Ownership groups

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Ownership groups

    Ownership groups in ServiceNow Knowledge Management allow you to assign responsibility for knowledge articles to a group rather than an individual. This helps maintain article quality, manage approvals, and ensure timely resolution of feedback. An ownership group includes members and a manager who collectively handle article approval, quality checks, and feedback management.

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    Key Features

    • Group-based access: Only ownership group members have contribute access to knowledge articles assigned to their group, regardless of broader knowledge base permissions. They can edit, approve, publish, and retire those articles.
    • Access restrictions: Users outside the ownership group who are not authors or editors cannot contribute to the article, even if they have contribute access to the knowledge base.
    • Configurable form field: To assign ownership groups during knowledge article creation or editing (such as from ITSM Agent Workspace), you may need to add the Ownership Group field to the Knowledge form.
    • Activation: Ownership groups require enabling the glide.knowman.ownershipgroup.enabled property, which is available after activating the Knowledge Management Advanced plugin. It is disabled by default and should be carefully managed to avoid disruptions.
    • Contribute access to published articles: By default, authors or revisers lose contribute access to published articles with an ownership group. This can be overridden by setting glide.knowman.ownershipgroup.override to true.
    • Self-approval of self-authored articles: Ownership group members can approve their own articles by default. This behavior can be disabled by setting glide.knowman.ownershipgroup.allowselfapproval to false.

    Practical Considerations

    • If you disable the ownership group feature later, you must manually reassign all articles linked to ownership groups, close pending approvals, and resolve open feedback tasks to avoid workflow issues.

    Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    Using ownership groups streamlines knowledge article lifecycle management by distributing responsibilities across a team, improving article quality, ensuring proper approvals, and managing feedback efficiently. It also enhances security by limiting article contribution to designated group members.

    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.