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Placing articles in multiple sections with article multiplacement (EAP)



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Elizabeth Williams

Zendesk Documentation Team

Edited Sep 26, 2024


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31 comments

This is great news and potentially a massive help for us in managing our multibrand content!

One question about article editing via API. We maintain a single source of truth for some of our content and push that into the help centre via the articles API. If I edit an article via it's article_id via API, will the change propagate to the multi-placed articles? Or would we need to find each unique article_id first and edit all of them simultaneously?

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We use a cCMS mostly for publishing to Zendesk, and it has the ability to map a single article to more than one section. I picture “article multiplacement” having a similar UX. 

 

The issue we have is that the search results are then a bit unintuitive and bloated. Two (or more) identically titled and summarized articles are returned, with different breadcrumbs. In other words, I see this feature as useful when browsing but less so when arriving at content via search, which is the majority of our traffic. It might help if we could suppress an article's indexing in ZD or crawling by search engines, though I'm not aware of any such setting. 

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Hello, The article talks about sharing an article across multiple brands in the beginning, but I can not see an example or statement that shows or defines this.

 

Can I share a single article in 2 or more brand help centers with this function?

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Are we able to modify the text in each branded article to keep it “on brand” if that makes sense? I often create one copy for my FOUR help centers, but then I have to go in a alter the content where I mention the Brand name. Seems like I wouldn't be able to do that, since it would update across every article, correct?

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Bobby Koch

Zendesk Luminary

BAKO BAKO in the video from the announcement, when the user goes in, you can see the brands on the left hand side. 

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Bobby Koch

Zendesk Luminary

Does this give us a centralized place to view all content? Does it help us simply move the ticket from one brand to the other?

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Hi product team,

 

We are keen to sign up for this as it addresses quite a few user needs but when signing up for the trial: "(a) Zendesk’s obligations with regard to any Deployed Associated Service, including but not limited to Advanced Security, Advanced Compliance, Data Center Location, or Priority Support shall not apply to the EAP Tools; (b) Zendesk’s obligations, representations and warranties contained in a Data Processing Agreement that may have been executed between You and Zendesk shall not apply to the EAP Tools; and (c) Zendesk obligations with respect to any certifications, including but not limited to, SOC 2,  SSAE-16, PCI DSS, or ISO 27001, shall not apply to the EAP Tools."

 

Does this override our existing agreement with Zendesk or does it only relate to information processed in relation to the specific EAP feature? Something of a deal-breaker for us.

 

Thanks!

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This is a wonderful update, particularly for browsing and resource workflow efficiency.

  1. Is there a way to suppress secondary/tertiary placements?
    1. in internal search results
    2. in external search results
  2. Or, is it possible to re-title secondary/tertiary placements?

We are a single-brand, multi-line, many model support group. I need to be able to recreate the same content (which applies to multiple models within a product line) in each model section, without entirely borking internal/external searchability.

Currently, it appears that the same article title will be reproduced, with only the location breadcrumb as differences. This is expected based on described functionality, but results in 5-7 of the same article in internal search results and, I assume, will eventually split external search ranking between the duplicates, resulting in lower SEO.

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Are there restrictions on the Article Multiplacement for organizations using a Custom Theme? 

Our Article Settings sidebar does not have the  Placement “+” sign to assign multiple placements.

Clicking into the existing Placement, I only see the section that is currently assigned and when I click into Manage Section, it will replace the current section rather than add another section (both within the same brand). 

Thanks for guidance on how to enable or troubleshoot this feature.

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Emily Carlson We are using a custom theme without issue. The functionality has more to do with backend database structure than front end styling. 

We signed up for the EAP on 9/25 and were accepted same/next day, but the functionality didn't show up in our Guide article interface until mid-morning on 10/3, so I would first assume there's just a processing delay rather than a compatibility issue, and give it a few days.

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Katarzyna Karpinska

Zendesk Product Manager

Emily Carlson , thank you for your feedback. Article Multiplacement is currently in the EAP and it's not yet widely available. You can read about how to sign up to the EAP here. Once you do it'll take us a few days to get you enabled :) 

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We are signed up for the EAP. I have all of the new EAP editor tools available, but not this multiplacement feature. Thanks for taking a look why that might not be turned on for our EAP account. 

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Katarzyna Karpinska

Zendesk Product Manager

Emily Carlson
Unfortunately I don't see your sign up in Article Multiplacement EAP. Would you mind filling this form once again so that we can enable it on your account?

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Creating a brand new article, then placing in multiple sections and brands (even with different organizational hierarchy of Categories and Sections and brands) is working. 

However, adding a second placement to an existing article is not working. From the Guide view, it looks as if the article is in multiple placements. But when I go to the Help Center to check the article appears from the end user view, it does not display the article in multiple places. The article is only visible in the location where it was originally published before this feature was released. Even if the target audience is the same (e.g., “Everyone”, “Signed In”). 

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Update: Modifying an existing article for multiple placements is working for internal-facing articles within the company. But not for external-facing articles (e.g., “Everyone”, “Signed In”). 

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I am having the same issue as Gretel. I create the second Placement for an existing article, but if I try to close the tab, it deletes the placement. Even if I click the “Create” button multiple times or a different save button, it doesn't stick.  I have not tested this on a newly created article. And yes, this is only if I select “Everyone” or “Signed In Users.” Placements save just fine for “Agents and Admins.”

