Allow articles to be posted to multiple sections
計画済みIt would be super awesome if we had the ability to post a single article to multiple sections. We have a number of different "buckets" that our customers fall into that each have their own specific section. We often times write articles that are german to more than one group of customers but not all groups of customers. As it stands currently we have to write the article, post it to one section, copy it, navigate to a different section and post the article, navigate to a different section and post the article, navigate to a different section and post the article, and then navigate to a different section and post the article. This is also a huge pain because that one article now has 5 different URLs and becomes a nightmare for updating and linking in our marketing materials and / or website. It would be much easier and efficient if we could choose to post an article to multiple sections (even if it were still separate URL's for each).
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Hello there,
We hope you're doing well!
Our team has been working on a solution proposals to address the issue in this thread, and we're eager to gather feedback from you to better understand and validate the usability of our proposed changes. This will help us ensure that we're on the right track to meet your needs and improve overall satisfaction with Zendesk Guide.
We're looking for participants who:
- Regularly create and manage articles in Zendesk Guide.
- Experience challenges in replicating the same content across multiple sections or brands, leading to content duplication.
- Are interested in providing feedback on our proposed changes to address this issue.
The study will involve a 1-hour session, during which you'll have the opportunity to test a prototype of our proposed changes and share your thoughts on the potential improvements.
If you're interested in participating and fit the criteria mentioned above, please click the following invitation link, which will start with a short screener survey: Invitation Link
Thank you in advance for considering this opportunity. Your participation and feedback are invaluable to us, and we truly appreciate your support in making Zendesk Guide even better for all our customers!
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+1 for us on multiple forums. Our support documents often overlap into multiple areas. At the moment, I'm creating duplicates when needed, but it would be really nice to be able to specify which forum(s) articles should appear in. This would make updating SO much easier. Also easier on the customers who perform a search, and end up with 2 or more of the same articles returned on the search.
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I'm only a new customer, so I certainly don't have the same right of action as other existing customers. However, I did recently stumble on this thread because this is something which I naturally expected Zendesk to already be able to do.
Having now been through the entire thread, it is disappointing that not only has it taken so long to get to this point, but it sounds as though it is still not even close to being delivered.
Timeline Summary
2012 - Original request.
2013 - Officially added to the roadmap. (Link)
2013 - Delayed due to other highly requested features. (Link)
2014 - Request for use cases. (Link)
2014 - Feature not being planned "anytime soon". (Link)
2015 - The 'Planned' label is removed from the thread. (Link)
2016 - First public signs of active R&D. (Link)
2016 - Customers start becoming restless due to the lack of action.
2017 - Feature evaluation continues. (Link)
2018 - Target for EAP in Q1 2019. (Link)
2018 - EAP delayed to mid 2019. (Link)
2018 - First mention of 'Reusable Content'. And an admission that this is not quite the same as the requested feature. (Link)
2019 - Still no ETA, but feature is being actively worked on. (Link)
2019 - Survey for feedback and use cases. (Link)
2020 - Suggestion that 'Content Blocks' is the official solution to the feature request. (Link)
2020 - Confirmation the 'Content Blocks' is not the official solution. (Link)
2020 - Confirmation that the original feature request is now planned for future development. (Link) -
I've been watching these types of threads for quite some time. I have to say I am utterly disappointed in ZenDesk and their short-sighted attitude on this specific subject. I currently work for a small company, but our Help Center is growing exponentially on a daily basis. Because of this there are articles that need to be displayed in multiple areas without requiring me to remake them. This is a huge no-no. I shouldn't have to duplicate my work in order to work around the short-comings of the platform I'm using.
The most recent release of the Guide Feature was utterly useless. It hasn't assisted me in managing my help center in the slightest. What people really want and need has been systematically and historically ignored. I find this to be an stunted business approach and would strongly urge ZenDesk to reevaluate their priorities.
This is a feature that many of us NEED. It's not a want.
Furthermore, the way we've been led on for years about this feature is unbecoming. It is either something that will be done or will not. I think many of us would appreciate a direct yes or no instead of the generic roadmap answer.
