Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Enterprise or higher, Knowledge Enterprise |
| Access | Agent, Admin |
Handing an article to somebody to check, with a state that means something rather than a message asking a favour. The control is easy to miss: Awaiting review sits behind the drop-down on the Review status button.
Submit one
- Open the article and save any changes.
- Click the drop-down arrow on the Review status button and select Awaiting review.
- Click Assign or Reassign to give it to a particular person.
The article moves from work in progress to ready for review and appears in Knowledge admin under Manage articles, in the Awaiting review list. Assigning is optional, which is why articles end up waiting in a list nobody feels responsible for.
Do it anyway, because assigning is what sends the reviewer an email with a link. Somebody who is not a Knowledge admin and did not get that mail needs the URL from you to reach the article at all, so an unassigned review is not merely unowned: for that reviewer it is invisible.
Approving it
The reviewer uses the same drop-down and selects Ready to publish, which approves it for publishing later or for a scheduled publish. They can also publish it there and then.
Only people with management permissions can publish, so the reviewer you pick needs that permission or the article stops at approved.
There is a third answer besides approve and publish: leave it in review and reassign it, to the author for changes or to somebody else. That is the route for "not yet", and it keeps the article in a state that says so rather than sending it back into the drafts.
Say what you want checked
A reviewer given an article and no instruction reads it as prose and fixes commas. One asked to confirm that the third step is still accurate does something useful. Most articles need a factual check rather than an edit, and those are different jobs.
Choose the reviewer for what they know
The person who knows whether it is true, not the best writer on the team. Accuracy is what review is for; wording can be fixed by anybody afterwards.
Review only what needs it
Everything through review means a queue and a bottleneck, and writers stop publishing rather than wait. Reserve it for what carries consequence: anything about money, anything legal, anything a customer would act on.
Somebody has to own the queue
The Awaiting review list is visible to everybody, which is exactly why it needs one owner rather than general awareness. A review state without a person who works through it is a place articles go to stop, and if reviews sit for a week the state is doing harm.
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