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Orsolya Forster

Zendesk Product Manager

Thanks for the feedback Gretel (Gretel) Galo and M Rogers ! We recorded the problem and will fix it shortly.

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Orsolya Forster

Zendesk Product Manager

Stephen Brandt and Andy Be. thanks for the thoughts on how article multiplacement and search behaviour needs to be harmonized. We will certainly prioritise a solution in the coming months, but for now, we are curious to hear your thoughts and preferences. I'd like to encourage you to join the community discussion about multiplacement and search, and share your ideas. Cheers!

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I'm having the same issues as M Rogers. The article is not saving the new placement on old articles.

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We have activated the EAP on our instance. We have currently an issue, that while adding new articles the placement is not possible in all sections. Some sections cannot be chosen. This was noticed after activation of the EAP and we assume a relation. 

 

We also sumbit a support request more than one week ago, but currently now solution is in sight, which could be caused by the fact, that this is currently EAP (#13013920).

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We have the EAP activated for our Zendesk account. I'd like to pass along two feature suggestions on article placements in search and reports:

 

For search, I can understand it makes sense if users want to follow a specific breadcrumb - e.g., access the article under a specific section, especially if sections are broken by audience / access level. However, I'd like to have an option to consolidate all placements into its default parent/first placement option, so that it only appears once in search. Reasoning is that some users may be confused and not sure why it's showing up twice, or think that information is different in both articles. This introduces additional cognitive load for our users who now have to make additional decisions (which article to click, or open both and compare side by side), and increases the amount of time our users are searching for information. This is the opposite of making the help centre helpful and efficient for our users.  

 

 

For reports, from an admin perspective, I'd prefer to be able to review all total views for the same article, regardless of how many placements there are for it. Otherwise, this introduces unnecessary overhead in calculating views and other related metrics. This could also be an option that can be toggled on/off for some use cases. For example:

Article A 1 - 10 views
Article A 2 - 5 views
Article A 3 - 2 views
Article B - 11 views

In the reporting / Explore, this means that Article A is listed three times, and I have to manually count 10 + 5 + 2 = 17 views total. This also means that if I wanted to sort views in descending order, Article B is incorrectly ranked first with 11 views, when Article A had a combined total of 17 views. That said, I can see some use in being able to see which placement was more effective in driving traffic, especially if it was used for A/B split testing, but I would also like the option to be able to combine all views of an article's placement into one for further sorting/analysis. 

Thanks!

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For multiplacement, is there any way to report on which articles are using multiplacement - either via the Guide Admin view or Explore? 

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We're seeing an issue whereby we cannot place an article in some sections - we have sections missing in some categories when using the multiplacement feature. Is anyone else experiencing this and is there a fix please? 

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Kyle Taylor I noticed the same thing yesterday and submitted a ticket—it's a known issue and Zendesk is looking into it. Luckily there is a workaround! You should be able to find and check off sections through the search function.

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It has not been made super clear that this actually creates duplicate copies of the article for each placement. This has caused a bit of a headache for us and created a poor experience for our users. 

Duplicate suggested articles show up in our help center and in our replies with suggested articles. Is there any way to address this? 

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Please do not require Zendesk admin permissions to be able to delete an article placement

Those that already have access to create, edit, publish, and un-publish articles should be allowed to remove an article placement. 

The overhead of providing admin access for something like this (which the user had access to do before it became a placement) is ‘all or nothing’ - as it is for arranging categories and sections - in which granting admin access allows users to delete an entire Help Center and view every ticket and article across all brands. Please please help fixing these permissions, it'll be much appreciated! Thanks!

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HI Brooke, we are facing a similar problem with search where articles are showing up multiple times if they are multi-placed.  This behaviour is creating a bit of confusion among users. We also want an article to show up only once in search even though it's multi-placed.

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Subject: Issue with Adding Multiple Placements to Articles

 

Hi,

 

We’re experiencing an issue with some articles where we are unable to add more than one placement. While we can change the existing placement, adding multiple placements isn’t possible.

 

It’s worth noting that this issue only affects a few articles; most allow us to have multiple placements without any problems. A common characteristic of the affected articles is that they include links to PDF files.

 

Could you please investigate this or let us know if there’s a workaround?

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Am I reading correctly, in the end, this core functionality is only for Enterprise customers, not small business users?

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Hey Team! 
We've been testing Multiplacement for a multinational company. So far it's working great. I just had one issue, that I wanted to raise here. After creating a new Section on the Helpcenter, there is the option to Add an article directly from the Section page through a button. I did that for multiple articles; for them, it is impossible to choose sections from other Brands, only from the Brand for which the Section was created. If I add an article through the regular “Add Article ” dropdown on the top of the Helpcenter, all Brands with their sections are presented in the Article and the Multiplacement shows as expected and gives me options to place the article across multiple Brands.
Last but not least we have a request/idea for the Multiplacement across multiple brands: Would it be possible to mark certain parts of the Article (f.ex. placed links) as adjustable, so there not exactly the same information across all Brands and sections would be visible, but the information corresponding the Brand? In our use case the customer has the same articles for the Helpcenter across different countries (meaning the language is the same), but small details like a Storefinder link or regional information differ. I know that this somehow is going against the whole concept of Multiplacement, but wanted to raise it as a possible use-case. 
 

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