New Status and Visibility Options for Knowledge Articles

The status options that can be selected for a knowledge article have been improved to better align with the Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) methodology.

The new status options are:

• Work In Progress
  The knowledge article has been added, but is not yet ready for use.
• Not Validated
  The knowledge article is available to all specialists of the account, but has not yet been validated.
• Validated
  The knowledge article has been reviewed and is available to the people selected in the visibility options.
• Archived
  The information in the knowledge article is no longer relevant and is no longer available to specialists, key contacts or end users.

When the status ‘Validated’ is selected, the following visibility options are available:

• Internal specialists
• Covered specialists
• Key contacts
• End users

The options ‘Covered specialists’ and ‘Key contacts’ provide a new way to make an article available to a more selective audience.

The ‘Covered specialists’ option ensures that only the specialists of the support teams that are responsible for the service instances that are underpinned by the service that is selected in the article can find it. This option can be used by managed service providers that provide infrastructure services to enterprises that use these infrastructure services to run some of their application services on. The specialists who support these application services can look up the articles for these infrastructure services if the external provider checked the ‘Covered specialists’ option.

The ‘Key contacts’ option makes it possible to limit access to an article to the people who are covered by an active SLA for the service that is linked to the article, provided that they have the Key Contact role of the SLA’s customer account.

Data Migration

The old status options of knowledge articles have been migrated as follows:

• New = Not Validated
• Internal = Validated and the visibility option is ‘Internal specialists’
• Public = Validated and the visibility options are ‘Internal specialists’ and ‘End users’
• Archived = Archived

For now, the 4me REST API for knowledge articles is still able to work with the old status options. When the old options are passed to the API, they are automatically translated as described above. It is best, however, to make sure that the new status options are used as support for the old options will eventually be withdrawn.