What is your experience with inactive authors?

[Andrew64]

Hello,

When it comes to Authors who have moved on (whether it be to another team or another company), what have you been doing?
What have you been doing with the Author field?
Have you been updating it? Changing it to another user? Leaving it be? 

Thank you!

[mbernste]

I created a Knowledge Article Review Dashboard (KARD) which among its various reports is an inactive author report.  Since we are not using permission groups yet but relying on the author field as the SME/contact, I check the dashboard on a weekly basis (sometimes more frequently) for anyone who is no longer active.  Our SNOW user table is fed by our HR system so when an employee leaves, we can see it in the employee table.  When an inactive employee is found, I reach out to their manager to identify a replacement.

[shannont]

I think there are various options.  Perfect world, prior to someone leaving the company, they would update any articles or tasks they might own in SNOW to the appropriate user.  Another option is having the KCS Coach reiterate this should they know someone is leaving. 

If you use Ownership Groups, then the article is cared for, however, I believe in keeping things nice and tidy, so I would suggest ensuring your data is accurate and making sure the OG updates the Author field. 

Like other SNOW records, when someone leaves, the system automatically moves Author from knowledge articles and other task owner/assigned to fields (outside of knowledge) to the Manager.  This is not the best as quite often that Manager may not take the action needed moving the article to the appropriate Author. 

Reporting can also help and if you have the Knowledge Domain Expert/KDE role, perhaps this is something that could exist on their or the KCS Coach Dashboard showing articles with inactive Authors.

After all of that, and with the OOB features today, I think OG is the best option.

[TJohns19]

Along with the Ownership Group field, we added a POC (Point of Contact) field. We use Author notes to list contact details for those POCs who are third-party and are not in the Ownership Group field.  

[Leri Andrews · Accepted solution]

OOTB the author field isn't on the knowledge template because SN expect the author to not change and to be a historical representation of who wrote the article.  It's worth noting that OOTB the original author remains subscribed to their articles even if they have moved on to another role.  Changing the author does not unsubscribe them.  However, ownership groups are all well and good, but if you have them for markets and you manage content around, say, HR policies then you may find that the person in charge of leave policy and process has no desire to be responsible for the payroll cut-off dates article no matter that they're all in the same group. Also OOTB the group manager gets assigned all the feedback tasks and have to spend a load of time assigning them to the right person.  So to answer you question, I run a report on inactive authors and badger their manager to get a replacement.