Automate knowledge article renewal or retirement

[Ashley Heath]

Hello everyone, I'm hoping someone out there has figured this out and can help our teams save some cycles when it comes time to renew or retire knowledge articles.

Each of our departments have their own knowledge base with varying users being able to contribute knowledge articles to their respective KBs. Some KBs are configured for "Approval Publish" and others "Instant Publish" depending on the needs of that department. All knowledge articles have authors assigned and they get expiration notifications when articles are 30 days and 15 days from the valid to date expiring.

Since only a handful of the authors have the 'knowledge manager' role, they don't have the ability to check out and publish new versions of their articles, even if there are no changes to the content. They simply need to move the 'valid to' date forward another year.

What I would love is in the 30 and 15-day expiration notifications:

 1) Provide the author a URL to ECP to review the article.

 2) Provide buttons to allow the author to automatically renew or retire the article by sending a reply to the notification back to the system.

For KBs set to "Approval Publish" the knowledge managers receive a notification when an article is submitted for review and the notification includes buttons that allow them to approve/reject the article via an email reply. I would like to use similar functionality to allow article authors to renew or retire their articles.

Has anyone out there found a way to automate the renewal and/or retirement of knowledge articles? If so, I'd appreciate any guidance you can provide.

Best regards,

Ash

[andreababch]

This is the exact same improvement we are looking to implement next. Would love to hear if anyone has done this as well. It would speed up and make the renewal process tremendously easier to be able to take appropriate action from the expiration email.

[Kim27]

In my opinion, allowing the user to approve the article via an email approval would be no different than not having a valid-to date at all. In my experience, the "approve" button will be clicked without any review. Maybe of the text of the article was included in the email, the user would at least look at the article before clicking approve? 

I hope others have different experiences than mine! 

[leahcoughlin]

I 100% agree with that kim! But what we implemented was whenever an article was used to solve an incident, and it was attached to the incident, then the valid to date would be extended a year. That way articles that are truly being used and are validated that way, don't have to be reviewed.

[JulietChicago]

I agree, if there is just button no one really looks at the article. I do like Leah's idea !