Knowledge Ownership Groups - can non-members checkout articles?

[Steve Kelly]

We recently implemented Knowledge Ownership Groups, and the ServiceNow documentation for this feature is very sparse and not great. I like the idea of Ownership Groups for feedback, reporting, and approvals. However, it seems you have to be a member of the Ownership Group to checkout the article. I would think anyone with contribute access to a particular Knowledge Base should be able to checkout an article, and then the Ownership Group would have to approve it.

If only the Ownership Group can checkout the article, then someone could just checkout and approve their own changes which doesn't seem like great functionality.

Does anyone know if there is an option to allow non-members to checkout articles? I looked up the KBVersioning script include on the 'Checkout' UI action condition and it appears that you have to be a member of the Ownership Group to checkout the article.

[sachin_namjoshi]

You can configure user criteria for groups who can contribute for allowing checkout of KB articles.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/orlando-servicenow-platform/page/product/knowledge-management/tas...

Users with canContribute permissions, including the knowledge owner, knowledge manager, and knowledge administrator, can check out a published article unless there is already a checked out version.

Regards,

Sachin

[Steve Kelly]

Hello Sachin,

This does not seem to be the case when the Knowledge Ownership Groups feature is enabled, and an Ownership Group is set on the article. It seems only members of that group can check out the article at that point. We have contribute User Criteria for our IT Knowledge Base set to anyone with the ITIL role, but they cannot check out an article to edit it if they are not in the Ownership Group set for that article.

Thanks,

Steve

[tsutherland]

I'm searching for the answer to this, as well.  I want any user with the ITIL role to be able to check out and edit any KB article without being a member of the ownership group. We use the groups exactly as you noted, for approvals and feedback. I'm ** this close ** to submitting a HI ticket, as it seems there must be a workaround for this.

[Steve Kelly]

I know, it seems weird right? But looking at the script include it seems to be the way they intended it to work. The documentation definitely needs improvement. They could even make it so that only members of the group can edit that Ownership Group field, but anyone with contribute rights can check it out. There need to be more robust options around the feature.

Let me know if you hear anything back from HI!