Allowing users to Preview Knowledge articles who do not have Knowledge access

[Janelle3]

Hi,

We sometimes have a need to send a preview of Knowledge Articles drafts to customers who do not have access to ServiceNow as a Fulfiller / knowledge user. The "View Article" feature that's available from the draft Fulfiller-view, seems to produce a link that cannot be shared with other Fulfillers / knowledge contributors.

We would use this feature before for an upcoming project launch, so we really don't want the article to be published early. Printing the article to PDF and emailing it often produces something that is not quite the same experience as being able to email a link to the article. 

Does anyone have any suggestions for how we can allow business users to preview articles?

Thanks,

Janelle

[Lauren Methena]

Hi, Janelle! You may not like this answer, but I've had good luck copying/pasting into Word, because formatting stays and links work if they have links and functionality to test. Bonus: Authors/content owners can use track changes for their edits, which is a lot easier overall. Definitely the quickest and easiest low-tech solution.

Alternatively, you could potentially grant draft and review access by adding potential content owners to a user group that would grant them the role they need to see articles in preview (i.e., draft and review workflow states). Then, anyone you add to that group will have that role. (Only downside is that people could see each other's articles in draft and review, but they'd have to have the link to the article and be really nosy, which I find aren't very big concerns generally.)

Here are some articles that talk a little more about the technical roles needed. (If they aren't the right ones, hopefully they'll lead you to what you need.)

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/quebec-servicenow-platform/page/product/knowledge-management/conc...

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/quebec-servicenow-platform/page/product/knowledge-management/task...

Another option, and this might be a little more labor intensive - or it could mess with your versioning, if that's an issue you're concerned with - and that is, if you can add "CAN READ" criteria to one person versus a predefined group, you could publish the article solely for the people who need to review it. 

Create the article. Add your reviewers to the "CAN READ" field (see attached). Publish. Send them the link and ask for their feedback.

So, a couple of different options - all of them easy, some requiring more set up than others (but definitely easy once the pieces are in place).

Hope this helps or leads you to some good ideas! Cheers!

[JulietChicago]

We perform the copy paste to MS Word as well for those users that can not Preview the article.

The only issue is images those don't copy over for us.

[Lesley W]

Hi Janelle,

I'm not sure if this is an ideal way of working but you could set up a staging knowledge base that is only accessible by the members you need to see those articles before they can be published to their 'live' knowledge base.

That way they get the same experience as the user in how it will look and search etc. but it will be in a knowledge base only they can see (meaning you can share the links with them etc.).

Then once/if they approve they can be migrated over to the 'live' knowledge base and made accessible to the wider team/organisation.

Otherwise, I'd suggest Laren's above method of using the content/ownership groups to allow them 'view' access to drafts.

[Lauren Methena]

I like the idea of a separate KB. That makes sense. It would basically be like your QA knowledge base. Let them see articles in there. 

You'll have to redo images, because the images need to be in your media library in the KB that they're in. (I highly recommend NOT just pasting images in - take the time to put them in your media library, and use a good naming convention, preferably one that combines KB#s of where images appear and keywords in case you want to reuse an image.)

But you can otherwise go to the source code, copy the HTML, put it all into the new KB, and bam - you're done. All your work transfers in seconds.