How can I restrict article creation to specific users?

QUESTION

Our knowledgebase has three different groups of writers:

• The subject matter experts (SMEs) who write the policies and processes for front-of-house
• The IT team, who write support documents for IT issues
• The sales team, who list prices and features of our various products

How do I set up my knowledgebase so that the three groups can only write articles specific to their area of expertise?

ANSWER

You do this using roles and categories, and set your categories to private write.

 Set up roles and categories

First, create roles for the each type of user:

• Create a role called SME and assign all your subject matter expert writers to this role
• Create a second role called IT and assign all your IT writers to this role
• Create a third role called Sales and assign all your sales writers to this role

Note that you don't have to restrict these roles just to writers, it can include all your sales team, IT group and subject matter experts. The user's privilege still controls whether they can write articles or not.

Next, create private categories:

• Create a category for policies and processes
• For the Private field, check Write (Write restricts write access to the category but allows everyone to read it)
• This brings up a new option, Access for assigned roles only. Select SMEs

• Select other options required for this category and then OK to complete
• Do the same for IT and Sales

Create your articles

Everything is now set up.

• Only subject matter experts can create or update articles in the SME category
• Only IT people can create articles in the IT category
• Only Sales people can create articles in the Sales category

All users can read all articles, however.

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This functionality works in version 3.5 and above