Team Publishing includes states for articles that are ready for review and approved for publishing. You can use these states as needed, depending on your workflow.
- Ready for review articles. You can either publish these articles immediately or you can approve for publishing later. Also, if needed, you can leave an article in review if you need to assign it to the author for updates or to another reviewer.
- Approved for publishing articles. You can either publish these articles or send for review, if needed. Articles in this state might be ready to be published at any time. For example, maybe an article is waiting for a publisher who has permission to publish in the appropriate section. Or, articles in the approved state, might be waiting for an event, such as a product release or update, and need to be published at a later date.
Agents can review, approve, and publish articles where they have management permissions. You must have Guide Enterprise to use Team Publishing workflow features.
Reviewing articles to approve or publish
You can review articles that are in the ready to review state. When you review an article, you can either approve it for publishing later or you can go ahead and publish it.
If you need to change the workflow state for multiple articles at once, see Updating knowledge base articles in bulk.
To review an article
- Open an article that is ready for review:
- Click the link in the email notification to open the article you want to review.
- In Guide, click Manage articles (
) in the sidebar, then click Awaiting review and open the article you want to review.
If you don't have an email notification and you're not a Guide admin, you'll need the URL to access the article for review.
- Review the article and make and save changes, if needed.
If you save any changes, the article becomes a work in progress and no longer has the ready for review status.
- When you are ready, do one of the following:
-
To submit for review, if you've made changes to the article, click the
drop-down arrow on the Save button, then select Submit for review.
The article moves from the work in progress status, back to the ready to review status. If you want to assign it to a specific user, click Assign or Reassign (see Assigning or reassigning articles with Team Publishing).
-
To approve the article, click the drop-down arrow on the Save button, then
select Approve.
The article has the approved for publishing status. If you want to assign it to a specific user, click Assign or Reassign (see Assigning or reassigning articles with Team Publishing).
-
To publish the article, click the drop-down arrow on the Save button, then
select Publish now.
The article is published. The live version of the article is updated, if there is one.
-
To submit for review, if you've made changes to the article, click the
drop-down arrow on the Save button, then select Submit for review.
Publishing approved articles
Articles in the approved for publishing state are waiting to be published. You can publish these articles when you are ready or you can send an approved article for review, if it is not actually ready to be published.
If you need to publish multiple articles at once, see Updating knowledge base articles in bulk.
To publish an approved article
- Open an article that is approved for publishing:
- Click the link in the email notification to open the article you want to review.
- In Guide, click Manage articles (
) in the sidebar, then click Ready to publish and open the article you want to publish.
If you don't have an email notification and you're not a Guide admin, you'll need the URL to access the article for review.
- If you need to change the section or modify other settings for the article, click
Article settings, make changes as needed, then click Close.
- When you are ready to publish the article, click the drop-down arrow on the Save
button, then select Publish now.
Alternatively, if the article is not ready to be published, you can select Submit for review.
The article is published. The live version of the article is updated, if there is one.
If you sent the article for review, it returns to the ready for review status. You can assign the article to a specific reviewer, if you'd like (see Assigning or reassigning articles with Team Publishing).
23 Comments
I would like to be able to plan a publication. For example publish on monday at 8 am. Is that possible?
Hi Debbie -
Scheduled publishing of articles is not currently available, though I see you did contribute to the Product Feedback thread on that topic. I know it's something that the product teams have on their radar; we will update that product thread with more details if it gets prioritized on the roadmap.
If other users are looking for scheduled publishing, please add your vote and your voice here:
Schedule articles to publish in Guide
Hi,
I appear to have lost access to this feature. It has rolled back to the previous way to manage articles and I cannot see any assigned to me, or any that are waiting for approval.
Justin
Hey Justin,
We'll need to take this to a Ticket for investigation. I'll be in contact with you shortly over email.
Thanks!
Hi Stephen!
This feature is meant to be used if you need to have submit your article to reviewed by someone else before being published/updated. I hope that clears things up! Let us know if you need anything else!
Hey Stephen! Sorry for the delayed response.
Since you'd be using the Team Publishing feature here, you would assign that article to the SME who needs to review before publishing.
Hey Stephen - That's correct.
Is there API support for Team Publishing? Can I fetch the draft (waiting for review) version of a published article using the API, and change the article's status via API?
Hi Annika -
There is not API support for Team Publishing at this point in time. They've indicated that they will be looking to fill some gaps in the API in 2019, but that's as specific as we can get at the moment.
