Salesforce Knowledge articles import

Question

My company is going to switch from an old KB to Salesforce Knowledge and I was wondering what would the best way to approach the migration would be.

We're talking about something like 3000 articles, 3 different types of articles at the least(e.g. FAQ, Walkthrough, etc.).

First of all, my understanding is that articles in knowledge can only be imported in a CSV format. Is that correct? This would mean A LOT of work as the articles we currently have on our old KB will be exported and updated with new content. Thus, updates must be done through Word or any other editor, so articles will be saved in word format.

This means we will have to convert all our word documents into CSV in order to import them. Is that correct? Would there be any other way/trick that could eventually speed up the process?

Also, I understand there are two ways to import the articles: Data Loader and Import Articles from setup.

Which one is the best way to go, and why?

Last question: some articles have images, so we need to use Rich Text fields. We run a few import simulations through the Import Articles feature, and it seems that the only way to populate such fields is to create an HTML file and put the field's content in such a file, then put the HTML file path in the CSV.

Is this actually the only way to import content in Rich Text fields? We have 3000 articles, each article would have at the least one Rich text field... so we would need to create 3000 different HTML files in order to populate our fields?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Long story short: there is only one way to import articles containing images or inline content and it is Import Articles functionality.

Read below the reasoning why this is the only option.

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Looks like there are certain obstacles in using Dataloader to import Knowledge Articles.

1. Certain Data Loader versions (newer than 55.0) have certain issues with HTML rich-text area import.
2. Also it is really hard or almost impossible to import an article with images into Salesforce Knowledge base.

When you use Import Articles, the image links are processed by Salesforce and converted into link using the following format: /servlet/rtaImage?eid={Knowledge article id}&feoid={field id}&refId={Content reference id}.

This is not possible to obtain Knowledge Article Id before the article is created (but this may be overcome with insert and consequent update operation).

Also it is not possible to get the Content Reference Id, this object cannot be queried and neither ContentVersion, nor ContentDocument has a link to it.

So there is currently no way to mimic the Import Articles functionality using Data Loader.

Probably we could replace the image links with <img src="/sfc/servlet.shepherd/version/download/<contentVersionId>" /> link, however, this won't be the same exact and uploading knowledge articles using Import Articles functionality, since uploaded image files won't be shared automatically with all necessary users.

So looks like Import Articles functionality is the only option to Import Knowledge Articles into Salesforce and there are no workarounds or hacks to make it easier unless there are no images or content to be loaded within the articles.