Change Authors for Knowledge Articles

[sabhish]

Hi,

I was wondering if we can change the Author Name for a knowledge article and replace it with a Group Name that includes more than one Authors.

Thanks for help.

[Sarup Paul]

We strongly recommend on using Ownership group, as we use this for Actionable Feedback management too. 

[Michael QCKM]

Author is a tricky field in SN too by the way.

For us, we came from another (standalone) Knowledge Base tool, and imported much of our content.  As such, I was the primary Author in the old system, and there were stragglers.  During the migration, for any Authored by ME, I was made Author, for any from weird one-offs that were odd (employee no longer works here, it was a Draft, etc.) they made ME Author as well.

AFTER the initial import, any NEW article was "created" as Draft... the Original Draft Creator was ALSO the Author, and any subsequent Edits (Drafts) were created by that person.

• Author           =Original Draft Creator
• Created By     =Draft Creator (Original and subsequent)

Because of this, we generally don't use the unclear Author field, but use Created By instead as it's more accurate... for us.

[Lori Penor]

Hello @shannont  as well as others on this thread - Is there an OOB solution for this? The link that you provided, @shannont, looks like it just goes to the default extend page. 

Here are the problems we are trying to solve with have the KB articles authored by groups and displaying the group in the portal rather than a single person: 

1. Knowledge authors are listed on the article which leads to end users reaching out to them with questions on the policy, which is not sustainable.

2. Authors may leave the specific role. Therefore, if an end-user does reach out, it may be leading to a dead-end.

3. Authors may leave the company (same issue as the original poster). 

4. In our recent usability study, users found the current experience to be very confusing and non-authoritative since they don't know the author is. Instead, they expect the KB article to be written by an authoritative group such as "HR Equity Team" or "IT Tools Team". 

[Pam Calvey]

I am not on Advanced Plug in and can't use groups yet. To solve the Author shoulder tap issue, we have removed author names from the View. They are still tracked and displayed on the article form but not viewable from the portal views. And since we can't use groups, we use Assignment groups as our document owner groups. I expect them to have knowledge managers and be in charge of content.