Guide Team Publishing enables advanced knowledge management workflows, making it easy for teams to collaborate on and manage content. Teams can set up collaboration workflows to review, approve, and publish content. They can also stage content updates for published articles without affecting the live content.
Articles move through various content states as needed, and can be assigned or reassigned to team members as needed. Team Publishing includes four article states and direct article assignment.
Overview of Team Publishing workflows
Team Publishing makes it easy for teams to collaborate on new and updated content. The following graphic shows some of the possible Team Publishing workflows.
The workflow for Enterprise plans
The workflow for all plans, except Enterprise plans
About Team Publishing article states
Team Publishing includes the following workflow states:
- Guide Publishing states
- Published A published article has a live version currently published in your help center. This includes all live translations, if you support multiple languages. It is possible for an article to have a published version and a version in another state.
-
Drafts An article in a draft state has not been published.
Guide Review states
- In Progress An article in progress is being created or updated, but is not yet ready to be reviewed or published. Any changes will not affect the published version of the article. Any saved changes to an article in the review or approved state will put it in a work in progress state.
- Awaiting review Means the article has been updated and is ready for review by another user.
-
Ready to publish An article that is ready to publish has been approved for publishing
when you’re ready or it has been scheduled for automatic publishing.
The Archived state
- Archived This means the article has been unpublished and moved to your archive. It will not return in searches in your knowledge base. Any article can be set to an archived state, regardless of whether it came from a publishing state or a review state.
The status of an article is indicated next to the article title when in edit mode.
If you are a Guide admin, you can view all articles in a particular state in the associated article list.
27 Comments
Jennifer,
The diagram is very helpful esp since we have KCS I (Candidates), KCS II (Contributors), and KCS III (Publishers). Very relatable to KCS methodology. Thank you!
Thanks, Mary! Glad it's helpful!
So, with Guide Team Publishing, does this mean that the person that creates or edits the article does not have permissions to publish the article?
Hi Lorie,
Permissions for editing and publishing have not changed. That is set at the section level. So if someone has permission to create and edit articles in a section, they also have permission to publish in that section.
Hope that helps!
I should add that more granular controls might be available in the future, so that you can control editing vs publishing rights. But for now permissions have not changed for Team Publishing. It still works like this:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/224892667
Hi Jennifer,
So here are my questions. Can you verify (even though I think you answered above):
Thanks,
David
Hi David,
1) Yes, that's true. Article editing/publishing will be controlled by permission groups (as opposed to the section-level setting) when that feature is available. It will enable more granular control of your team publishing workflows.
2) Yes, you must have Guide Enterprise to use Team Publishing.
Hope that helps!
Hi Stephen,
1. Yes, it's a good idea to assign the article to the reviewer when it's ready for review. It's not required, however. You could have reviewers monitor the Ready for Review queue (as long as they have access) and work on articles as they are ready. But if you want the reviewer to receive a notification, you should assign the article.
2. You cannot assign an article to someone who does not have permission to edit the article. So if you assign an article to a reviewer, then they will be able to make updates to it. It is possible that you might have a reviewer who does not have permission to edit the article. It just depends on permissions for the section the article is in.
Hope that helps! If not, let us know.
So what I can understand from it, previously with my professional account I was able to flag the article and then make a self made process of reviewing the documents.
Now I'm not able to do this anymore & working without it with a multi language environment is not easy now.
And now that this flag option has been removed, a new version is online but we need to have an enterprise account for it...
Very dissapointing, and commercialy spoken a negative thing from our side;
For my purposes, I need to assign an article to more than one person. Is that possible in this tool?
Hey Krista,
For now, that's not a thing that can be done. This is done to make sure only one person at a time is handling an Article so that one person's changes don't get overridden but someone else who's assigned at the same time.
Hope that helps!
Building on Krista's question from above.
We would like to take the "Ready for Review" articles and assign them to a specific *group* of reviewers and then anyone in that group can then assign the article to themselves to act on. Just like workflow management for tickets.
Having articles be assigned to an individual reviewer right away just bottlenecks the review process. What if that person is out of office? Meanwhile, 15 other people who could review the article are in office but don't have it assigned to them.
