Editing 'knowledge base' field for a published article bypasses approval process

[Melanie9]

We are using knowledge v3 and have two knowledge bases set up for our IT knowledge   -     'IT' and 'IT Technical'

The 'IT' knowledge base is client-facing and so we are using the 'approval publish' workflow. Articles can be contributed by itil staff, but must be approved by the knowledge manager prior to being published.

The 'IT Technical' knowledge base is visible only to itil staff and has 'instant publish' workflow so itil staff can contribute and publish articles.

We are finding that an itil staff member can publish an article in the 'IT Technical' knowledge base, and then edit the article and change the value of knowledge base to be 'IT' and the article is immediately moved to the client facing 'IT' knowledge base in it's published state - thus bypassing the approval process.

Is this expected behaviour?   This also seems to be a case with the my vanilla developer instance, so I'm assuming it is not related to our configuration.

[frank_magnin]

Hi Melanie,

We have a different, but also quite similar issue 😉

An itil user is authorized to create articles for a Knowledge base, for which the approval workflow is in place. After approval en publish, the itil user is able to view, but also edit this article (via   at the top right). After editing the updated article is published directly, so skipping the approval flow.

Do you have the same issue here, or were you able to solve this?

FYI: our both knowledge bases have the approval workflow set.

[frank_magnin]

By the way: Maybe you can set a UI policy on the field 'Knowledge base' to be read only in state 'Published'

[Melanie9]

Hi Frank,

Yes, we have the same issue with ability to instantly edit published articles without approval.   I raised an incident on HI and received a response that the functionality is improved in Jakarta - there is a 'Knowledge Management Advanced Installer' plugin.     I upgraded my developer instance to Jakarta and installed the plugin and had a play, it will resolve our issue and the issue you mention - when you edit an article, you check it out and a new version is created. The checked out version of the article needs to go through approval before being published. Here's the response with links to docs:

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Once activate 'Knowledge Management Advanced Installer' you will see Checkout button on the article. This will create new version of the article and goes back to approval once the new version is submitted. For more information, please refer to our documentation [Article versioning](https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/jakarta-servicenow-platform/page/product/knowledge-management/con...) and [Check out a published article and create a new version ](https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/jakarta-servicenow-platform/page/product/knowledge-management/tas...).

>

Regards,

Melanie.

[ianmcgee]

I'm using a Business Rule on update to reset the Workflow to a Draft state when a KB article is changed.

When to Run:

Actions: