Article publish workflow best practise

[Magnus Hovik]

Hi,

Out of the box, the Approval Publish workflow routes knowledge articles to the Knowledge Base Owner or Knowledge Managers for approval. Alternatively, an Ownership Group can be used.

However, I’m trying to design a slightly different setup.

I want:

• Everyone to start with approval required.

• A specific group of trained users to be able to self-publish.

• To avoid adding large numbers of users as Knowledge Managers.

• To avoid using Ownership Groups as this limits flexibility and article maintenance later.

The goal is to manually add trained contributors to a custom group that allows them to bypass the approval step.

What is the cleanest way to implement this?

Would you recommend:

• Creating a custom publish flow with a condition like “If user is member of Group X → bypass approval”?

• Or is there a more standard / recommended approach to achieve this?

Appreciate any guidance on best practice here.

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @Magnus Hovik 

I recently worked on a similar setup for one of my clients, and I would recommend using Flow Designer for everything—avoid any bypass or custom workaround. Flows operate at the Knowledge Base level, not at the individual Knowledge Article level, which means if any article is linked to a knowledge base, the relevant flow will automatically apply. This helps keep the implementation standardized and consistent.

[Magnus Hovik]

Thank you feedback! Could you specify more on how you approached this with your similar setup?

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @Magnus Hovik 

We didn’t change anything; we’re using the OOTB approach. If you open the Knowledge Base, you’ll see that the flow has been added there. Any article created under that knowledge base will automatically follow the same flow.

I saw the flow shared by @JulietChicago, and it looks good. However, one key question is how we identify the owner group. For example, in your case, if the creator is a member of Group X, the approval is bypassed. But what if tomorrow there are five different groups? We would then need to add conditions for each.

We also need to consider whether users might create articles that contain sensitive data and therefore require approval. In such cases, the flow might skip approvals incorrectly.

Because of this, it’s safer to either:

• Keep approvals enabled for everyone, or

• Alternatively, create a new Knowledge Base with a flow that has no approval, and grant access only to specific groups who are allowed to create Knowledge Articles without approval.

[JulietChicago]

HI, 

We have something similar we did it in the older workflow editor as that was our only option at the time.

Today Flow designer is better.  We created the flow, for special self publishing group we use the publish workflow for members of the "special self publishing group" everyone else we use the OOB approval workflow.