful if they change
their mind or answer on a previous question, etc. In addition to restarting from the beginning, navigation
options make it possible to simply navigate back to the previous question.

Suggested actions
Authors can specify Pega Customer Service case (service requests) that provide end users with other
options, such as to escalate an issue, or to schedule an appointment with a technician.

Related articles and attachments

Authors can also specify related knowledge articles to provide additional details about a diagnostic topic
or a specific question. File attachments can also be specified, which can help when a diagram or user
manual may help with the diagnostics process.

Pega Communities
Pega Communities (a component feature set of Pega Knowledge Management) allows your customers,
partners, and employees to collaborate and to explore and discuss solutions to common questions and
issues. Pega Community members can leverage not only the expertise of their fellow customers and
contact center experts, but also have access to your Pega Knowledge articles alongside community
discussions, further helping customers help themselves.
The community capability comes pre-packaged with functionality that allows customers to follow and
participate in conversations (or flag content they don’t feel is suitable). Extensive moderator facing
functionality enables community owners to properly enforce community standards of behavior. A
moderator can edit, quarantine or remove discussions and lock, ban or email community members
involved in an infringement. The Moderator also has workbasket functionality for posts and responses
flagged by community members. Pega customers have the ability, if they so wish, to appoint external
Moderators from their pool of super-users, who can perform the role without using Pega portals or seats.
Community functionality extends from your community web pages back into the Pega Customer Service
Interaction Portal. CSRs can ‘see’ the activity of active community members, when they reach into the

[15]
Contact Center for assistance, and even respond to a community thread if needed and mark it as a best
answer if appropriate.
Best answers are routed as knowledge content candidates, allowing your organization to harvest the vast
knowledge of the community and after editing and publishing, articles can be shared throughout the
enterprise and of course on Pega Knowledge help sites.

Communities key features:

Easy-to-use configuration tools to configure, brand, and publish community sites, promoting
collaboration of customers, service reps, or other business partners.
Authors can quickly name, style/brand, and specify discussion categories they wish to provide for
user community.
Create multiple communities to support lines of business (e.g. consumer vs business)
Utilizes knowledge help site taxonomy categories to leverage relevant articles during searches.
Members can opt-in/opt-out of receiving email notifications when a new reply is made on their post.
Profanity filtering – Community posts are scanned for profanity or other terms deemed
inappropriate as defined by the business. Members receive a warning that profanity has been
detected, prior to posting a question, reply, or comment. The member can continue posting with
the profanity, but the identified words will be masked using asterisks. Members can also open their
posts and edit it to remove the offending words.
Members can review discussion threads, post replies/comments, attach files, and post new
discussion topics or questions.
Members can edit their posts, including the title, main content area, and tags.
More like this – Lists related articles and community posts that contain the same tag(s) as the post
in context. Brings instant visibility to suggested/related content.
Specify tags on posts to help garner higher contributor participation (enhanced search results).
Auto-tagging – Auto-tagging community posts is a configurable option and when enabled, will
automatically add contextual tags to a member’s post. The member can edit their post if necessary
to remove any unwanted tags.
The discussion thread creator can mark a reply as the “Best Answer” (or un-mark the reply) to
ensure other community users can quickly identify the best reply to a post.
Community members can delete a discussion thread if deemed unnecessary.
Ability for community members to Follow (and unfollow) discussions
Visibility to popular discussion tags and search by the desired tag (combines resulting matches for
both posts and articles).
Search facility from KM Help Site or Communities returns both relevant articles and discussions.
Highlight featured content, web sites, or even documents (file attachments) using the Featured
content gadget.