Please, please give us what we need.
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Hey All,
I wanted to spend some time and update this thread and explain a bit more about what we’ve been up to and why this is still ‘planned’ and not ‘done’.
It’s been a journey, and I share personal frustration that we’re not there yet. But I will tell you that we have 2 engineering teams and a product manager working on a series of releases to get us there. With that, I hope to explain some of the context of what we have been focusing on for the last few years. Content reuse has been an across the board demand for a long time (as you can see in this thread). However, our underlying data model did not support the core of what needed to make this a reality. If you looked at Guide 4 years ago, the product didn’t have proper permissions, hierarchy, workflow, revisions, auditing etc. And the underlying system reflected that relative simplicity and our articles were bound to a single section in a single Help Center. Beyond that, Help Center as a product had to scale from perhaps a billion page views a year to almost a billion page views per month. That is all to say, there was a lot to improve along the way.
Two years ago we started focusing in earnest on content reuse. We started working on what is now Content Blocks. We prioritized this feature first after interviewing customers about their needs around reusing content and doing data analysis around how content is reused. We heard from customers that they need full duplication of content, but that being able to reuse portion of content would unlock even more functionality for them. Content Blocks and the desire to place articles across multiple Help Centers and sections has meant some fundamental redesign. We’ve been rearchitecting the system behind the scenes and unwinding a lot of complexity along the way and opening up new possibilities. Right now, we’re focused on driving Content Blocks to its first full release in the next month. But we have a roadmap of planned updates throughout the year that will drive us toward placing articles across Help Centers and sections. We know we need to build this feature and we’re going to. It’s just a matter of getting there.
I know this is little solace for those of you that really need this. I get it and I really wish we had it today. I’m sorry we’re not there yet, but we are listening and working hard to get us there and beyond. I do really believe we have great things in store and I really appreciate your (extreme) patience so far.
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@Bogdan - Can it PLEASE not be just in Guide Enterprise? This is something we've all been asking for for over 6 years now.
This could work like how reusing Forms in all/some Brands works now. Or which Groups can use certain Macros, etc.
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@Bogdan please add my voice along with @Brad for the "decision makers" to consider both "multiple sections" and "reusable content" for Guide Professional.
While I understand the need to reserve certain functionality as added value in a tiered subscription model, the number of comments, and the span of time over which this feature has been repeatedly requested, suggest that it should be considered more as standard functionality and made available to a broader group of customers.
Thank you!
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Hi all,
I'll gladly provide you with some updates as to our current thinking and direction.
Let me start by acknowledging the use case. We do want to support this. So it's not currently a question of whether we want this feature or not. It is down to how to do it and when to do it.
I have also acknowledged this in my extensive answers from May and July this year, although I understand it can be difficult to get a full picture of my thinking because I spread it out into several different comments. Oh the joy of having an ongoing conversation and the challenge of keeping up with it afterwards ;)
How
There are certainly different ways to do this. What we want to do is the right thing that works for all our customers. We also need to make sure that we build something that is sustainable and doesn't cause problems to other things we want to introduce into our product in the future. This was what happened when the original category/section/article tree was built. It was built in a manner that made it close to impossible for us to expand to have the article live in more than one section without significantly rebuilding it.
A few suggestions have been mentioned here and we have definitely been through these as well. A lot of what I do is to ensure that we have explored many different options.
I think Peter has summarized these pretty well, so let me comment on the individual suggestions:
Allow dynamic linking of article CONTENT so that one article is the source of truth.
We have investigated the same thing. Currently that is not possible due to how access restrictions are built. Since access restrictions are defined on the section level, an article could have many different access restrictions if we allowed it to be published to multiple sections. This in itself would be difficult for us to calculate, because what if a user has access to one section but not the other? What should we be honouring, how can we calculate it technically and how do we make sure it's understandable both from a Manager perspective and an End-user perspective.
If we were to link between the articles, we would have to know if the user would actually have access to the article and with our current implementation that would be a very demanding query which wouldn't scale. It would be even worse if articles could have multiple access restrictions.
