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Help Center Articles containing both internal and external content



Posted Jan 21, 2015

The current Help Center permission model seems to restrictive. Rather than having an article that is entirely public, or entirely internal, we'd like to be able to have both types of content.

Just like a ticket has public and private comments.

The benefits are:

  • Have the same structure for internal and external content.
  • Add internal notes about the same content, within the context of the external document.
  • Make it easier to maintain both internal and external  content at the same time.

 


21

27

27 comments

Official

image avatar

Ryan McGrew

Zendesk Product Manager

Hey All,

Thanks for the feedback on the feature and those that have chimed in to provide some interesting workaround. I'd just like to state clearly that this is a great idea and I definitely see the value in it and have heard from customers in this thread and other conversation that this is something they're looking for. This may be for internal collaboration as stated or for producing varying content for different audiences. Our work on Content Blocks and upgrading our underlying editor technology is setting the ground work for us to consider this feature in the future. However, right now we have a number of things in flight that are higher priority. You can see information on our roadmap and we're actively working on improvements that have been requested by lots of customers. As with all things, we're juggling priorities and resources to try and make progress on the most impactful things for our customers. But this is definitely something we want to do in the future but we're unable to prioritize it right now.

0


Phil, this is fairly simple. In my article I added the folowing as an example:

This text can only be seen by managers and agents

 

I have this as JS:

// Show div html based on role
if (HelpCenter.user.role=="end_user"){
$("div.enduser").show();
}

if (HelpCenter.user.role=="agent"){
$("div.manager").show();
}

if (HelpCenter.user.role=="manager"){
$("div.manager").show();
}

if (HelpCenter.user.role=="anonymous"){
$("div.anonymous").show();
}

 

and in my css I have:

.internal.manager {
display: none;

}

 

So the internal stuff is hidden by default but then shown by the javascript that is reading the role of the user. 

0


Right, the first example was removed so i will try to type it here in a way that will not be removed:

(Remove all underscores)

< _div_ class_=_"internal manager">
Internal only visible to agents/managers

0


Hi Colin,

Interesting suggestion, thanks.

Am I right in thinking that the internal content would be visible to any customer that was curious enough to go and look for it, by viewing the page source?

If so, that would not be appropriate for anything really confidential, but might help in some circumstances.

Phil

0


Yes Phil if you really wanted to see this then you could. We actually use this to point to another article that is protected so this is not a major concern for us. So all I am doing is actually adding a note for the agents.

0


It would be awesome if this was supported at the server level. It would really simplify some elements of content management, and be more secure than hiding content with JS (right now, it makes the most sense simply to use the hidden comment to refer the agent to another article as Colin suggested).

0


Hi, the suggestions in this thread is too technical for me but not sure if this is the same concept I am raising :

I think it will be helpful to have a function like an "Internal comment or note" when creating articles, which will not be visible to readers once the article is published. It will only be visible to the writers while on edit mode of the article...

Not sure if I make sense, but this can serve as an internal reminder in case there will be a different editor/writer who will touch/revise an existing article.

An example internal note (invisible on a published article) would be like this:

"Note - please verify with the Product Manager if these items listed in the table are still valid for this latest version. Otherwise, please update."

5


image avatar

Jonathan March

Community Moderator

Thanks to Nicole for pointing here from another user comment. This is a request which I have been making for years.

It is a specific case of a general principle that ZD seems now to have accepted but not yet embraced... that ANY substantive setting which an agent/admin can change should have place for writing comments notes. Documentation / explanation is a crucial part of any endeavor, and if we can only locate such documentation somewhere which is disconnected from the work, then (a) it's less likely to happen and (b) it's more likely to get stale and not be referred to.

In this particular case, the types of internal notes that one wants to write include (just at quick off-the top):

* Still need to clarify the following points.

* Be sure to remove XX when YY

* Half-written but need to post now.

* Should be combined with ZZZ.

Good to be reminded that there are JS hacks that can serve this function, but that's at best a poor substitute for the built-in capability.

1


Hi, I would like to support the request for internal comments, we have a growing documentation resource that we want our whole team to help review and update. In some cases an actual edit is not the right option and a quick comment with the ability to mention and notify someone in your comment would be extremely useful,

Regards,
Mike

1


image avatar

Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Thanks for that feedback, Mike. 

0


Hi all,

I came back to this post to see any updates on the functionality of hiding contents in published mode, but visible to agents/managers/editors only in "Edit mode".

Sample of notes to be hidden:  "Notes: Please cofirm this info with Product Manager."

I'm able to make this functionality work using Colin's suggestions above. Thanks a lot Colin.

It was too technical for me before being new in Zendesk then, but since I have been using ZD for a year now, I'm now able to follow some technical suggestions.

 

0


Hi everyone,

We are doing research around various customer needs related to how they might user variables (sometimes called placeholders) in Guide Content. Specifically we'd like to hear more about how you and your organisation would use features like: Frequently used names, contextual information, placeholders and formatted snippets, inline images, etc.

If you're interested in this research and would like to share your opinion, please fill out this form.

 

Guide team.

