The NEW SF Knowledge App (Thoughts, Confusion & Questions)

This is a post I made today on both the Community Forum and the New Answers Community.

Lots more thoughts and questions surrounding the SF Knowledge App, like Why no more development on Solutions? Will Knowledge replace Solutions? And most importantly why the added cost? I created an Idea surrounding the costing of the Knowledge App that I would welcome some feedback on titled: “Please consider the upcoming Knowledge app to have a no fee association!”

So to my Community post today.
We are trialling the new SF Knowledge App and are trying to gage the benefits of it over the use of SF Solutions as our Customer Self-Service model.

Has anyone implemented Knowledge? If so, what have you done with Solutions? Did you export your Solutions and then re-import them as Articles? What are some best practices for this?

One would assume that if you have exposed Solutions in the past to your Customers either via the Customer Portal or via the Self-Service Portal you would want to create Articles for them.

The only benefits I see at this point in time is a better organized way of Managing the creation and distribution of the Articles, a better search mechanism for those Articles (over Solutions) but no facility to self close a Case with the help of a “Suggested Article” feature like there is for Solutions within Cases and a richer UI experience. For sure there is the whole avenue of Article distribution via the likes of the Social Networking communities that make the new SF Knowledge App a nice feature but I am at a real loss as to how this either compliments, enhances or replaces Solutions.

It would be a real plus if SFDC communicated some vision surrounding SF Knowledge in the form of where this fits into the existing Service & Support model with Solutions, Cases and Content(sorry the Video Clip of an Article being presented to a Twit(what does one call a Twitter Member anyway?) and also being found as a Web Article via Google does not really cut it).

Also, some serious answers need to be given with respect to the confusing placement alongside Solutions. Is this going to replace Solutions? Will there be the facility to provide Case self-closure with Articles? Why is Articles not available via Workflow or something simpler like a “Create an Article” checkbox within the Solution Edit Mode(no easy way to continue our existing business process surrounding Solution creation and turning them into Articles)? Why is there no “Create Article screen upon Case closure?

One is left scratching his head as to SF Knowledge’s placement alongside Solutions and how one can either use both or just the one. Solutions seems redundant but with Articles not meeting the same functionality as Solutions why would one want to use Articles apart from it being nice to look at?