Data category groups and category hierarchy
Key Takeaway
Filtering and visibility both follow a category's family line: the category itself, the categories below it and the categories above it, but not its siblings or cousins. So where a category sits in its category group's hierarchy decides which filters return its articles and who can see them.
Data categories, or categories for short, are labels that classify Salesforce Knowledge articles, questions in Answers, and ideas. Users can filter by categories to find these items, and admins can use categories to control who sees what. Categories live inside category groups, and each category group is a tree-shaped hierarchy. How you build that hierarchy decides how filtering, article classification and visibility behave.
What a category group is
A category group is a container for a set of categories. For example, a Products category group could hold Phones, Computers and Printers.
In Knowledge, each active category group appears as a category drop-down titled with the category group's Group Name. You see the category drop-down in these places:
- The Article Management tab
- The article edit page
- The Articles tab in all channels
- The public knowledge base
Use a separate category group for each separate way of classifying.
For example, imagine you want to classify articles both by sales region and by product. You create a Sales Regions category group and a Products category group. Then you tag each article with categories from both category groups.