How to process legacy Knowledge Articles stuck in Review / Pending Retirement with old approvers?

[suryapaduko]

Hi Community,

We have a number of legacy Knowledge Articles currently stuck in Review and Pending Retirement states.

These articles were submitted for approval before I was added as the Knowledge Manager / Manager of the respective Knowledge Bases. Since the approval records were created earlier, my name is not present in the Approvals related list, and I am therefore unable to approve/reject or complete the workflow for these articles.

I currently have the Knowledge Admin ("knowledge_admin") role, but I do not have the Platform Admin ("admin") role.

Some of the original approvers/authors are also no longer responsible for these Knowledge Bases, and in some cases may no longer be active users.

I now need to clean up this legacy backlog and, after validation, either:

- Publish the articles that are still valid

- Retire the articles that are no longer required

- Move/cancel them appropriately if they should not proceed further

What is the recommended OOB/supported approach for handling these existing approval records?

Specifically:

1. With the "knowledge_admin" role, is there any supported way for me to process or take ownership of these existing approvals?

2. Can the current Knowledge Manager be added as an approver to already existing KB approval records?

3. Is there a supported way to regenerate/reassign the approvals based on the current Knowledge Base managers?

4. Can the existing workflow/approval be cancelled and restarted without directly manipulating the workflow state?

5. For a large number of legacy articles, is there a recommended bulk remediation approach?

6. Does the approach differ if the Knowledge Base is using legacy Workflow versus Flow Designer for Publish/Retire approvals?

I would prefer not to directly update the "workflow_state" or manipulate approval records through scripts unless that is the recommended/supported approach.

Any guidance or best practice for cleaning up this type of legacy KB approval backlog would be appreciated. 

[John_Wilkes]

i would recall the articles and ask for your authors of ownership groups to review and either retire or resubmit the article. 

If its been stuck in a backlog then some of the information may no longer be needed

If its also been in a backlog, the information may be out of date

If the information is important, then it should be reviewed and resubmitted. This should then come through to you as you are now in the approval group.