Hey A.J. -
As Keith said, right now it's set up to only be assigned to one user at a time in order to prevent two people overwriting one another.
However, your use-case makes a lot of sense. You may want to post your idea in the Guide Product Feedback topic where other users can add their comments and vote, so we can get a better sense of whether this is a common need.
I would like another tier of permissions eg -
Author - Create/Edit
Editor - Create/Edit/Approve
Manager - Create/Edit/Approve/Publish
The diagram above kind of suggests that this exists however, it looks like only managers can approve. Which means those who approve can also publish, but I don't actually want the approvers to be able to publish.
Our desired workflow is this;
1. Any agent can create an article which moves it to Work in Progress
2. I have certain Agents who then go in and proof read, format, link, add pictures, labels etc and save it placing it into Ready for Review (and assign it).
3. Then, due to the nature of our content, we have various members from our tech team check the content for accuracy and sensitive content. Then ideally they would Approve, moving it to Approved for Publishing.
4. Customer Service Manager does the final check of an article and publishes.
Is this possible?
Hey Kelsey,
At this time there's no way to add an additional layer to the Guide user permissions. For a full list of existing guide permissions, you can take a look at this article: Understanding Guide roles and privileges
I'll be sure to pass this feedback along to the appropriate team so they're aware of this need.
Thanks!
Hello, I would like to know, is it possible with Team Publishing, for an author (agent) to create new categories or sections? Or is it limited only to creating or updating articles?
I know an author can do this in ServiceNow. But, I do not think you can do this in Zendesk. You need Admin permission to create categories & sections.
So it is possible if the manager gives permission to the agents?
Hi Brett - yeah I am familiar with that article thanks. Are you saying this is not possible in future or just now? Thank you
Hey Kelsey,
As of right now, this isn't on the roadmap for our Guide team but I have marked this as product feedback for them.
Let me know if you have any other questions for me!
What action causes the "Team Publishing" dialog box on an article to be removed? Do you have to make an edit to the body of the article and then publish it? Currently, it is not intuitive to the user, what "action" they have to complete when they receive an email via team publishing. If they simply review it and find nothing wrong, what can they do to make the "Team Publishing" dialog box go away? Click "Unassign" or "Reassign"?
Hey Ryan! I'm so sorry for the delayed response. Could you share a screenshot of which dialog box you're referring to? I've been clicking around to try to replicate to get you an answer and I just want to verify that we're talking about the same thing.
Hey, Madison Davis. I'm referring to the attached dialog box that generates when you assign an article via Team Publishing.
Got it, thanks Ryan, thanks for clarifying! Publishing changes to the article appears to unassign and remove the note, but you're totally right that if the reviewer doesn't make any changes, there's no obvious way to eliminate the dialog box. In that scenario the only option appears to be "unassigning" the article.
Hi Brett Bowser,
Any update on being able to add an additional layer to the Guide user permissions? We were trying to set up a similar workflow to what Kelsey laid out above. Ultimately, we want to separate approvers and publishers.
Thanks!
Is there any workflow in Guide that would support reviewers adding comments or suggested edits (along the lines of a 'track changes' type feature)? We have the use case of an article needing a technical review, we want to capture feedback in the article but without the reviewer actually editing the text.
Hi Eric,
There isn't anything in Guide that allows you to comment or suggest edits without updating text. I've created some other processes depending on the person I'm working with and how familiar they are with Zendesk.
For people who work in Zendesk regularly, I have them edit the article and use bolded and italicized text for their comments and feedback. Although this is editing the text which isn't what you are looking for, thought I'd throw it out there as an idea. It does work well with those folks who work a lot in Zendesk. I also can roll back to the published version really easily with the Revisions option if nothing needs to be changed.
For people who aren't as engaged with Zendesk, I usually just copy and paste the article and drop it in a Word document and turn on Track Changes. It's an extra step but it does preserve my content and makes it easy for the person doing the review/changes. When it comes back, I just make the necessary changes in my Zendesk article. It's a few extra steps but don't find it to be time consuming or difficult.
The one piece that is missing for me in both of these workarounds/methods is managing what is out for review. That is something I haven't been able to figure out a good way to handle.
Thanks,
Maggie
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