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

[Rum]

We've discussed this in our organization. To some users, it is convenient not having to review all the details and just click Approve or have the system publish automatically. Most of the IT teams still agree that it's still good to review to ensure they don't miss anything, in case there were activities changed in the last year or so. That was one main reason that I've been working on moving documents (mainly troubleshooting. support documents, processes) from SharePoint into ServiceNow. This helps to ensure we review documents regularly, retire them if not needed, vs. in SharePoint users keep documents without revision, no updates, no reviews. We're working on setting up Past Valid Date articles that users don't review within specific time frame (still looking into between 1-3 months) and move the KB articles into Retirement.