Versioning in Knowledge Management – FAQ

For the latest information on this topic, see Article versioning.

The Article Versioning feature allows knowledge contributors to create multiple versions of a knowledge article. They can create a new version of an article from an existing published version. This existing version can be either the latest published version or an older outdated version. All changes are stored in the new version of the article and the information in the existing article remains the same. Here you will find some Frequently Asked Questions related to Versioning and tips to get started.

How do I enable versioning?

This feature is installed with the Knowledge Management Advanced Installer plugin:

• Go to System -> Plugins and search for Knowledge Management Advanced Installer
• Click Activate
• For more information, navigate to the Product Documentation topic: Activate the Knowledge Management Advanced plugin

Note: V2 knowledge bases need to be migrated to V3 before using versioning, to determine if you have v3 knowledge bases and to migrate them to v3, follow these steps:

1. Query the kb_knowledge_base table, filtering for records where Release version - is - 2, as shown in the following screenshot:

2. Refer to our documentation topic Knowledge Management v3 Migration if you have existing v2 knowledge bases.

The Checkout button is not visible on articles even though the valid_to date has not passed, why?

The Checkout button is enabled only in the following cases:

• Article Versioning is enabled (the Knowledge Management Advanced Installer plugin is activated)
• The property glide.knowman.versioning.enabled is set to true
• The article is in Published state

How do you edit the latest version of an article?

The latest version of the article can be edited in the following ways:

• Check out the article and make the changes in the new minor version of the article
• Some fields of the article can be edited without creating a new version based on the fields configured for the glide.knowman.versioning.enable_minor_edits property (more information about the properties in Article versioning properties)

What does the script KBVersioningSNC do?

This is a Script Include that contains the article versioning related service method. You can create a custom definition for the required methods by overriding the method definition in the KBVersioning Script Include

How do you get a link to the latest version of the article regardless of which version the article is in?

 Accessing the article based on the sysparm_view parameter renders the latest version of the article accessible to the user:

• Knowledge V3: /kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KBXXXXXXXX
• KM Service Portal: /kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KBXXXXXXX

Does the Permalink point to a draft or the published version of the article?

The article's permalink points to the latest version of the article "accessible" to the user

• For users with contribute access, the permalink redirects to the draft version of the article, if available.
• For users with only read access, the permalink redirects to the published version of the article.

Does kb_use show the total number of views for all versions of the article? Why are the numbers from kb_use different from View Count on the kb_knowledge table?

Yes, the kb_use table shows the total number of views of all versions of the article. But the view count is governed by the property glide.knowman.view_age.days, which indicates the number of days up to which the article views should be considered for the view count, the default is set to 30, meaning only views in the last 30 days will be counted in the view count and hence you will find the discrepancy between the numbers in kb_use and view count, see the documentation topic Knowledge properties for more information.

Who gets notified when a new version of the article is created?

Users who are subscribed to the article or the parent knowledge base will receive a notification when a new version is published.