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.

[tsutherland]

Found this article and commented. The author answered, so here's the link.

Looks like it wouldn't be useful to put in a HI ticket, but I might do it anyways just to stir the pot. 😉

[Steve Kelly]

I hope ServiceNow at least provides a property to get around this!

[Courtney1]

I know this question is 6 months old, but I was just searching for a similar solution and found this documentation, excerpt below. I haven't been able to test it yet to see which roles can then contribute (unclear to me who they mean by "reviser"), but it sounds like it at least partially solves the problem.

Contribute access to published articles

If an ownership group is associated with a knowledge article, the author or reviser of the article can't contribute to the article after the article is published. You can override this behavior by enabling the glide.knowman.ownership_group.override property. When the property is set to true, the authors or revisers of knowledge articles associated with ownership groups retain contribute access to their published articles. By default, the property is set to false.

[Steve Kelly]

Hi Courtney,

Thanks for pointing this out, I didn't see these new features!

Steve

[Wildbeach]

Courtney, this is true, but unfortunately still only applies on the Author, no other contributor roles (except KB manager, KB admin and system admin).