Summary of Retire a knowledge article
This feature enables knowledge base owners, managers, and administrators to retire knowledge articles through a designated retirement workflow.Retiring an article removes it from search results on the Knowledge homepage and portal, while still allowing certain roles to view it.The retirement process supports approval workflows and the option to specify a replacement article that redirects users automatically.
How to Retire a Knowledge Article
- Retirement is initiated by selecting the Retire option while editing an article, triggering the associated retirement workflow.
- Only knowledge administrators, knowledge managers, and the latest publisher of a versioned article can retire it. Contributors and candidates cannot retire articles.
- If approval is required, the article enters a pending approval state before final retirement.
- Retired article numbers are not reusable.
- Retiring a parent article does not automatically retire its translated child articles.
Replacement Article Feature
- You can specify a replacement article when retiring an article; users accessing the retired article are redirected to the replacement with a notification message.
- If no replacement is provided, a “Knowledge record not found” message appears.
- This replacement feature is enabled by default for new users via the
glide.knowman.enablearticlereplacementonretiresystem property, which must be enabled manually for existing or upgraded users. - The replacement feature is not supported in the classic workspace; retiring there only retires the article without replacement.
- Retiring with replacement returns HTTP status 301; without replacement returns 404.
Viewing and Repurposing Retired Articles
- Only administrators and knowledge administrators can view retired articles.
- Retired articles can be republished by administrators to reuse them.
Deleting a Knowledge Article
- Administrators can delete published articles by selecting Delete on the article record.
- If the Delete button is not visible, it can be accessed via the more actions menu.
Initiate the retirement workflow to retire a knowledge article. Knowledge base owners and managers can view articles after they are retired but cannot search for retired articles on the Knowledge homepage and portal.
A knowledge article has an associated retirement workflow, similar to the publishing workflow. This allows administrators to configure these workflows, defining an approval and review process for retiring knowledge if appropriate.
When editing an article, select Retire. This launches the retirement workflow associated with that article. Only knowledge administrator, knowledge manager, and the latest publisher of the versioned knowledge article (not available for kcs_candidate or kcs_contributor) can retire a knowledge article. For more information, see Retire a versioned article. If the article requires approval prior to retirement, the article goes to a pending approval state, and the workflow either finishes when approved or cancels if rejected by an approver. The article number associated with the retired article is not available for reuse. For information on the status of a knowledge article see Knowledge article states.
- Only administrators and knowledge administrators can view the retired knowledge articles. To reuse a retired article, administrators and knowledge administrators can republish the article. For more information, see Republish a retired article.
- An article and its translations have a parent-child relationship. Retiring a parent article does not automatically retire all its translated child articles.
- Article with replacement returns a 301 code.
- Article without any replacement returns a 404 code.
- The retire action on classic workspace will just retire the article and not provide a replacement irrespective of the setting of glide.knowman.enable_article_replacement_on_retire.
Delete a knowledge article
Users with the admin role can delete a published knowledge article. On an article record, select Delete. If the Delete button isn't displayed, select the more actions icon , and then select Delete.