Knowledge Article Management Guidelines

[slgonzales]

Good morning all! 

I'm new to the Knowledge Admin process role at my current organization and I'm reaching out to get feedback on how others are managing regular content review, KB validity (expiration) dates and retirement of articles over time. 

I want to establish reasonable timelines to ensure article content is reviewed regularly (at what time mark? yearly? quarterly?), articles are retired as appropriate, and we also want to establish reasonable expiration dates of KB articles if they are not reviewed in a timely manner. 

I'd appreciate any information that can be shared with respect to how these process policies are managed at other organizations. 

Thank you! 

[Pam Calvey · Accepted solution]

My company has about 5,000 articles and we use the 1-year default for validity review. It's up to the Document Owner group knowledge managers to decide if an article is no longer useful. If articles are not reviewed in a year they automatically retire. Knowledge Managers are told they can manually set the date to less than a year if it makes sense for the content. 

I've heard of large companies with tens of thousands of articles setting their valid-to default at 6 months, because they go through so much knowledge they can't afford to keep around non-useful articles any longer than that.

[Pam Calvey · Accepted solution]

My company has about 5,000 articles and we use the 1-year default for validity review. It's up to the Document Owner group knowledge managers to decide if an article is no longer useful. If articles are not reviewed in a year they automatically retire. Knowledge Managers are told they can manually set the date to less than a year if it makes sense for the content. 

I've heard of large companies with tens of thousands of articles setting their valid-to default at 6 months, because they go through so much knowledge they can't afford to keep around non-useful articles any longer than that.

[slgonzales]

Thank you so much! 

Do your knowledge authors receive notification that their articles are set to expire? 

Does the Knowledge Admin have the capability to "unretire" articles if needed or do you have a retire approve workflow in place? 

[Pam Calvey]

Yes, we send notification emails at 30, 15 and 0 days about the valid to date. We also provide them with a dashboard that tells them what's retiring. The articles retire automatically. There is a procedure to 'unretire'. Basically, they create a new version, so it goes through an approval process. 

[Rum]

Are notifications sent to individual or group? I'm working on organizing, looking for best ways to send notification due to our groups/ teams info were not set up correctly when we implemented ServiceNow a couple years ago.