KB with Two Approvals - Group then Manager

[Heidi Rawson1]

• I have created a KB that requires two approvals to publish an article.
• The two approvals are 1st level group, 2nd level manager of the group.
• I set the KB up with Approval - Publish and listed the group managers there but I don't think that matters.
• When I create Articles, I set them up to use Ownership Groups, as mandatory, with ownership group approval.
• That is working well for the first approval. It is requiring the first group to approve at the peer level.
• The issue I'm having is how to get the second level approval, the manager from the ownership group to get the next approval. Every group manager will have to approve after their group approval.
• All the groups were added to the Type: Knowledge, and role: knowledge_group_member.
• All the Managers are assigned as manager to their groups, and have been given the role knowledge_group_manager.

If anyone has done two-level approvals. I may be on the wrong track, or on the right track and missing a link! Appreciate the assistance.

[EricG · Accepted solution]

Funny you  should post this, I'm in the middle of updating the KB for just such a purpose.

A screenshot of your KB and Workflow would be helpful.

What I found was that i copied the OOB Approval Publish workflow, copied the Approval activity and updated accordingly. Here is why my KB looks like.

Here is the Workflows i set in the KB itself

I found that approvals for KB are different than normal Approvals and you need the Approve/Not Approved/Delete options

By copying the OOB WF, it is working form me on First and Second approvals.

[cynlink1]

Hi Dave,

I have implemented your solution. However, I have cases where some knowledge articles have an ownership group, and others do not (in the same knowledge base.) How do I set the workflow to skip the ownership group approval if the field is blank on the knowledge article form?

[cynlink1]

@Dave Littlejohn - I think I solved for instances where the ownership group is empty by pointing the 'delete' action from the 1st approval action to the 2nd approval action. Is there a better way?

[Dave Littlejohn]

I would design it with an IF before the Ownership approval to check if the ownership group field is empty or not. if it's empty, skip to the knowledge base owner approver, if it's not empty, continue to the ownership group approval that was originally designed.

[cynlink1]

Thank you!

[Heidi Rawson1]

This is great and almost working. I have the workflow defined as above, including the second approval set to ownership_group.manager, but for some reason the second approval is returning all the members of the ownership group, not the manager.