Community Moderation
Moderator role and dashboard allowing full moderation of discussion threads, posts, member and
account status, and other moderation capabilities. Key moderator actions will include:
Review reported posts and edit or delete individual posts or entire discussion threads
Ban a member from a community site (read-only access, no participation allowed)
Suspend a member’s account for a configurable period (e.g. 1 month, 3 months, etc.). Member has
read-only access to the community

[16]
 Deactivate member accounts (member’s login is revoked)
Lock a discussion (still visible, but no further actions are allowed by the members)
Quarantine discussion threads (entire discussion thread is temporarily hidden from the community
during moderator investigation)
Moderator can email members regarding actions taken or behavioral issues
Review member’s posts, replies, and comments
Mark a post as Moderator Best Answer (replies marked as Best Answer are routed to the
“Knowledge Management – Content Candidates” workbasket and can be approved as a new draft
article)

Additional community features

Auto-route best answers to KM authors to promote as new knowledge articles
Allow members to report abusive or inappropriate posts (creates a case routed to moderators for
appropriate action).
Provide Pega Customer Service users visibility to customer’s community posts and the ability to
reply and/or mark replies as best answer.
Allow members to edit or delete their posts
Badges/awards capabilities for contributors. Earn different levels of awards/badges with
configurable thresholds.

Fuzzy Search
Fuzzy search capabilities improve relevant search results for misspelled search terms, a common search
issue.
Fuzzy search automatically compensates for misspelled words, returning likely search results for the
corrected search term
The fuzzy query generates all possible matching terms that are within a configurable ‘edit’ distance
(fuzziness) and then checks the term dictionary to find out which of those generated terms actually
exist in the index.
Customers can browse other knowledge categories and articles or search for other answers
Degree of fuzziness is configurable

Search Engine Optimization

Knowledge system administrators can enable search optimization for each help site and community.
Enabling or disabling this feature is configured on the General tab of each individual help site or
community, to provide flexibility with which sites the business feel are important for search engines like
Google to spider and index.
A site map is generated in XML format, when enabled for each site. The resulting XML is not meant to be
manually edited, and it is up to the customer to submit the sitemap XML to their preferred search
vendors. When enabled, sitemaps are configured to be automatically updated on a nightly basis, setting
each article with a priority level of .5.

[17]
REST APIs
REST APIs are provided with the application (Integration-Services) that a web application can utilize to
retrieve Knowledge Content and related information for both articles and community discussions and
posts.

Knowledge articles
Get article by ID
Returns the article whose ID is passed as a parameter

List articles by category

Returns list of all published articles belonging to categories passed as parameter

Download article attachments

Downloads any file attachments specified on related articles

Rate article
Allows a user to rate an article

Article intake
The KMCreateArticle API supports intake of a new article from an external application.

Community posts
Get community post by ID
Retrieves community discussion thread by using post ID

Get community posts by category

Retrieves community posts by category

Get user community post

Retrieves community discussions posted by a user

Download article attachments

Downloads discussion attachments (same REST API as above)

Search
Get articles and posts
Returns a list of articles and posts relevant to the search string

Reporting and Analytics

Pega Knowledge includes a variety of standard reports and graphs providing real-time information
regarding article usage, ratings, work, assignments, and historical data for analyzing contact center KPIs
over time. In Pega Customer Service, there are two distinct report types, dashboard widgets, and
analytics reports.

[18]
Search result metrics can be viewed on the Pega Knowledge dashboard as charts (widgets) or in the
Reports page. Search result metrics help organizations identify potential gaps in content, where a high
number of search strings that are returning zero results can quickly be identified including the source
such as a help site or interaction portal.

Localization / Language Packs*

Language packs support localization of applications through use of translated field values for buttons,
prompts, and labels. Language packs are available for Pega Knowledge in Italian, French, Japanese,
German, Spanish and Portuguese.
Pega also offers a ‘Localization’ wizard capability to enable customers to localize Pega-based applications,
including custom fields and screens quickly and easily, and in any language.
Language Packs to not effect knowledge articles. Pega Knowledge articles must be translated separately.
The application’s language management capabilities and export/import feature allow articles to be sent
out for translation via .CSV format and reimported into the application for final edits and publishing.
Auto-translation is also supported through the auto-translation API introduced in the Pega Knowledge 8.2
release.

Accessibility
Pega Knowledge provides support to enable your applications to comply with requirements required by
legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This includes features like keyboard navigation,
and the ability to support assistive technologies such as screen-readers. Pega offers the Pega 8 Web
Accessibility rule set, which, when included with your applications, generates appropriate markup that is
compatible with common screen readers and accessibility devices.

