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.
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
15 Comments
We would like to have the ability to add internal comments to an article during the review process. The use case would be that an editor/reviewer is requesting changes from a contributor, which can be documented as internal comments and sent back.
We are seeing an issue with Articles getting "stuck" in the Awaiting Review. This appears to be random and is not happening at a high frequency but we do have a handful of articles that are in Awaiting Review that we cannot get to leave this status.
The articles in question have the green published notification next to them but when you try and click into the article to verify the settings, you are directed to the All Articles page and you cannot actually navigate to the desired article.
A few articles have been stuck in this status for about a month now.
Is anyone else experiencing this issue or is anyone able to provide assistance on how to get these articles out of the Awaiting review status?
-Ashleigh
Hi Ashleigh,
I haven't seen this in our Zendesk instance personally. Do you use translations? Are you able to access the article from the Help Center and try and edit it from there?
Thanks,
Maggie
Hi Maggie,
I believe it is related to using Content Blocks. We signed up for the EAP for Content Blocks to help with an issue we were having publishing multiple articles from Paligo to Zendesk but ultimately it didn't end up working like we wanted. I have asked the Product Manger to disable Content Blocks for us and hopefully that will resolve the issue.
Thanks,
Ashleigh
Is there a way to allow certain agents to Approve articles without allowing them to Publish articles? I have used User Segments and Management Permissions to allow for Edit permission to a certain group of agents so they can edit and review articles. What I would like to do is allow them to submit for Approval (which they can) to a group of agents that Approve content. Then another group who can Publish. This seems to be possible after reading this article but am struggling on how to implement it,
Hey Graham,
I did some digging and it looks like Approve is part of the Publish permissions and currently there's no way to separate the two permissions. More information can be found in this article: Creating management permissions to define agent editing and publishing rights
I think you bring up an interesting use-case that would be worth sharing in our Guide Product Feedback topic which I've linked for you. I would recommend copying the following template:
Product Feedback Post Template and sharing your feedback in that topic for our Product Managers to review.
Thanks so much for taking the time to share this with us!
Thanks for coming back to me, Brett. I was about to post to the Guide Product Feedback site as you suggested however Jonathan beat me to it with this feedback article "Separate Permissions for Approve and Publish in Guide". I voted it up. For those interested, please do the same!
I may be missing it, but how would one go about setting up the email notifications for when articles are submitted for review? It's referenced in this article but I can't seem to find instructions on how to actually enable this.
The email notifications should be sent automatically whenever an article is assigned to someone for review -- see Assigning or reassigning articles with Team Publishing
I'm having the same issue Zach is. People that are assigned to tickets are not getting notifications, myself included.
The users that are being assigned are members of teams that have edit rights yet they never receive a notification.
We have articles that are being published but are stuck in the "Ready to Publish" view. When you open the individual articles, they say they have been published. However, they don't have the green dot and don't appear under published articles in the Article Management. Is there a way to move them from "Ready to Publish" to "Publish?"
Regarding this behavior, I'll create a ticket for you to investigate further. Please wait for my update via email.
Is there a way to create a webhook to Slack when an article is published?
Any thoughts on the original comment from Mr. McCabe? Comments from reviewers on an article would be great.
It is not yet available. However, based on our Product Manager's comment, it is already in the roadmap.
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