Scout
Give Scout your business’s documents
Knowledge holds the documents your business keeps for Scout: policies, procedures, care guides and notes. Scout searches the published version of each document and cites the section it used, so anyone in your business can check the answer.
Knowledge appears in the sidebar when your business has Scout.
Write a document
- Open Knowledge, then select New document.
- Give it a Title. Add Tags separated by commas if you want to group
documents, such as
returns, wholesale. - Write the Content in Markdown. Start each topic with a heading (
#or##). Scout cites a document by its headings, so “Frost protection” works better than “Notes”. - Select Publish. Scout can search the new version straight away.
Your draft saves as you type, and you can leave and come back to it. Scout never searches a draft.
Change a document
- Open the document, then select Edit.
- Make your changes. They save to a draft; the published version stays as it was until you publish.
- Select Publish to make the next version, or Discard draft to throw the changes away.
A document has one draft at a time. If someone else saved the same draft while you were editing it, Biosphere shows a message instead of overwriting their changes. Select Reload draft to see their version, then make your changes again.
See earlier versions
Every publish keeps the version before it. Open the document and select History, then select a version to read it. An earlier version says so at the top, with a link to the current one. Scout searches only the current version, but a link Scout gave you earlier still opens the version it quoted.
Archive a document
Select Archive when a document no longer applies. Scout stops searching it, and it moves to the Archived list. Every version is kept. Open it from Archived and select Restore to make Scout search it again.
How Scout uses your documents
Ask Scout in your own words, such as “What is our returns policy for damaged plants?” Scout searches for matching sections in your published documents and in Biosphere help, answers from what it found, and links to each section it used. If Scout cannot find anything, it says so rather than guessing.
Search matches words straight away. Matching by meaning, which finds a section that uses different words for the same thing, is ready within about a minute of publishing. The Meaning search line on a document shows which it is.
What to know
- Everyone in your business can read, edit, publish and archive documents.
- A published document holds up to 1 MB of text. A longer draft shows Split by heading, which splits it into one draft per top-level heading for you to publish separately.
- A title can be up to 500 characters, with up to 20 tags.
- Documents cannot be deleted. Archive a document to take it out of Scout’s search.