Article Approvals
The Site setting to require article publishing approvals is designed for teams who want to add an approval step on one or more of their sites prior to the content being published. When enabled, this feature will require KB Agents to request approval for any changes that they make to article content. KB Agents would not be able to directly publish content on a Site with this feature enabled. Only KB Managers and Admins would have the ability to review the content and then choose to approve and publish or send back for revisions.
Article Approval Site Setting
You have the ability to turn on this feature on a site by site basis. To do so, click on a site in your Knowledge Base menu and there is an option in Site Settings to turn on the feature.
Turning this feature on or off will immediately change the options available to KB Agents and KB Managers on the specific site.
Article Approval Statuses
With this feature on, articles will have a new status available to them called "Article Approval Status". This is independent of the Published Status. On the article list page, you will be able to see any Approval Statuses if they are something other than approved.
Published articles can have changes that have been drafted by a KB Agent that are not published. It is possible for an article with a Published status to have unpublished changes. Changes to an article will not be published until approved and published.
- Pending Approval = This is a status set by a KB Agent when they have made changes to an article that need approval from a KB Manager or Admin to have the content published.
- Needs Revision = This is a status set by a KB Manager when they have reviewed changes proposed by a KB Agent that they KB Manager deemed not ready to publish.
Article Actions
There are specific actions that can be taken on an article by KB Agents vs. KB Managers.
KB Agents
Users with this role will not have the ability to publish article content. Even for articles that are already published, any edits made by a KB Agent will stay in a non-published state until approved.
- Cannot publish an article from Draft
- Cannot publish updated content on an article already in a Published state
- Can only make suggested changes and set the Article Approval Status to Pending Approval
KB Managers
Users with this role have the ability to approve and publish article content.
- Can update the Publishes Status of an article, e.g. take it from Draft to Published or Published to Draft
- Can immediately edit and publish article content without approvals
- Can review content submitted for approval by KB Agents and send it back for revisions
Article Version History
In addition to article versions being created by changes to the published status, title and body content, the Article Approvals feature expands the actions that will trigger a new article version in the history. These new actions are:
- Updating the Article Approval status
- Adding an internal article comment
For more details, please refer to our Article Versioning & History content.
Article Approvals Page
As a KB Manager, you will be able to see a new page labeled "Article Approvals" underneath your Sites menu in the left rail. This page will surface articles that need review and approval across any sites that have the Article Approval feature turned on. This gives KB Agents a quick way to see any article content that is Pending Approval and needs them to take action on.
Article Comments
To help facilitate feedback back and forth between agents and managers, users can take advantage of the internal article comments feature. This feature allows users to leave comments about the article and review.
This functionality is explained in more depth in this article.