Some of you might be okay with links being visible that then wouldn't be accessible after clicking, but I have had numerous conversations with other customers who want to ensure that customers don't see something they can't access.
Each article are unique articles, thus breadcrumbs will be through the correct category -> section
What we've seen in conversation with other customers has been that sometimes you want the articles to be separate, sometimes you don't. For example when it comes to metrics. You might want to measure the performance of the article no matter what section it's in. You might want votes to be the same, so users voting for the article in one section also vote for it in the other section. Other times you want to split those up completely and measure each article's performance for each section it's placed in.
It's the same when we look at article comments. You might want those comments to be the same as they address the same content rather than be split.
I can definitely understand that you might not have that specific requirement in your organisation, but we do see this from other customers.
What we might do specifically for this use case is introducing a way to duplicate articles, so they could indeed be separate entities. But that obviously means that maintenance of these will be more difficult, as you would have two copies of the same content that you would have to maintain. We have already built a prototype for duplicating articles, but the way attachments was built means that we need to make some significant changes there before we can introduce the feature.
When someone searches for some content in the article, it links to the source of truth, but display a note beside the article that this article is also in X other sections.
Yes, we are definitely going in that direction too. No matter what we need to have a canonical article that we link to by default. But showing that it appears in other sections would require either new components in our Curlybars theming language or changes to the breadcrumbs. But both those things are definitely in scope of what we are looking at right now, we just need to ensure we build a great experience.
What are we planning to do?
We are knee-deep in going through all of this with a dedicated team. Being able to publish the same articles into multiple sections is tied to two other projects: Being able to have more than 2 levels (category, section) and being able to publish the same article to multiple brands. These things are all tied together, so we need to holistically understand how they interact, before we can nail down exactly which feature to deliver first. We might deliver one before the other, simply because that is how we can technically build it in a sound manner.
When
As mentioned we now have a dedicated engineering team that is focusing on publishing content, including to multiple sections. This team is a newly created one and ensures that we get some much needed focus on this part of our product.
Unfortunately I can't be specific about timelines yet, because we are still going through everything and making a plan for how we get this out. We need to understand if we need to migrate from the old to the new functionality, if this has any implications on our API, what consequences this has on our Curlybars theming language and what it means to our standard theme Copenhagen.
Once we understand these things we will start to build them. Some of that work will be visible in that new features will be launched. Some of it won't be visible, because we need to do significant changes to our infrastructure to support this. As we progress we might make other decisions. We might see something that we need to attend to urgently or that there are certain tasks that we need to do before we can do publishing to multiple sections.
As you know prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. What I can see now in the crystal ball is that you should not expect these features for at least 9 months (and it could definitely be a lot longer). There is simply too much work for us to complete in that timeframe even with a dedicated team and we still have many unknowns at this stage that could influence our timing.
As we progress through this we'll know more and more and I'll gladly continue to provide updates, because I understand that this is causing significant pain. That is why we have started up a new team to focus on this.
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Hey everybody,
as mentioned above, we're aiming for an EAP in Q1 2019 for posting articles to multiple sections.
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We are just starting out with Zendesk Guide, but this thread is concerning.
7 years to change this field to allow multiple selections:
And no result yet, or in the foreseeable future.
Should we still hope or move on?
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Quite disappointing that a feature, requested for 7+ years would only be offered to enterprise users. especially considering that, particularly, smaller companies, who may not have the corresponding support request volume to warrant hiring 5 support users (for enterprise to make sense). Maybe it is worth to go shopping around then (yes, Zendesk is the biggest out there, but obviously far from perfect)
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Yes, this would be very helpful! We'd like the same functionality (articles can be republished in different categories in the knowledge base). Ideally, there's one parent article and you can pick the other locations where it shows up, that way you only have to edit it in one place etc...
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this request has been running for five years, please act on it or reject it if you don't want to do it.
