Guide: Article review process, edits drop the article out of review status
In our workflow, all articles must be reviewed by another set of eyes before they are published. During the review process, it's typical for the reviewer to make small changes to the article. But making any change to an article in review drops it out of review status. This makes it difficult for the original author to track the status of their articles and know which are actually ready to publish and which are still in progress.
Right now, our content development process is small enough, we can manually track reviews using spreadsheets outside Zendesk (hello 1998). As I look to scaling this process in 2022, we have problems with this workflow. This simply won't scale to a higher content production output.
The review process workflow is only half solved.
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Hi Sharon Burton,
Thank you for your feedback, what I can understand from your description is that you'd like to have a more flexible way of collaborating on the article and suggesting small changes while the status of the article remains the same. Is that correct?
We are not planning any specific improvements to Team Publishing this year. But we are working towards a more collaborative experience while creating articles. That will include a possibility to leave comments on the articles, suggesting changes, etc.If you should be interested in our roadmap for Knowledge Management in Guide, take a look at this post.
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Hi Katarzyna. In our documentation development workflow we need to be able to allow multiple reviewers to check the articles (around 20 in this current release cycle). Reviewers need to be able to add comments and suggestions but not actually change the material. We have used this approach as we believe it is the simplest way for non-tech writers to indicate what changes need to be made, rather than spending time trying to come up with suitable wording and replacing text themselves.
One way of achieving our goal is to copy/paste updated (but not published) articles from preview mode directly into a Google Docs document. This document can then be shared with the reviewers (who can see who has already said what) and they can add their own comments, as required. When they are finished, we update the Google Docs version of each article. If the changes were significant, the reviewers can then look at the GD version again to check that their suggestions are correctly applied. In most cases the changes are straightforward, so they are simply applied to the original version of the updated article and then published in the usual way.
The main benefit of this approach is to leverage the power of GD as a collaboration tool. It also means that reviewers do not have to be familiar with using Guide editor or needing to use a license seat.
Is there any way that some or all of this approach can be used with the current review features in Zendesk Guide?
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Thank you for sharing your case it's very insightful, I recorded it for when we'll get closer to building collaboration tools. Unfortunately, there are not many tools in Guide at the moment to support your flow. You can, of course, leave comments when you assign an article to someone else but they are on the article level and it's not possible to place them in the text as it is in GD.
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Thanks for the update Katarzyna. One option that would simplify our current workflow would be an "export article" feature. At the moment, the articles have to be copied and pasted into Google Docs, but a bulk export to HTML, Word or even GD directly would save a lot time and effort.
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Hi Xero - Workflowmax and Katarzyna Karpinska,
You may want to reach out to Sorin at Swifteq. He's working on a KB collaboration tool.
https://www.linkedin.com/Fin/asorin
I've spoken to him and he's very open to ideas for this feature.
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Thank you Flair Customer Support for the mention.
Yes, I am working on making Zendesk KB collaboration easier between team members. This will be a new feature part of the existing Help Center Manager app.I am keen to speak to any of you about your current collaboration workflow and needs! This would help me build the right thing, so please get in touch.
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Hi Sorin. I would be interested in talking with you about collaboration options. What's the best way for me to get in touch?
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Hi Steve, happy to chat! You can use the contact details on the app's page.
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