Knowledge articles: editing existing articles

[marskh1111]

We want to allow a user to edit an existing article but when that article is being edited we want the existing article to stay live and the new article to go through an approval process. The new article would then replace the old article once it has been approved. how can this be done?

[servicenowkevin]

Two things on this:

1. I think it can be done as a customization, but we haven't done it internally at ServiceNow.
2. What you're asking for is a feature enhancement that I know saruppaul is aware of, so I've tagged him in this thread for his awareness.

[marskh1111]

Great. I will be on the lookout for a comment from him. In line with that do you know if you can restrict only certain users to be able to create new articles? we have a workflow set up for approving but we want to limit the amount of people who can write new ones. When we edit roles in the "can contribute" section it only locks down their ability to edit not to create a new one. thoughts?

[servicenowkevin]

If you remove any knowledge role from the user, they won't be able to create content. They should still be able to view content though.

This bit of product documentation talks more about it: Knowledge contributor

If this answered your questions, you may want to mark the thread as answered so people searching know it's been answered.

[Jim_Marchant · Accepted solution]

Although we are reevaluating everything under knowledge V3, we have been using a business rule: Anybody can fiddle with a published knowledge article, but if a change is detected, a copy of the article is created with the words "Copy of" prepended to the short description of the copy, and the copy's state is set to "Review." A temporary advisory alert is posted on the knowledge edit form when this happens.The original is untouched.

Downsides: Some people with fat fingers can create "copy of" articles, often for invisible, insignificant, and unconscious changes made while the are reading an article. Knowledge writers can create a lot of "copy of" versions and be left wondering why their changes don't show up (especially when they can't view articles in "review" state). (Sometimes they make multiple copies while repeatedly trying to perform the same update). And some editor has to monitor the "copy of" articles in review and use relatively crude compare steps to see what was changed and whether the changes belong in the published article.