You, Zendesk, just release re-vamped Helpcenter as "Guide" and it is still not possible.We are just starting to us helpcenter/guide need the to be able to publish an article in two sections.our use-scenario is as follows
We have a category called "Your solution". With in this category each customer organizations have their own section which is restricted to users from the specifik organization.
We also have a section created per customer organizations under another category called Internalsupport. These sections are restricted to agents. In this section are internal support articles that our agents need to support the customers but we don't want the end-users to see.
However we do have articles that is relevant for agents and end-user. We therefor NEED to be able to have articles listed under two or more sections with different restriction level
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Its plain EXTORTION to add this functionality which has been in high demand now for over 6 years to put it only in Guide Enterprise. We been at Guide Professional level for almost 5 years and to force us to pay so much more for something that is considered basic functionality of any good Knowledge Base is out right Extortion on the part of Zendesk.
Zendesk has sunk to a new low to make this essential function which we have been waiting for over 6 years something you only can get in the very top tier if Guide subscriptions
Shame on you Zendesk.
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+1 PLEASE!!!
I bet it would be such an easy task to change this on the backend too. PLEASE
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How amazing is this. Originally requested in 2012, now four years later still being requested.
And as I type this, a pop up appears to the side of this topic, from Sarah Kay, Customer Support Analyst at Zendesk that says:
"We'd love your feedback about your experience in our Help Center. Please take a quick survey to help us help you!"Well, how about Analysing this?
Knock! Knock! Zendesk. A lot of us still have heaps of respect for your great product. But when we think no one is listening, it's tempting to start looking for alternatives that offer basic functionality like what being requested here...Programmatically it would be a cinch.
Not expecting anything to happen however, I am unfollowing this topic because all I am getting is more people like me saying the same thing and getting no answer.
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Hi Christian,
Thanks for the update, although it unfortunately doesn't really give us any info that we didn't already have. Just my 2 cents (and I'm sure the others here agree), the need for publishing a single article in multiple categories is much more compelling than the need for publishing a single article to multiple brands (which I haven't seen anyone in this thread mention). Even though making it possible to publish a single article to multiple brands may be easier for you to achieve, we hope that you choose to work on publishing a single article to multiple categories first instead as that is what your customers really want & need.
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I was about to choose Zendesk but this topic made me think twice about it. I can't imagine myself having to copy past the same article 5 times. This feature has been asked since 2012!
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Hey Brad,
I'll make sure to share the feedback with the decision makers, it is indeed something people are concerned with.
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For sure this needs to be core functionality!
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Hi Katarzyne, thank you for the info.
However, don't think I'm the only one who feels that this is a bit of a joke. This ticket has been going on for 8 years - we are patiently waiting, and the requirements are clear. Then, you start promising us a solution and when it finally arrives it's not what we expected nor what we wanted.
From what you're telling us now, it sounds like you've realized the entire time, that this isn't going to solve our requirements. Again, you are now promising us a feature "in the future" - what's that? 8 more years?
I completely understand that you can't give us timelines. But when you're fully aware of the fact, that the solution you've been promising us for several years isn't going to cut it, just admit it. I'll far more respect a concise response about this issue not being given any focus for the foreseeable future. Then I at least know what's going on and what I can expect. Now, I'm just disappointed.
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+1 on making this core functionality!
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Yep. I'm on board as well. It's very frustrating making several of the same articles in different sections.
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Still waiting....I have changed companies and this is still not offered.
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Honestly shocked reading this thread. I don't understand how Zendesk STILL doesn't have this feature. As Zendesk users, we know first hand what it means to service customers. This is a basic and IMPORTANT function that is missing for your CUSTOMERS. Content Blocks don't even remotely solve the issue we are facing. And it's quite embarrassing that Zendesk still hasn't figured this out. Please save the generic reply and just add this to the product roadmap for the NEAR FUTURE. Otherwise at some point people will get tired of waiting and this thread will soon become a thread on what platforms other than Zendesk have this ability.
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Just a little late for this topic's 10th anniversary!
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I was thinking about buying a cake to commemorate...
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*BUMP*
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This topic is fairly old... is this feature on the roadmap?
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+100 ;-)
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