Retire a knowledge article

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.

Note:

• 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.

You can provide a replacement article while retiring a knowledge article. When the retired article is accessed, the user is automatically redirected to the replacement article with the display message The article KBxxx is retired and has been replaced with the knowledge article KBxxx. If no replacement article is available, the page displays the message Knowledge record not found. The retire with replacement feature is not supported on classic workspace. By default, the glide.knowman.enable_article_replacement_on_retire system property is set to true for new users, to provide a replacement article for a retired article. Set the property to true manually so existing and upgraded users can view and use the feature.

Note:

• 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.

Instant retire and Approval retire workflows

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.