Internal Comments on Guide Articles

With our documentation in Guide, it is essential for us to have features common to writing software, like internal comments and collaboration within the editing view of an article. We often have just one or two questions about an article that we need someone to look at. It is inefficient to have to pull the article out of Zendesk to collaborate on it or to send a screenshot to someone. Many users in our organization are surprised that we can't collaborate within Zendesk. Ideally we should be able to highlight parts of the text and leave an internal comment on those and tag an internal user/agent in them to look at. 

Hi Jake Mahon,

This is definitely something that we want to add to content blocks in the future, but currently, we are working on other priorities (everything related to article multiplacement) and can't focus on this request. 

Hi - I have a question about this sentence in the official comment:

In Content Blocks, we are planning to add visibility permissions to the blocks so that you'll be able to place them in the articles and decide which of the readers can see them when they open an article.

Is this feature still on the roadmap? If so, when is it planned for release?

Hi Katarzyna Karpinska, 

With reference to the request made by JD above, 

If there was a way to share unpublished articles with these external stakeholders and eliminate the copy/pasting to an external document, we could save time and reduce errors. 

I would like to point out that copying and pasting text from one application to another adds weird, unnecessary tags to the article's source code, which cause problems for the localisation team when translating the articles with CAT tools.

some way to share not published articles with important stakeholders for review (or similar reasons)

Katarzyna Karpinska As for your third bullet point, we need a way to share unpublished articles with stakeholders for approval before we publish them. These are product owners and customers without agent access to Zendesk. Providing them with a Zendesk license would be cost-prohibitive and inconvenient, for the handful of articles they need to approve a year. Currently, we build articles in Zendesk, then copy/paste them into a Google Doc. Stakeholders add comments and suggestions to the doc, and then we go back to Zendesk to make those changes. Finally, we copy/paste the final article back into the document for final approval. If there was a way to share unpublished articles with these external stakeholders and eliminate the copy/pasting to an external document, we could save time and reduce errors. 

Another reason to not use content blocks for comments shared by agents is that the content we would share applies to only one article. 

 I understand that Content blocks were intended to share content among several articles (write once, use many times!). I dont think it was intended for recording agent (internal) comments on (public) articles.

Seems there should be a field within the article that is reserved for agent comments.  Once an agent adds comments, they are appended like a footnote to a document (at the bottom) and dated.  See screenshot.

Then, other agents can see these comments, but customers who view the article from the portal cannot.   In past work at IBM, we allowed any agent to add a comment/date to any article.  They accrue on that article but are not visible to any portal users.

regarding the statement: 

+1 request for the ability to add internal comments to Help Centre articles. 

In our specific case, we would like to have this feature to (among other things) add a link to the Asana task related to content creation and review for each specific article. Currently, we have to write the link at the bottom of the article and delete it before publishing.

I agree with this as weel, It would be a valuable feature to have internal comments for the content in the KB. 

It would be great to get this on the roadmap and it's pretty frustrating that this hasn't already been added.  The request has been out there for a number of years.  Honestly, this seems like a basic thing a product like this should offer.  There are many times you need to reference associated tickets, internal pages, internal bugs, etc.