Data Categories and its usage in Salesforce Knowledge

Data categories are used in salesforce Knowledge to control access to a specific set of articles. It is available in all editions with Knowledge except the Professional edition. Data category is useful in Article Filtering. It will be helpful for the agents to classify the articles into logical categories.

Data Categories in Articles

A Data Category Group is like a container for a set of containers. It is used for the classification and easier identification of articles. Let’s say a company has two teams. One is the development and another is testing.  Each team has its own set of articles. So we can create two Category groups. In each category group, we can create categories.

To create a new Data Category, Setup -> Data Categories -> Data Category Setup

Data CATEGORY LIMITS	DETAILS
Maximum number of data category groups and active data category groups	5 category groups, with 3 active at a time
Maximum number of categories per data category group	100 categories in a data category group

Considerations

1. After creating a data category group, we should activate the group, or else it will be hidden from users. While creating a data group, define its visibility, and access settings before activation.
2. While assigning categories to articles, we can choose up to 8 categories in a category group.
3. While searching for articles, selecting a category will include the parent and child of that category. But we can’t see the siblings of that particular category.
4. Once visibility settings have been defined for the data category, the users who are not assigned visibility cannot see the categorized article.
5. If an article has no categories, it displays only when you choose the No Filter option in the category drop-down menu.
6. Define which case fields map to which data category groups and set a default data category for cases that have no value for the mapped fields. For example, you can map a product’s custom case field with a products data category group to filter the articles for the customer’s products.
7. Keyboard shortcuts are helpful while creating data categories. We can also modify data category groups.
8. Delete and undelete data category groups are also possible. We can add up to 100 categories to a data category group. That is, per category group can have 100 categories.
9. We can Modify and arrange data categories in order.