Are you able to set permissions for Knowledge at the Category level?

[JordanL2]

My team received a request to configure permissions for Knowledge at the category level, as opposed to at the article level or at the knowledge base level. Everything I've looked at so far says that this is not current functionality that exists in ServiceNow, but I wanted to see if anyone in the community has found any workarounds for this. Thank you!

[Community Alums]

If there is no OOTB solution, you can add a field on the knowledge article (can be hidden) and the field would have several choices and according to these choices you could create ACLs granting the access.
For example - knowledge article has a field "Privacy level" with values 1 to 5 and only knowledge_admin can see/edit these in a list view. And then create the ACLs as following if:
"Privacy level is 1 > XYZ", 
"Privacy level is 2 > ABC",
"Privacy level is 3 > FGH".

Or perhaps a scripted condition within the user criteria records could be the way.

[Community Alums]

Edit: the field would be on the [kb_category] table

[lastreaction122]

---

@JordanL2 wrote:

My team received a request to configure permissions for Knowledge at the category level, as opposed to at the article level or at the knowledge base level. Everything I've looked at so far says that this is not current functionality that exists in ServiceNow, but I wanted to see if anyone in the community has found any workarounds for this. Thank you!

---

Hey! One approach is to create separate Knowledge Bases for each category and assign user criteria to control access. By doing so, you can manage permissions at the Knowledge Base level, which indirectly controls access to the categories within them. This method allows you to define who can read or contribute to articles within a specific category by controlling access at the Knowledge Base level.

Another method involves creating Access Control Lists (ACLs) with conditions based on the category. You can set up ACLs that grant or restrict access to articles based on their category. For example, you can create conditions such as "Privacy level is 1 > XYZ," "Privacy level is 2 > ABC," and "Privacy level is 3 > FGH" to control access based on the article's category. This approach requires careful configuration to ensure that permissions are applied correctly.