Client Spec Drafts

What client spec drafts are for

Sometimes the person who knows exactly what is needed is the customer. Client spec drafts let a signed-in customer write that down themselves, in your Knowledge Base, instead of describing it across a long ticket thread. They write a draft spec in the portal's Help center; your team sees it arrive in Manage articles, shapes it, and publishes it when it is ready.

A client's draft is private to their own company. Other companies never see it, and nothing a client writes reaches the Help center until someone on your team publishes it.

Client drafts are off everywhere until you open a category to them.

Opening a category to client drafts

On Manage articles, open the category's ⋯ menu and choose Edit (or create a new category). Switch on Clients may submit drafts here and click Save.

• The switch is off by default for every category, new and existing.
• Each category has its own setting. Opening a category does not open its subcategories; switch on each one you want.
• The category must also be customer-facing: set to Portal (customers), with no Internal category above it. A category hidden from customers accepts no client drafts, whatever its switch says.

Changing the switch needs the Publish knowledge-base articles permission, like every other category change. See Organizing with categories.

What your customers see

Once at least one category is open, the Help center shows a Specs in progress section with a Write a new spec button. When more than one category is open, the customer first picks one under Category for the new spec. If no category is open, the section does not appear at all.

Specs in progress lists every draft spec from the customer's company, with when it was last updated. The customer's own drafts are marked Written by you. Until the company has written one, the section reads Your company has no specs in progress yet.

Writing a spec

Write a new spec opens the spec editor, with a Title, the Spec itself and attachments.

• Formatting: bold, italic, two heading sizes (Heading and Subheading), bulleted and numbered lists, and links. Formatting your team adds later in the full article editor, such as tables, images, code, quotes and video, is kept when the customer edits the spec again.
• Saving: Save draft saves at any time. The spec also saves itself 30 seconds after the first unsaved change. A spec needs a title before it can save: Give the spec a title before saving.
• Leaving: if there are unsaved changes, the portal asks You have unsaved changes. Leave without saving? before it lets the customer go.
• Attachments: files are virus-scanned, exactly as ticket uploads are, and are linked at the end of the spec when it is saved.
• Category: chosen when the spec is first saved. After that it shows as text; only your team can move the spec to another category.

Editing together

Anyone signed in from the same company can open a draft from Specs in progress and edit it, not only the person who started it. Every save is kept as a version in the article's history, under the name of the person who saved it.

If two people save the same spec at once, the second is told Someone else changed this spec since you opened it. Their own text is kept on the page under Your unsaved text, so nothing is lost. They choose Reload the latest version, then add their changes back.

When a draft stops being editable

A customer can edit a draft only while it is still a client draft in an open category. It becomes read-only in the portal, with This spec can no longer be edited here, when your team:

• publishes it. This ends client editing for good: unpublishing it later does not give it back to the customer.
• switches off the category's Clients may submit drafts here, or makes the category (or one above it) Internal.
• archives it, or sets its visibility to Internal.
• changes which companies it is shared with.

What your team sees

A client's draft is an ordinary draft article in Manage articles, with the customer shown as its author:

• The Author column shows the customer's name with a Client chip.
• The editor shows Written by name (client).
• The History panel names the customer on every version they saved. See Article history and restore.

The people who can see other members' drafts can see a client's draft too, and editing it follows the rules for editing someone else's article. See Knowledge Base permissions. Your edits are what the customer sees the next time they open the spec, so you can tidy a draft together before it goes live.

Being told when a new draft arrives

When a customer saves a new spec, everyone who holds Publish knowledge-base articles gets an in-app notification: A client submitted a new spec draft in category. It names only the category, never the customer or what they wrote, and opening it takes you to the article. Later saves to the same draft send no further notifications.

Publishing it

Review the draft like any other, set its audience, and click Publish. From then on it is a normal article: the customer can read it in the Help center if its audience allows, but can no longer edit it.

Privacy: erasing and merging customers

Client drafts follow the customer's record in Service Desk:

• Erasing a customer (Anonymize… on the requester) replaces the titles and text they wrote in unpublished drafts with Removed, in every version in the history, and removes the draft's title from your team's notifications. Published articles keep their content.
• Merging two requesters moves the drafts and versions written by the requester being merged away to the one you keep.

See Requesters and companies.

Related

• The customer Help center: what customers see in the portal.
• Organizing with categories: creating categories and their settings.
• The article lifecycle and URLs: draft, published and archived.
• Knowledge Base permissions: who can edit and publish.