How to display knowledge articles past their valid to date in search results in service portal

[Robert Duca]

My customer is implementing end user self service knowledge and offering it through the current IT self service portal.

We have a process to review knowledge articles nearing and/or past their valid to date but they DO NOT want the article to disappear from searches upon that date breaching. 

We have found references to valid to date at the widget level as well as search source scripts and a script include (KBPortalServiceImpl) which is being referenced in some search related widgets as well.

We have attempted to customize all of these elements to remove the valid to date checks and it still does not allow for the articles to appear even if they are still in a published state. 

Is there something that overrides all of these changes that can be a single point where we can revise to achieve this requirement?

My customer does use valid to dates as a part of process but they do not want the articles to disappear from view until and only until they have been through the pending retirement process and once retired it then will be removed from searches.

This would be for portal searches only as well... has anyone done something similar to this and how many places need to be changed to make this work properly?

[Uncle Rob]

Absolutely positively do NOT change how that works out of the box.  You'll put yourself on a collision course with all future Knowledge upgrades.  ServiceNow INTENDS for that date to be the hard cutoff for searches.

A safer solution would be either of the following:
- A FLOW that runs periodically to create review tasks for KB articles due to expire in 30 days.  Assign those tasks to the article owner

[Robert Duca]

Thanks @Robert Fedoruk  I had a feeling that would be the answer I've also opened a ticket to ServiceNow to get their official response as well to bring to the client and advocate towards what you've described.... we've already created a scheduled job to automatically send those articles through a review process workflow so that is there.. they just didn't want them to disappear from view whilst going through that process. We're also utilizing the OOTB notifications as well as dashboard views and advocating using those as part of their overall governance process to avoid them breaching hat date in the first place but process is only as good as the people that follow it.

Thanks again for the validation through your response.

[Uncle Rob · Accepted solution]

You could also Flow out an "auto-extend by 30 days", but I can almost guarantee that will incentivize their KM process not to re-validate KBAs.  

If I could offer a "left field" option:  keeping a large KB perfectly groomed is an insane labor that's hard to quantify benefit from.  You could just leave KB's run indefinitely and let KB feedback warn you of out-of-date stuff.

You could also look into KB versioning and just have a normal review process that looks at versions over a certain age (but leave them running perpetually beyond that)

[Robert Duca]

Man we are on the same wavelength.. I just got off my scrum with my offshore devs and we just ideated that same option... we are going to propose to extend the scheduled job we already created to move it to the pending retirement workflow but extend out the valid to date 30 days as a grace period if they don't do something about it in 30 days its taken off line then next time the date is breached 🙂 I agree 100% on the incentivization to not follow good rigor on knowledge content so they may just opt to focus more on the process instead of 'pay no attention to the man behind the curtain parlor tricks' to enable poor governance habits 🙂 we'll see how it goes but I always like to have a plan b in the back pocket. Thanks again for the support.