Documentation Center Guide

This guide covers RebelPSA’s Documentation Center — where your organization’s knowledge base articles, runbooks, technical manuals, client-facing templates, and structured client data lives. It’s built around a single design philosophy: feature-rich underneath, simple and intentional on the surface.

A few non-negotiable design rules shape everything else in this guide, and they’re worth knowing up front because they explain why certain things work the way they do:

• Document creation reaches an editor in a single click — never a redirect to a page that just contains another “Create” button.
• Your dashboard shows what’s relevant to your role automatically, without manual setup.
• Internal documents are never exposed to a customer without someone explicitly choosing to publish them.
• Every document, regardless of type, renders through the same underlying viewer — so Word, Excel, PDF, and Markdown all feel consistent rather than like different tools bolted together.

The Documentation Center dashboard automatically adapts to who’s looking at it, detected from your existing permissions — no setup required on your part:

Each role view keeps to a focused 5–9 elements rather than a dense widget wall, with secondary information tucked behind expandable sections. Empty widgets (“No recent runbooks,” etc.) stay hidden until they have something to show you.

A single, prominent search bar sits at the top of the dashboard and handles both a quick title search and a full global search — see Search: Finding Anything, Fast.

Every document type is created the same way, and it always reaches an editor in one step:

• Click a document type from the dashboard’s action bar (Word Document, Excel Spreadsheet, Markdown, Knowledge Base Article, Runbook, and others).
• A slide-over panel appears on the right — no page navigation. The title field is already focused, ready to type.
• Enter a title, and optionally set a folder/routing destination, tags, and visibility.
• Click Create. The panel closes and the appropriate editor opens immediately, inline.

Everything you can create from this panel:

Every supported file type opens through the same centralized viewer, so behavior stays consistent no matter where in RebelPSA you’re opening a document from (a ticket attachment, a CRM record, or the Documentation Center itself).

Rather than everything landing in one default location, your organization can define routing rules that automatically send a document to the right storage location based on its type, category, audience, or tags.

Rules are evaluated in this order, and the first match wins:

• Explicit admin-defined rules, in priority order.
• Category defaults (for example, Finance documents route to a specific Finance storage location).
• Audience defaults (for example, Sales collateral routes to a specific Sales library).
• Your tenant’s baseline default storage.
• The Drop-Off inbox — a catch-all for anything that doesn’t match any rule, clearly flagged as needing to be filed.

Beyond free-text documents, RebelPSA supports schema-driven templates for information that should be captured consistently across every client — an Asset Layout defines a named set of typed fields, and an Asset Instance is the actual per-client record filled in against that layout.

Field types available when building a layout include text, multi-line text, rich text, number, currency, date, checkbox, single/multi-select, email, URL, phone, IP address/CIDR, a linked credential reference, a linked asset/device reference, a linked document reference, and embedded diagrams.

A set of ready-to-use global templates comes standard, including Client Network Overview, Device Configuration, Client Onboarding Checklist, Security Incident Response Procedure, Vendor Contract Summary, Sales Proposal/Collateral Record, Financial Document Index, and Technical Manual Index.

Variable Placeholders in Document Templates

For regular rich-text or Word templates (as opposed to structured Asset Layouts), you can use placeholders like {{ClientName}}, {{TechnicianName}}, {{Date}}, {{TicketId}}, and {{CompanyName}}, plus any custom variables your organization has defined. Creating a document from a template with unfilled placeholders opens a quick resolution panel to collect those values before the editor opens.

Runbooks and checklists are first-class objects with real execution tracking — not just free-text documents that happen to describe a procedure. Two separate but connected things make this work:

• Process — the reusable template: a name, description, category, and an ordered set of steps. Each step can be a plain instruction, a confirmation checkbox, a typed data-capture field, a document attachment, a credential reference, or an external link.
• Process Run — a live, in-progress execution of a Process against a specific ticket, client, or asset — with an assignment, a due date, and per-step completion tracking.

A run’s status moves through Not Started, In Progress, Blocked, Completed, and Archived. Your active runs surface directly on your dashboard under “My Active Checklists,” so you never have to go hunting for what you’re mid-way through.

A PM Checklist is simply a Process with a recurrence schedule attached, tying it into the Scheduling module so it fires automatically on a cadence rather than needing to be started by hand every time.

Every document and record carries one of three visibility tiers, and this is the mechanism that keeps internal material internal until someone deliberately decides otherwise:

Publishing is deliberate and reversible:

• From the document’s action menu, choose Publish to Portal.
• A confirmation shows exactly which clients will see it, the visibility setting, and an optional expiry date.
• The document appears in the client’s portal document list, rendered read-only.
• Choosing Unpublish immediately returns it to Internal — portal access is revoked right away.

Search runs on a comprehensive index that works completely independently of AI — titles, body content, tags, metadata, asset template field values, and process step text are all indexed and searchable without any AI feature turned on.

• Fuzzy matching handles typos and transpositions.
• Phonetic matching helps with name searches (“Johnsn” still finds “Johnson”).
• Title and tag matches rank above body matches, and recently modified documents get a small recency boost.

The same search bar handles both a quick, instant title search and, on pressing Enter or Search, a full global search with filters for document type, category, visibility tier, date range, author, and tags. Results group by type (Documents / KB Articles / Runbooks / Asset Records) and can be sorted by relevance or date.

Every AI feature here is strictly additive — its dismissible, optional, and never required for the underlying workflow to function. If your organization hasn’t enabled AI, none of the following appears, and nothing else in this guide changes.

• Semantic re-ranking of search results, with AI-influenced results subtly marked so you know why they’re there.
• “Did you mean?” suggestions for a low- or zero-result search.
• Natural-language query parsing — typing something like “show me vendor contracts expiring this quarter” and having it resolve to the right structured filters.
• A dismissible outline suggestion when starting a new document.
• Smart SOP generation — describe a procedure in plain text and get back a structured, step-by-step document ready to refine in the editor.
• Stale document detection, flagging documents that haven’t been touched in a while and show signs of being out of date.
• Duplicate detection, surfacing near-duplicate documents for you to merge or archive.

Writing a new KB article from scratch

• Click Knowledge Base Article from the dashboard action bar.
• Enter a title, set its category/tags, and leave visibility at Internal for now.
• Write the article in the editor — it autosaves as you go.
• Once it’s ready for customers to see, use Publish to Portal from the article’s action menu.

Running a PM checklist on-site

• Open the run from your “My Active Checklists” dashboard widget or start a new one from the relevant Process.
• Work through each step, checking off confirmations and entering any required data as you go.
• Mark the run Completed when finished — the record stays in history rather than disappearing.

Finding a document you know exists but can’t quite remember the name of

• Use the global search bar with a few keywords, even if you’re not sure of the exact title — fuzzy matching covers small misspellings.
• Narrow using the type, category, or date filters if you get too many results.
• Save the search if it’s something you expect to need again.