Knowledge base approval process

Our client is one of the largest online music store's support department with over a thousand agents using Confluence as a knowledge base. The official content was initially maintained by a small team of subject matter experts, however, as the volume of emails and calls grew and new products and services were developed, they could not keep up.

They wanted to allow more users to participate in improving the knowledge base, but they needed to make sure that the quality of the contributions was maintained.

Our client adopted the Approvals Workflow Plugin as a solution for providing a simple approving process around contributions.

Encouraging participation was also important, so they used one of the plugin's features to ensure support agents are always informed on the status of their contributions.

Editorial validation

A small editorial team is in charge of reviewing, classifying and approving all the knowledge base contributions. Only approved content is visible to all the support agents.

The approval is also required when non-editors modify existing published content.

Users notifications

Email notifications needed to be sent to contributors and editors team throughout the approval process. This included notifying when the content is created or updated and when is approved or rejected.

The workflows

A number of workflows were created by the client using the plugin's macros. They include the following:

• New pages are restricted to be visible only to the author, the modifier (if applicable), and the editors
• By default, all pages enter into the approval process upon creation
• Editors can also pick pages for review by adding a label
• When a page is created or sent into the approval process, the editors are notified
• When the pages are approved they become visible to the rest of the agents
• Notification is sent to the author when their pages are approved or rejected
• If approved pages are updated by agents, then editors are notified and the approval process starts again

A similar scenario is explained in this tutorial.

The workflow is also used to assign a special icons depending of the classification of the content, using triggers when certain labels are added.

Adoption

'Our wiki wouldn't even be possible without it'

The use of the plugin has been key in being able to maintain such a large knowledge base, covering the different products and services.