Sharing Articles and Categories

What sharing controls

Sharing decides which members of your organization can read, comment on, or edit a knowledge-base article. You can share an article or a whole category with individual people, with teams, or with everyone in the organization.

Sharing is about your own team. It has nothing to do with customers: what customers see on the portal's Help center is decided by the article's Audience settings, explained in Who can see an article. An article can be shared with only three people internally and still be on the portal, or open to every member and internal-only.

The access levels

A level opens the door; your Knowledge Base permissions decide what you can do once inside. Can comment lets you comment only if you also hold Comment on knowledge-base articles. Can edit lets you edit only alongside an authoring permission: Create knowledge-base articles for a draft, or Edit knowledge-base articles you authored or Publish knowledge-base articles once it is published.

Sharing an article

1. Open the article in the editor (Manage articles, then click the article).
2. Find the Sharing panel in the right-hand rail. It shows who has access in one line, for example Everyone in the organization can view and comment or Restricted — 3 people, 1 team. When the article sets nothing of its own, the line ends with (inherited from the category name*)*.
3. Click Share.
4. In the dialog, use Add Access to search for people or teams, pick a level, and add them. Change a level with the selector on each row.
5. Set the Organization Access row: a level for everyone else in the organization, or No access to keep the article to the people and teams listed above.
6. Click Save.

A summary at the bottom of the dialog shows the line the Sharing panel will show once you save.

Who owns an article

Whoever wrote an article is its owner. The owner can share it, and can hand ownership to someone else by choosing Make owner in the level selector on that person's row. The new owner takes over when you save, and the previous owner keeps edit access.

Sharing a category

1. On Manage articles, open the category's ⋯ menu in the category tree.
2. Choose Share….
3. Set people, teams, and the organization level as for an article, then click Save.

The articles and subcategories inside the category follow its sharing unless they set their own. Categories have no owner.

How articles follow their category

Sharing passes down the tree: a subcategory follows its parent category, and an article follows its category. In the Share dialog, rows that come from the category are captioned Inherited from that category.

You can change any inherited row on the article or subcategory itself. Only what differs from the category is stored on it, so if you set a row back to what the category gives, it follows the category again.

Moving an article changes who can see it. Filing an article into a category gives it that category's access, on top of anything the article sets for itself. An uncategorized article that was simply open to everyone becomes restricted like the category you file it into. Moving an article to Uncategorized, or a category to the top level, keeps everyone's access exactly as it was. Deleting a category also leaves the access of everything inside it unchanged.

When a person, a team, and the organization disagree

• A person given No access by name cannot see the article, whatever their teams or the organization have.
• A person named directly gets the better of their own level and their teams' levels.
• Someone not named directly, on a team set to No access, cannot see the article.
• Otherwise, a team's level applies, and for everyone not named at all, the Organization Access level applies.

So to restrict an article to a few people, set Organization Access to No access and add those people or teams.

Who can change sharing

Members holding Edit any member's knowledge-base articles, and your organization's Owner, are not limited by sharing at all: they can see and act on every article.

What members who are not shared in experience

An article you cannot read is left out of the Library, search, and the Manage articles list. Opening its link shows "not found" rather than "access denied", so the article's existence is not confirmed to someone it was not shared with. You also cannot publish, archive, or change an article you cannot see, even with the matching permission.

If you share yourself out of an article, DevStride saves the change, tells you that you no longer have access, and returns you to the knowledge base.

Drafts

Sharing applies to drafts too. A draft is visible only to people who can read it and who wrote it, hold Publish knowledge-base articles, Edit any member's knowledge-base articles, or Comment on knowledge-base articles, or have Can edit on it.