Edit Company Knowledge prerequisites

Company Knowledge is used to capture the steps required to resolve an alert in your OpsMgr installation.  When paired with the Product knowledge (which provides you with the application developers knowledge on the causes and suggested resolution steps for an alert), the two will help any operator with the best steps to take to resolve an alert.

Product Knowledge is embedded in a rule or monitor when it is authored.  Company Knowledge can be added at any time provided you have the correct applications loaded and you are logged into the console with an account that is assigned to the correct role.

Software requirments for the machine that you will be accessing and editing the Company Knowledge on (this was tested on a management server):

1. Office Professional 2003 SP1 or higher, only Word is required.  I tested with SP3 and it worked just fine.  During the Office 2003 install, select the Custom Installation and select only Word and Choose Advanced Customizations of Applications Options, click Next.  Then expand the Microsoft Office Word option and set the '.NET Programmability Support' option to 'run all from my computer', click Next, then Install and wait for the setup to finish.
2.  Apply the desired Office Pro 2003 service pack, again, I applied SP3 in this test.
3. Install the Visual Studio 2005 tools for the Microsoft Office System.  There are three installation options, I selected the default option.  Note that the online help tells you that you only need to have the runtime installed, but I was unable to find that when I selected the custom installation option.

Role requirements:

1. In OpsMgr 2007, user roles define the actions that can be taken (the profile) on what objects (the scope).  There are several user roles predefined in the product and the OpsMgr Administrator will have assigned your user account to a role.  Your account must be assigned to one of the roles before you can access the Operations Console.
2. All roles can view the Company Knowledge content either by accessing the rule or monitor directly (this access is limited by the role that you are in) or through an alert that was raised by a monitor or rule.  In order to edit the Company Knowledge however you must be in either the Author or Administrator OpsMgr 2007 User Role. (I tested, Operator, Advanced Operator roles as well).

-Chris Fox