Assignment groups vs. ownership groups

[Aerin]

We are currently using ownership groups to manage creation, etc., of knowledge articles, but my devs want to transfer this functionality back to the standard assignment groups. I can see the pros in terms of minimizing the number of total groups to manage. 

But it got me wondering why there are separate ownership groups to begin with? Is there anything different about how the ownership groups work or functionality associated with them that doesn't go with assignment groups that I'll miss, if I let them make the switch? Is there a best practice from SN's point of view with maintaining this separation?

I'd appreciate any input or experience with this that you'd like to share.

[Kim27]

Hello Aerin, the biggest difference between the two is ownership groups provide a level of access to edit/publish the article. 

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.

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.

If you want everyone within the assignment group to edit and publish articles, then you could tie the assignment group to the ownership group which will allow for easier maintenance. However, if everyone that is part of the assignment group should not have the ability to publish articles, then you want to stick to ownership groups. 

Here's the documentation on ownership groups. https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/utah-servicenow-platform/page/product/knowledge-management/concep...

[johnfeist]

Hi Aerin,

From my readings, ownership groups are specific to KB and carry certain roles with them.  Here's a link to the documentation.  Based on that, you should be able to assign the necessary roles to an assignment group but since ownership groups are a special case for just KB why not leave them as is?

[Aerin]

Maybe I need to rephrase the question. In our case, the people in the assignment groups are pretty much 1:1 with the people in our ownership groups. Which is why, I think, the devs want to assign the required knowledge-related roles to the assignment groups and minimize the maintenance.

Does anyone else do this or has tried this? Or does everyone just keep the two sets of groups?

I can find and read the documentation, but it doesn't address this issue, so I'm looking for input from people who either understand why there are two group types or have tried the set up I'm describing and can speak to if it works/what the pros and cons are.

[Kristen Dettman]

We were in the same boat as you in that we didn't want to have to maintain two separate sets of groups when they were essentially 1:1. We decided to open up the Ownership Group field so users can select any Assignment Group, and if it's not already type Knowledge, we have a business rule that adds that type to it and also provisions the necessary role to the group's manager. So essentially, the groups that need to be used for ownership are being provisioned as we go! I can't promise it's best practice, but it's been working out well for us.