What's in this article?

For organizations that want to create a separation of duties to ensure users that draft and edit knowledge content cannot also publish that content without a formal documented review, we have the Publisher Approval workflow option on Knowledge Libraries.

What is the Publisher Approval Workflow?

The Publish Approval workflow makes it so when a user edits a Knowledge Library (branding or custom code) or a Knowledge Article, that same user cannot publishing their changes without approval from another user.

Enabling the Approval Workflows for a Knowledge Library

To enable Knowledge Library and Article approval workflows, you need to enable the 'Require Publisher Approval' toggle on the Library settings. You can find this by going to Settings > Select the Library > Detail Tab > Edit General Info > Enable Require Publisher Approval.

Publisher Approval For Libraries

• Once the Require Publisher Approval feature is enabled, any content changes in the library (branding, custom code, an article content change) will require approval from a different user before publishing.

• For all changes to branding or custom code in a knowledge library, we automatically track revision history for drafts, published content, and previously published content. This means that a user can make edits to the branding and custom code in a knowledge library and preview those changes before publishing.

• A user can make edits and save the edits to the draft as many times as they need.
• Once the changes are ready for review, the user can share the draft with another user for review. The second user can approve the changes and/or publish the content. If the second user makes additional updates to the draft, they will need to get approval from a different user. The last editor is never able to publish the draft without approval.

Publisher Approval For Articles

• Activating the 'Require Publisher Approval' toggle on a library also introduces a new approval workflow for Articles within that Library.

• With the new feature enabled, when a user edits a draft article, they must obtain approval from another user before they can publish it. Any user with the article publishing permission that isn't the one that made the changes will be able to approve the content changes.

• The approving user can choose to either approve the article, allowing the original editor to publish, or they can publish the article on behalf of the original editor.

This approval workflow only applies to Libraries with the 'Require Publishing Approval' flag enabled. By default, this workflow is disabled for all libraries.