Handling Article Links within Other Articles

[mbernste]

I am wondering how others are managing articles that need to refer to other articles.  Right now, article authors are referring to other articles by putting the permalink into the article.  As you know, from a knowledge management/maintenance perspective, this is not a good solution as linked articles change, get retired, moved to another knowledge base, etc.  The "related articles" related list tab is good for the portal, but not good for a CSR (customer service representative) who is searching for an article.  How have others tackled this situation?  The CSRs are using the Service Operations Workspace (SOW) if that makes any difference.

[Dave Littlejohn]

Are the CSRs using the full view for the article? When I opened the article in full view, I can see the "related articles" related list:

[mbernste]

How did you get that added?  We don't have that.  We're on Vancouver.

[Dave Littlejohn]

we're on Utah and just tested with a personal instance on Washington, both had that widget available on the right side when I selected "full view". I made sure to link the article via the "related articles" related list though.

[Vickie Runyon]

Not necessarily an answer to your question, but a related topic. Recently, ServiceNow added the Replacement Article feature. When retiring an article, you can specify a replacement article number. Then, if a permalink is used to the retired article, it will redirect to the new article - and indicate at the top that KB### was retired and replaced with KB###.

So, if you do have permalinks embedded in articles, it makes it less troublesome when the linked article is retired.