*** NOTE: ALL INFORMATION IS ACCURATE AT DATE OF PUBLISHING ***
If you are using a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portal for your business, chances are you are displaying some kind of FAQ or information to provide answers to your customers. Knowledge Articles (KA) are created within D365 and can be published out to the portal. Below you can see a KA has been found using the search functionality on the site. By default all of the KA published can be accessed by everyone, even if they aren’t logged in as a user of the portal. However, what if you want to change that, and only allow logged in users to access them, and also have the ability to set some articles as only visible by specific users, or users with specific Web Roles? Good news, you can, and it’s pretty easy to do using Content Access Levels.
Navigate to the Site Settings area for your portal, and look for the KnowledgeManagement/ContentAccessLevel/Enabled setting. By default this is set to false. Change the value to true and save the site setting record.
Now go back to your portal, and do a search for an article you know has been published, and you will see it’s no longer available.
In order to determine who gets to see this piece of content, we can use something called Content Access Levels. In theory, these levels can be called whatever you like, it’s just a way for you to categorise and group your KA. The three below are the ones that are set up as standard when you initially create your portal. The Default content access level is associated with the Anonymous Users and Authenticated Users web roles.
Now, navigate to the KA within your D365 app and look under the Related Information section. You will need to either create a new form, or make sure you add the Portal Knowledge Article for Interactive experience form to the app to get access to this area. Click on the padlock icon to see the Content Access Levels section.
You can now click to Add Existing Content Access Levels.
From here you can use a lookup to select which Content Access Level to use for this piece of content. You can use more than one if you wish. Remember, if you use the Default one, anyone that isn’t logged in will be able to see this piece of content.
Now that we have assigned Content Access Levels to the KA, we need to make sure users can actually see it, so we need to link it to them in some way. The fastest, easiest method is to link the Content Access Level to a Web Role. That way, when a user is given the role, they get the right level of access to the KA’s. Navigate to a Web Role, and to the Content Access Levels section. From here, we can link one or more Content Access Levels.
You can also link a Content Access Level directly to a Contact record from the Related records section. This way, only Contacts you specifically link will get to see the KA’s with the same Content Access Level assigned.
Want to just watch how to do this? Check out the video below:
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Hi Megan,
Love your articles. I’ve got a quick question on Content Access Level. We had the site setting for CAL turned off as KB articles that we published was fine to be publicly available to anyone online and without needing to log into Portal. Now we’ve got a requirement to hide a specific few new KB articles to only logged in portal users with specific content access level. The problem is we didn’t associate any CAL to our existing published KB articles. So when I turned on the site setting and cleared the portal cache, it hid all of the KB articles which should be viewable publicly even without logging into Portal.
I then assigned the Default content access level to 1 KB article to see if that one will be publicly available once the CAL is set and it appears that it still doesn’t appear. I’ve had to turn the site setting off for now so that all the KB articles are visible again for now but any help would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Mike, did you clear the cache again once you assigned the Content Access Level to your KB article? Also, check your Anonymous User web role and make sure that the Default Content Access Level is still assigned (maybe it was removed at some point?).