Single Sourcing for Authors

Single sourcing is the creation of multiple articles using one. This is done by generating multiple versions of an article based on content tagging and publish view application. Single sourcing is a way to hide or display sections of content for specific audiences.

Single sourcing can reduce the time and effort needed to maintain your knowledge content, while streamlining the content creation process by allowing authors to create and maintain multiple pieces of content at the same time. Single sourcing requires the use of publish views and content tagging. For more information, see Publish Views and Content Tagging.

Before Single sourcing

Before single sourcing any article, it may be beneficial to consider the following questions:

  1. Is there significant overlap in content for two or more distinct audiences? Articles should not be single-sourced using personalization unless there is an overlap of 60% or more in content. For example, an article on How to send a text message? for several smartphones would have overlapping content, but be intended for different audiences.
  2. Is there extra content that only a part of your audience should see? For example, an article could be written to contain sections of content intended for agents. Such information can be made exclusive to agents using personalization, preventing customers from viewing it.
  3. Are the self-service portals structured to allow for Single sourcing? For example, if the Knowledge Console has been set up with one portal for each audience, Single sourcing may not be the most suitable method for content delivery.
  4. Is there a pre-existing application feature that can perform the function of Single sourcing better? For example, the application has multilingual features that assist with translation of content into different languages. Rather than Single sourcing an article for different languages, it would perhaps be better to take advantage of the multilingual features.

Why Single Source?

There are a number of aspects of single sourcing that make it an excellent way of creating and delivering content.

Single sourcing can:

  1. Hide information.
  2. Display or highlight specific sections of information.
  3. Greatly reduce the effort needed to maintain the knowledge base.
  4. Greatly speed up the content creation process.

Though single sourcing is a useful tool, it is important to understand a few things that single sourcing should not be used for:

  1. Single sourcing should not be used to create articles that do not overlap in their subject matter.
  2. Single sourcing should not be used to create articles intended for the same audience.
  3. Single sourcing should not be used if it would be easier to create multiple articles.