0


I would really like to see the option to have internal notes/comments added to Zendesk Guide. Not looking for anything fancy, just a place somewhere in the right edit bar to leave comments that can be viewed while in edit mode. Many of the articles I write cover similar topics and when we update our product multiple articles may need to be updated at the same time. Having a way to look at comments in edit mode of the article where I could simply list related articles would save me soooo much time. 

0


+1 for this idea!

We currently coordinate with our B.A.'s an internal article that only employee's see, then convert that to an external article that customers will see. It would be nice to have both an external and internal article exist on the same page! 

That way, when logged in agents view the article, they could see extra troubleshooting steps (or info) that the customer doesn't necessarily need to see.

0


This is such a great idea! This would make content management so much easier, and help us to achieve our goal of managing a single knowledge base.

Our philosophy is that we push as much content as we can to our external knowledge base, and where there may be confidential info, we have that restricted to internal. We find that we're often managing two articles.

This idea would help to remove that limitation.

1


+1 

Trying (unsuccessfully) to follow Colin's advice from 6(!) years ago, can anyone help me?

1 - In the article, I added: 

<div class="internal manager"> <p>
This text can only be seen by managers and agents: Internal test
</p></div>


2 - In the theme's script.js, I added:

// Show div html based on role
if (HelpCenter.user.role=="end_user"){
$("div.enduser").show();
}

if (HelpCenter.user.role=="agent"){
$("div.manager").show();
}

if (HelpCenter.user.role=="manager"){
$("div.manager").show();
}

if (HelpCenter.user.role=="anonymous"){
$("div.anonymous").show();
}

 

3 - In the theme's style.css I added:

.internal.manager {
display: none;

}


But I can't see the text under preview as any of the user types....what am I doing wrong?

0


I also need this. We would like to be able to link to internal articles (private) in public articles to
connect the two for our agents for faster resolution and minimize duplicate internak articles

1


+1

0


This would be useful to us!

0


Hi all, 

I would like to take this opportunity and ask to think about and share your thought on the security of the content. Do you have any concerns that accidentally some sensitive content could be exposed to an unintended audience, either if it's an admin mistake or a system mistake?  Any precautions that need to be put in place to prevent this from happening?

At the moment we do not have detailed plans for this feature, but it's on our radar.  

0


The precaution would be ensuring the "internal content" has a user group/segment assigned to it that is "agents & admins" or "admins" for example. 

0


Hey all!

Just to chime in on a more secure way for what Colin suggested, instead of hiding and showing alone, there's a way to remove element by class so it doesn't show at all, not even in Inspect. This way it can't be bypassed (or at least is incredibly more difficult to bypass if not impossible?).

In javascript:

// Remove or show div html based on role
if (HelpCenter.user.role=="end_user"){
const elements = document.getElementsByClassName('internal');
while(elements.length > 0){
elements[0].parentNode.removeChild(elements[0]);
}
}

if (HelpCenter.user.role=="anonymous"){
const elements = document.getElementsByClassName('internal');
while(elements.length > 0){
elements[0].parentNode.removeChild(elements[0]);
}
}

if (HelpCenter.user.role=="agent"){
var elements = document.getElementsByClassName('internal');
for (var i = 0; i < elements.length; i ++) {
elements[i].style.display = 'block';
}
}

if (HelpCenter.user.role=="manager"){
var elements = document.getElementsByClassName('internal');
for (var i = 0; i < elements.length; i ++) {
elements[i].style.display = 'block';
}
}

 

css code, hidden by default because there's a weird thing where when the page is refreshed the internal notes are displayed for everyone for a split second before the javascript removes it (puts a red outline and light red background so it stands out as being internal, as well as writes Internal Notes at the top of the box):

/* internal note styling */
.internal:before {
content:"Internal Notes \a";
font-size:22px;
color:red;
white-space: pre;
}
.internal {
background-color: #ffeeee;
border: 1px solid #ff0101;
border-radius: 5px;
text-align: left;
padding-top: 7px;
padding-bottom: 7px;
padding-left: 14px;
padding-right: 14px;
position: relative;
display: none;
}

 

Then put <div class="internal"> </div> around whatever needs to be internal.

This will hide internal notes by default, remove them from the HTML if the user is an End User or Anonymous, and change display to block if the user is an Agent or Manager. Internal notes can be used multiple times in the same article with this code. Hope this helps!

 
 

0


Guys, everything is rather helpful here, but everybody forgets about the actual accessibility of the content - "internal data" hidden with JS will still be available in Google indexing services moreover, if a customer Follows the article its updates are sent to their e-mail, and in plain text internals will be revealed.

So I want to ask ZenDesk development. There were requests about such functional changes to keep internal data internal at all angles since 2015 - haven't you come up with anything yet? Could you be more active?

4


Our agents want to add links to tickets, JIRAs, and share notes about "gotchas" .  This is very important to us.  I've seen these requests for quite some time and am hoping that ZD can deliver a way to add internal notes to any article.

 

2


This seems like low hanging fruit from a development side with a huge value add for teams. It would help us to adopt KCS methodologies to better support our customers experiencing more complex issues. 

2


It's sad this hasn't been a priority since 2015, and still continues to be low priority. 

1


I commented on another main comment thread about this topic and hope we can share some ideas of how to implement this critical feature; for public customer-facing articles to include critical context for the logged-in support agents helping customers through them. 

1


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