What is supposed to happen on the Valid To date?

[barbclark]

I have experimented by setting the Valid To date in a Knowledge article to a specific day.     But that day comes and goes and the article is still there in a published workflow state.       Is there something else that needs to be triggered or set to active for the Valid To field to be valid?    

[Shahed Shah1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Barbara

There are a number of Wiki references with regards to this field

1. From the legacy version of Knowledge Management (v2): Legacy:Knowledge Workflow - ServiceNow Wiki

Valid to

Enter the date when this article expires. Only Published articles within the valid date range are visible in the knowledge portal and search. Articles that are not published or whose Valid to date has passed are not visible. This field is available to users with the admin or knowledge_admin role only.

2. For the current version of Knowlege Management (v3): Creating Knowledge - ServiceNow Wiki

Valid to

When this knowledge article expires. Articles do not appear when browsing or searching after the valid to date, or if the valid to date is empty.

You can see how the field is actually being used by reviewing the code. Here's a few examples:

1. UI Page - kb_list - /sys_ui_page.do?sys_id=d24eaed20a0a0b3200e4f70e69f4368e
2. Text Search Group - Knowledge & Catalog (condition) - /ts_group.do?sys_id=2b77ce594bd6c0d901b8fbe25ceff671

Theoretically, you could change the behaviour of the field by updating the code. However, from a document control perspective your Knowledge team(s) would want to take that opportunity to review the "expired" articles, where they can be unpublished, extended, revised or deprecated in favour of another article.

I do like Terri's suggestion of having a Scheduled Job to identify such KB articles and take action on the record. You can take that idea further and generate notifications for the relevant individual(s) or team(s)

I hope that helps

Regards

Shahid

[Mike Rae]

I am adding an updated answer here since this is the most view question and shows at the top of a google search.

In Paris there is a new email notification that can be activated through a system property that will send an email letting the author, knowledge base owner and managers, and reviser for the updated and checked-out versions know articles will be expiring next month:

The email notifications for expiring knowledge articles are available when your administrator activates the Knowledge Management Core plugin (com.glideapp.knowledge) and sets the value of the glide.knowman.enable_article_expiry_notification property to true. By default, the property value is set to false.

On the first day of each month, the application sends an email notification to a list of authorized recipients to remind them about articles that are scheduled to expire in the next month. The user can then determine whether to extend the Valid to date to continue providing access to the article.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/paris-servicenow-platform/page/product/knowledge-management/conce...

Thanks,

Mike