Knowledge management entities

Article
11/28/2016

Applies To: Dynamics 365 (online), Dynamics 365 (on-premises), Dynamics CRM 2016, Dynamics CRM Online

Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online & on-premises) introduce a new knowledge management system that lets you create rich knowledge articles with support for embedding external multimedia contents, such as images and videos, as links. You can use the SDK to programmatically create and manage knowledge articles, create major and minor versions of the articles, translate the articles into multiple languages, and schedule the publishing and expiration of the articles. You can also increment knowledge article views, associate knowledge article records with Dynamics 365 entity records, and perform a full-text search on knowledge articles from your application. More information: Work with knowledge articles in Dynamics 365

Note

For Dynamics 365 (online), you can choose whether to use native Dynamics 365 knowledge or Parature knowledge as the knowledge source while setting up knowledge management in Dynamics 365. For Dynamics 365 on-premises, you can only use native Dynamics 365 knowledge as the knowledge source; integration with Parature knowledge is not available for Dynamics 365 on-premises.

You can set up knowledge management for your Dynamics 365 instance using the web client only; it can’t be done through the SDK. More information: Help & Training: Set up knowledge management in CRM

After you enable knowledge management for an entity using the web client, you can insert and configure a knowledge base search control in the entity form to display relevant knowledge articles either from Dynamics 365 or Parature. The knowledge base search control provides programmability support to automate or enhance the user’s experience when using this control. More information: Knowledge base search control (client-side reference)

If you’re using Parature as the knowledge source, you can programmatically create and manage knowledge base record metadata and associate a knowledge base record with a Dynamics 365 entity instance. More information: Use Parature knowledge in Dynamics 365

Use the new KnowledgeArticle and KnowledgeArticleViews entities to work with the knowledge articles in Dynamics 365, and use the KnowledgeBaseRecord entity when using Parature as the knowledge source.

Important

With CRM Online 2016 Update 1 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Service Pack 1 (on-premises) release, the following entities used for knowledge management are deprecated: KbArticle, KbArticleComment, and KbArticleTemplate. These entities won't be supported in a future major release of Dynamics 365. You must use the newer KnowledgeArticle entity in your code for knowledge management in Dynamics 365. More information: Important changes coming in future releases of Microsoft Dynamics 365