Ownership groups

Release version: Yokohama

Updated January 30, 2025

2 minutes to read

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Summary of Ownership groups

Ownership groups in ServiceNow Knowledge Management enable customers to assign responsibility for knowledge articles from individual users to groups. These groups, consisting of members and a manager, handle article quality, approvals, and feedback resolution. This approach streamlines maintenance and ensures timely management of knowledge content.

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Key Features

Group-Based Article Ownership: Assign ownership groups to articles so that only group members have contribute access regardless of their knowledge base permissions.
Access Control: Non-members who are not authors or editors cannot contribute to articles owned by the group, enhancing control over article edits.
Approval Capabilities: Ownership group members can approve self-authored articles, with an option to disable this via configuration.
Contribution Post-Publication: By default, authors or revisers lose contribute access to published articles owned by a group, but this can be overridden through a system property.
Configuration Requirements: The Knowledge form may need updating to add the Ownership Group field when creating or editing articles, especially from ITSM Agent Workspace.
Activation: Ownership groups require enabling the glide.knowman.ownershipgroup.enabled property, which depends on the Knowledge Management Advanced plugin. Disabling this later requires manual reassignment and task resolution.

Practical Considerations for ServiceNow Customers

Enable ownership groups to better manage article quality and approvals through shared responsibilities.
Control contributor permissions precisely by leveraging group membership rather than broad knowledge base access.
Adjust system properties to fit your organization’s workflow regarding contribution rights and approval processes.
Before disabling ownership groups, ensure all articles and tasks associated with groups are properly reassigned or closed to avoid disruptions.

Configure ownership groups and associate them with knowledge articles to maintain article quality, manage approvals, and for timely resolution of feedback.

For the ease of maintenance of knowledge articles, you can assign an ownership group to a knowledge article and shift the ownership of an article from a single person to a group. An ownership group consists of a group of members and a manager who are responsible for knowledge articles. Responsibilities include: approving knowledge articles, performing AQI checks to ensuring article quality, and managing feedback tasks for knowledge articles.

When a knowledge article is assigned to an ownership group:

Only ownership group members have contribute access to the article even if they don't have contribute access to the knowledge base of the article. They can edit, approve, publish, and retire the knowledge article with which they are associated.
Users who aren't a member of the ownership group and not an author or editor can't contribute to the article even if they have contribute access to the knowledge base of the article.

When Create a knowledge article from an incident in ITSM Agent Workspace or editing a knowledge article, you may need to configure the Knowledge form to add the Ownership Group field.

Activation information

To enable the use of ownership groups, enable the glide.knowman.ownership_group.enabled property. This property is available when the Knowledge Management Advanced plugin (com.snc.knowledge_advanced) is activated. By default, the property is disabled.

Note:

If you use ownership groups, try not to disable the glide.knowman.ownership_group.enabled property later. If you must disable the property later, ensure that you manually reassign all knowledge articles associated with any ownership group, close all article approvals sent to ownership groups, and resolve all open feedback tasks assigned to ownership groups.

Contribute access to published articles

If an ownership group is associated with a knowledge article, the author or reviser of the article can't contribute to the article after the article is published. You can override this behavior by enabling the glide.knowman.ownership_group.override property. When the property is set to true, the authors or revisers of knowledge articles associated with ownership groups retain contribute access to their published articles. By default, the property is set to false.

Approval of self-authored articles for ownership group members

With an ownership group associated with a knowledge article, ownership group members can approve self-authored articles for publication. You can override this behavior by disabling the glide.knowman.ownership_group.allow_self_approval property. By default, the property is set to true. When the property is set to false, ownership group members can't approve self-authored knowledge articles.