Ownership groups

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Ownership Groups

    Ownership groups allow you to associate groups of individuals with knowledge articles in ServiceNow, enhancing article quality, managing approvals, and resolving feedback efficiently. This feature shifts article ownership from individuals to a collective group, which includes members and a manager responsible for maintaining knowledge articles.

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    Key Features

    • Ownership Group Responsibilities: Members are responsible for approving articles, conducting Article Quality Index (AQI) checks, and managing feedback tasks.
    • Access Control: Only ownership group members can edit, approve, publish, and retire associated articles, regardless of their access to the knowledge base.
    • Configuration Requirement: To utilize ownership groups, activate the glide.knowman.ownershipgroup.enabled property, available after enabling the Knowledge Management Advanced plugin.
    • Publishing Restrictions: Authors of knowledge articles lose contribute access post-publication unless the glide.knowman.ownershipgroup.override property is enabled, allowing them to retain access.
    • Self-Approval Capability: Ownership group members can approve their own articles unless the glide.knowman.ownershipgroup.allowselfapproval property is disabled.

    Key Outcomes

    By configuring ownership groups, ServiceNow customers can ensure a structured approach to knowledge article management, leading to improved article quality and streamlined approval processes. Proper configuration and understanding of properties related to ownership groups facilitate better collaboration and content governance within teams.

    Configure ownership groups and associate them with knowledge articles to maintain article quality, manage approvals, and for timely resolution of feedback.

    For the ease of maintenance of knowledge articles, you can assign an ownership group to a knowledge article and shift the ownership of an article from a single person to a group. An ownership group consists of a group of members and a manager who are responsible for knowledge articles. Responsibilities include: approving knowledge articles, performing AQI checks to ensuring article quality, and managing feedback tasks for knowledge articles.

    When a knowledge article is assigned to an ownership group:
    • Only ownership group members have contribute access to the article even if they don't have contribute access to the knowledge base of the article. They can edit, approve, publish, and retire the knowledge article with which they are associated.
    • Users who aren't a member of the ownership group and not an author or editor can't contribute to the article even if they have contribute access to the knowledge base of the article.

    When Create a knowledge article from an incident in ITSM Agent Workspace or editing a knowledge article, you may need to configure the Knowledge form to add the Ownership Group field.

    Activation information

    To enable the use of ownership groups, enable the glide.knowman.ownership_group.enabled property. This property is available when the Knowledge Management Advanced plugin (com.snc.knowledge_advanced) is activated. By default, the property is disabled.
    Note:
    If you use ownership groups, try not to disable the glide.knowman.ownership_group.enabled property later. If you must disable the property later, ensure that you manually reassign all knowledge articles associated with any ownership group, close all article approvals sent to ownership groups, and resolve all open feedback tasks assigned to ownership groups.

    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.

    Approval of self-authored articles for ownership group members

    With an ownership group associated with a knowledge article, ownership group members can approve self-authored articles for publication. You can override this behavior by disabling the glide.knowman.ownership_group.allow_self_approval property. By default, the property is set to true. When the property is set to false, ownership group members can't approve self-authored knowledge articles.