Deployment Options
Pega Cloud
Pega Knowledge is available on Pega Cloud as well as on-premise.
Pega Cloud provides industry-leading infrastructure, enterprise-grade services, and operational
excellence. Realize a faster time-to-value for your Pega investments and take advantage of the complete
range of Pega Cloud services, from development and testing sandbox environments to fully managed
production environments. You can even migrate applications from the cloud to your data centers as
needed.

On-premise deployment
Pega supports on-premise deployment options, including a number of supported databases, application
and web server options. Please see https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/documents/platform-
support-guide for details.

[19]
Roles, portals, and dashboards in Pega
Knowledge
The Pega Knowledge application was designed to accommodate typical quality assurance requirements
of knowledge organizations, where multiple levels of content approvals may be required during the
content creation process. The use of privileged-based operators and associated roles support the stage-
based content creation process used in the application. This design allows separation of the authoring,
approval, and publication roles.
Role name Description
KMAuthor This role can create draft content and submit to the Approval stage
KMApprover This role can create draft content and approve draft content (Pending Approval) content
for the Publication stage
KMPublisher This role can create draft content, approve draft content, publish pending-approval
content, edit taxonomy categories and related security.
KMSysAdmin This role provides the same privileges as KMPublisher, but with Designer Studio access
for more advanced configuration or customization needs.
KMModerator This role provides access to moderation tools and capabilities to help monitor and
manage community member activity.
This role is shipped with the Pega Customer Service application and provides access
(visibility) to both the Customer Service and Pega Knowledge applications. This allows
CSKMSecurityAdmin the user to assign Customer Service-specific access roles to taxonomy categories in KM
Portal to restrict and control knowledge content access by category.

Pega Knowledge provides a configurable dashboard allowing content authors and community
moderators to customize their view of operational metrics and charts. The application ships with a
variety of charts, called widgets, and dashboard layout templates that are easily configured by user.

The below dashboard is configured for a knowledge author.

KM Authors and KMSysAdmin role dashboard

This dashboard is configured to display content by stage in the authoring, approval, and publication flow,
and a snapshot (bubble chart) that shows article views and ratings.

[20]
KM Moderator role dashboard
The KM Moderator dashboard is configured to provide insight into typical metrics and member activity
from a Pega Knowledge Community site, such as members who have been reported for inappropriate
posts, profanity thread monitoring, and answered vs unanswered posts.

[21]
[22]
Primary data entities
Pega Knowledge provides common data objects that support the knowledge data model. The application
was designed to be utilized out-of-the-box and it is not expected that customers will need to modify or
extend the data model. However, extending the data model is supported, and may be necessary to
support additional article attributes that are required if importing legacy content repository articles
where these attributes need to be maintained in the Pega Knowledge application.
The following matrix shows the key objects used in the Pega Knowledge application and their respective
Data Pages. You can use the Data Explorer in the Pega Express to review all Pega Knowledge Data Types
and Data Pages.

Name Description System of record (SOR)

Featured content Featured content can be articles, web
Pega
links, or file attachments that are made
available to users who are visiting the
help sites and/or community sites. The
Admin for the site can add the featured
content through the knowledge portal.
Skills A community user (operator) can be
Pega
associated with skills. Each operator
can be associated with more than one
skill.
Taxonomy A taxonomy allows you to classify or
Pega
group similar content to better organize
your knowledge base and support a
more efficient search and display of
content. Pega Knowledge supports a
multi-level taxonomy category structure
that offers flexibility in designing a
classification configuration.
Templates Content templates provide preformatted
Pega
styles used to create knowledge
articles. Every template has a source
which can be created by using RTE in
creation stage. The source is then
converted into JSON while displaying it
to authors in content creation screen.
For more details on the Pega Knowledge entities and the related data model, please review the Pega
Knowledge 8.1 Logical Data Relationship Model on the Pega Knowledge product page.

[23]
Further reading
For more information about Pega Knowledge, see the Pega Knowledge product page.

[24]