Articles with the status "Pending Deactivation" are no longer found or displayed

[Rocco K_hling]

Hello Community,

In https://www.servicenow.com/docs/de-DE/bundle/xanadu-servicenow-platform/page/product/knowledge-manag..., an article should no longer be found or displayed until the retiring request has been approved.

In our knowledge base, we have been able to use the approval workflow for retiring articles without any problems.

We are currently using ServiceNow version Xanadu Patch 7.

During a technical test, I noticed that articles to be retiring are no longer displayed or found if they are still in "Pending Deactivation" and the retiring has not yet been approved.

Is this a bug or an undocumented change?

[Brian Lancaster · Accepted solution]

As far as I know once you invoke the retirement workflow the article goes into workflow stage of pending retirement. Once there the article cannot be found when searching the Knowledge base but you can still find it if you have back end access to create articles. This is the way it has always worked.

[Rocco K_hling]

Thanks for your reply.

We've been using ServiceNow for several years. Then it seems that the product documentation doesn't describe this case accurately or completely. An article in "Pending Deactivation" whose retiring hasn't been approved should still be viewable and searchable. According to https://www.servicenow.com/docs/de-DE/bundle/xanadu-servicenow-platform/page/product/knowledge-manag..., it also states: "Retired knowledge articles cannot be searched by external users or customers."

Until recently, I was able to understand this; only once the retiring was approved was the article no longer accessible or searchable. However, it should be noted that retiring occurred relatively rarely.

As part of a patch, we performed a business-critical technical test on our applications in ServiceNow, and I also examined Knowledge Management more intensively. I've now noticed that articles are no longer searchable or viewable without approved deactivation (except in the backend with the appropriate permissions).

I don't find this critical, but it is a bit surprising. Perhaps it was a minor bug that was fixed in an older patch version.

Best wishes to you and the community