Hi Nicole,
Is there a way to see historical comments made during the publishing process? For example, if we have created an article specifically to address a ticket in our support centre, we would like to reference this ticket in the beginning when assigning the article to someone. However I can't seem to find how to view those original comments? I'm probably being completely blind and it's in front of my face :)
Hi Kelly -
I think what you're referring to are the notes that you can write when assigning an article. Unfortunately, there is not a way to go back and see these historically; they get overwritten each time the article is reassigned.
Hi All,
What do you do if someone makes changes that you don't want to publish? An example - someone makes changes to an article and those changes are incorrect. It's a long article and there are a lot of different changes - what is the recommended way to "reject" these changes so you don't have that article sitting in work in progress or ready for review, etc. for eternity? Or even worse, have it be published by someone else who doesn't realize the information is wrong?
The only solution I've found is going into the history of the article and reversing all the changes they made but it's time consuming, cumbersome and prone to error. If I try to go back to the last published version and publish that, it still keeps the article at the work in progress or ready for review status.
Has anyone else run across this? Or is there a solution I'm missing?
Thanks!
Maggie
Hi Nicole,
Do you know if the API to pull articles etc is the same when you're on enterprise vs other plans? There's no modifications to fields etc based on articles being in the publishing workflow (I'm aware from your comment above there's no publishing API to fetch specific information about that). Just wanted to make sure we wouldn't need to modify our processes for pulling data.
Kel
Hi Kel -
Yep, the API provides access to whatever endpoints are relevant to your plan. For example, if there's a feature on an Enterprise plan you don't have access to, you wouldn't be able to access that part of the API. But otherwise the API is not limited by plan type.
When an article sent for approval, is there a way to comment or insert notes for the changes required instead of doing changes directly? I'm imagining something like comment feature in word online or gdocx. Thanks
Hi Ravin Subramaniam,
Unfortunately not but agree it would be great to have. Right now, we bold and italicize notes/changes so they stand out but it's not ideal.
There's already a similar request in the Guide Feedback forum that you can add your vote and business case to: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115008147688-Internal-Comments-on-Guide-Articles
Thanks!
Maggie
The articles that are flagged for review, are they published internally? Meaning they are visible in the Knowledge Capture panel when working a ticket, but aren't published externally to your Knowledge Base?
Ideally, I would like our Support Reps to be able to search for articles that are under review. Even if the article isn't completely polished and ready for the public knowledge base, I'd rather my front line support staff have access to the knowledge. Sometimes waiting for an article to be reviewed might take to long and someone else might create a duplicate article or spend time trying to figure out the same thing.
Hi Joe McPherson,
Welcome to the Community!
Articles that are only internally visible are searchable through the Knowledge Capture App.
Please let me know if you have any further questions!
Hi
Is there any way we can automate some kind of alerting to "Publishers" to let them know an article is "Approved for publishing"?
I creates a "Publishers" group and I would like them to receive an email when an article is submitted as approved.
The same for alerting "approvers" that we have an article that is submitted as "Ready for Review".
Would appreciate some guidance on how to automate without having to rely on the "assign" feature that for sure will be forgotten on a regular basis
Thanks
Hi Patrick,
There aren't automatic notifications although I agree it would be a great feature to add. In our particular case, there are a small number of reviewers and publishers so part of their daily responsibilities is to log in and view if there are any articles there for review or publishing. However, depending on how each organization works, I can see how this wouldn't be a realistic option for everyone.
Sorry I don't have better news for you:(
Thanks,
Maggie
Hi,
Is it possible to add review steps e.g. "On hold" after approved for publishing?
thanks Chris
Hi Chris,
The available Zendesk statuses aren't customizable. I've run into needing something like this a few times and have used the Assign feature to assign myself the article and then add the information in the note. It's not a perfect solution but it's met my needs when I've needed it.
Hope that helps!
Thanks,
Maggie
I would like to see a "permission to publish internally" solution. The agents that are creating articles can't link them to the ticket until they're published and they don't get the link counts. Also I think the work in progress articles should be findable by agents using the KC app. We're working with KCS and the only option I have is to either provide everyone with publishing rights or to loose link statistics.
If there was a "permission to publish internally", agents that are learning the KCS process could publish articles only for internal use (or prevent them from editing the metadata "visible to") and get the link stats.
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