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

[Averell]

Lesley is right.

You should not try to change the whole permission system, because that usually has a lot of side effects that are unpredictable. The best solution is to publish the articles in an extra knowledge base, which basically has no read rights. Then I would give the rights to a special project group directly at the article, and assign the employees to this group. This way you keep them within the given possibilities and keep control.

Of course, you can also automate the whole thing with the automation options. For example, if a project is switched to active in the PPM, then the group is automatically created and all project members are assigned, etc. 

[Kim27]

Hi, I haven't played with them yet myself, but would the use of Knowledge Ownership Groups help in this instance? 

For the ease of maintenance of knowledge articles, you can assign an ownership group to a knowledge article and shift the ownership of an article from a single person to a group. An ownership group consists of a group of members and a manager who are responsible for knowledge articles. Responsibilities include: approving knowledge articles, performing AQI checks to ensuring article quality, and managing feedback tasks for knowledge articles.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/sandiego-servicenow-platform/page/product/knowledge-management/concept/enable-ownership-group.html

When a knowledge article is assigned to an ownership group:

• Only ownership group members have contribute access to the article even if they don't have contribute access to the knowledge base of the article. They can edit, approve, publish, and retire the knowledge article with which they are associated.
• Users who aren't a member of the ownership group can't contribute to the article even if they have contribute access to the knowledge base of the article.

[Lauren Methena]

That's one of the solutions I was suggesting - you can create a group of folks with permissions to see articles in review or draft - then you can apply them in the CAN READ criteria OR use them as an owner group. But as @Averell pointed out, that can run into some unintended consequences. 

I do think if done right though, with well defined roles assigned to the group so all members inherit those roles, this could be an interesting way to let stakeholders see and test their articles.