Creating an Audit Trail for Knowledge Article Reviews: Ideas Needed

[cynlink1]

Hello ServiceNow Friends,

I am in need of some ideas and help with the requirements detailed below:

Current State:

• When a knowledge article is created or updated, there is a clear audit trail of the changes to the content and the approval records needed for the article to be published.
• Some knowledge bases leverage ownership groups, and some do not.
• All knowledge articles need to be reviewed for accuracy on an annual basis.

New Requirement:

• Create an audit trail indicating that a knowledge article is still accurate when a user reviews/recertifies it.
• No changes are required to the content.
• The username and date/time stamp must be captured each time an article is reviewed/recertified.
• The act of reviewing/recertifying the content as accurate, updates the 'Valid to' date by 300 days.

Context: This new requirement is crucial to ensure all knowledge articles remain accurate and up-to-date. It helps maintain the integrity of the knowledge base and ensures accountability.

Request: I expect that others have fulfilled similar requirements. I hope the community can help me identify an out-of-the-box method for doing so (if it exists) OR help me brainstorm ideas for developing a solution.

I really appreciate any help you can provide.

[Mark Manders]

This has no OOB solution, because OOB the almost 'valid to' articles need to be reviewed. 

But, for starters, make sure all knowledge bases have ownership through a group (so you are not relying on just one person).

You could apply new logic to the publish UI action to set the valid to to 300 days in the future on publish (since evaluating needs to be done on a checked out article). You could add new fields to the form to show the published date and the person publishing it. 

Or you create a complete separate audit tracking by using tasks to audit the article. Create them x time before an article is no longer valid, and use the task (can be a related list) to do the tracking. You can simply apply a flow to handle the logic (if article is published, find task, update task with name of publisher (flow triggered by) and date stamp and you can also update the article's valid to in that flow). 

Having notifications on the tasks can also help to alert people of articles becoming no longer valid because they aren't doing their job.

[cynlink1]

If I opt to create a separate audit tracking by using tasks to audit the article, I would need to create a new table (extended from the 'task' table), right?

[Mark Manders]

You can also use an existing table. I have seen companies (mis)using the incident_task table for tasks like this.