Internal Comments on Guide Articles

I use ZD Guide for a customer facing help center that needs to be periodically reviewed by different departments...if that sounds like your situation, I have the mother of all workarounds that doesn't involve re-coding your articles:

A couple months ago, I installed Kolibri to export the help center as a .pdf for our content archive (ZD doesn't allow you to export, so we needed the third party app and that one...had the least worst reviews).
I just exported a fresh .pdf and I'm having my team add comment on *that.* Once all the comments are resolved, I'll sift through the .pdf and update the help center by hand.

Hello, Zendesk PM.
What is the latest update on this Feature Request?
Thank you.

Really need this feature. What is the status of this Feature Request?

@dan28

Hi Dan, 
Your suggestion above does not meet our use-case, as the 'hidden' information could still potentially viewed by the customer via the page source.
Since the object was to make truly internal information not accessible by the customer, we are unable to use this option.

So we still need a full solution to this problem, or a more functional work around.

@ryan48

Hi Ryan,

This Feature Request is 5 years old with 38 customers requesting it.

This limitation has a major business impact for us.

Can I please get an update on the status of this Feature Request?

In the meantime, is there a workaround?

Hi All,

I too would like to see this system change. Having a KB that has the ability to have both public AND private comments could help streamline our KB system, and provide us support agents with more information within a single article.

@orion12 thanks for taking a look. My proposed solution made sense for my team at the time as we were using Zendesk internally and our notes weren't problematic if someone internally saw them.  I wouldn't recommend it for public help centers where your notes may have internal process hidden away.

I'm holding out for this feature myself.  Make sure to add a vote to the post if you haven't already so that the Zendesk PM team can get the signal that this is a priority for you. 

This Feature Request is 5 years old with 42 customers requesting it.

This limitation has a major business impact for us.

Can I please get an update on the status of this Feature Request? Ryan McGrew stated that there would be an update available soon in 2018.

In the meantime, is there a workaround?

Hi All, 

Thank you so much for all your interest in this topic and your patience. As I read this thread I can see a couple of different needs:

• A possibility to comment and collaborate while creating the content in Guide Admin.
• A way to see agent only (secret) content on publicly available articles in Help Center
• some way to share not published articles with important stakeholders for review (or similar reasons)

As for the first need on that list: in 2022 we are focusing a lot on improving the content editing experience. The first step in this direction is to rebuild our WYSIWIG editors (both for Content Blocks and for articles). As a result of this work, we'll be also able to add collaboration features, like commenting, @mentions, showing users who are currently viewing the article, and more.

As for the second item on the list above, you might have heard about one of our newly launched features called Content Blocks. In the feature, we are planning to add visibility permissions to the blocks so that you'll be able to place them in the articles and decide which of the readers can see them when they open an aritcle. I wonder if that will be helpful for the cases you are describing.

As for the third item we don't really have it on our radar just yet. But I'd be really interested more about how would you like to use this, or similar, functionality.

If you are interested in what features we are considering for development and what we are currently working on in Knowledge Management in Guide you can always check (post is no longer available).

Thanks for the update @katarzyna13!  Unfortunately for us and I'd guess most other organizations, Content Blocks don't really address the need here. I suppose it would be ok to use as a temporary workaround, but it doesn't really meet the need and would create a lot of clutter in the list of Content Blocks. 

Many of us just need a way to put a piece of text in the article - either inline or preferably as a whole separate field that displays inline - that is an internal note or section. Our support engineers use articles as much as or more than even our customers do, and having the ability to have both internal and external content in the same article is so important. 

Without having this ability, we have to create two separate articles for one issue. 

Thank you for the update Katarzyna Karpinska

I would agree with John Streeter. Content blocks might be better than nothing. But it seems like a cumbersome workaround that may be difficult to manage long term.

What are the long term plans to have this as a full feature in the product? :

• A way to see agent only (secret) content on publicly available articles in Help Center

Hi, @katarzyna13
is there any news related to the possibility of having internal comments on the articles?

Do you have an ETA considering that we are already in July?

Also, do you think the possibility to comment on the articles could be extended to the Lite Agents too?

Thanks

@claudio12, as much as it still stays on our roadmap we are not currently working on this request. We are focusing on the images in CB and upgrades to our editing tools. You can always check what we are working on on our roadmap.

It would be great to get this on the roadmap and it's pretty frustrating that this hasn't already been added.  The request has been out there for a number of years.  Honestly, this seems like a basic thing a product like this should offer.  There are many times you need to reference associated tickets, internal pages, internal bugs, etc.  

I agree with this as weel, It would be a valuable feature to have internal comments for the content in the KB. 

+1 request for the ability to add internal comments to Help Centre articles. 

In our specific case, we would like to have this feature to (among other things) add a link to the Asana task related to content creation and review for each specific article. Currently, we have to write the link at the bottom of the article and delete it before publishing.

regarding the statement: 

Another reason to not use content blocks for comments shared by agents is that the content we would share applies to only one article. 

 I understand that Content blocks were intended to share content among several articles (write once, use many times!). I dont think it was intended for recording agent (internal) comments on (public) articles.

Seems there should be a field within the article that is reserved for agent comments.  Once an agent adds comments, they are appended like a footnote to a document (at the bottom) and dated.  See screenshot.

Then, other agents can see these comments, but customers who view the article from the portal cannot.   In past work at IBM, we allowed any agent to add a comment/date to any article.  They accrue on that article but are not visible to any portal users.

some way to share not published articles with important stakeholders for review (or similar reasons)

Katarzyna Karpinska As for your third bullet point, we need a way to share unpublished articles with stakeholders for approval before we publish them. These are product owners and customers without agent access to Zendesk. Providing them with a Zendesk license would be cost-prohibitive and inconvenient, for the handful of articles they need to approve a year. Currently, we build articles in Zendesk, then copy/paste them into a Google Doc. Stakeholders add comments and suggestions to the doc, and then we go back to Zendesk to make those changes. Finally, we copy/paste the final article back into the document for final approval. If there was a way to share unpublished articles with these external stakeholders and eliminate the copy/pasting to an external document, we could save time and reduce errors. 

Hi Katarzyna Karpinska, 

With reference to the request made by JD above, 

If there was a way to share unpublished articles with these external stakeholders and eliminate the copy/pasting to an external document, we could save time and reduce errors. 

I would like to point out that copying and pasting text from one application to another adds weird, unnecessary tags to the article's source code, which cause problems for the localisation team when translating the articles with CAT tools.

Hi - I have a question about this sentence in the official comment:

In Content Blocks, we are planning to add visibility permissions to the blocks so that you'll be able to place them in the articles and decide which of the readers can see them when they open an article.

Is this feature still on the roadmap? If so, when is it planned for release?

Hi @jake16,

This is definitely something that we want to add to content blocks in the future, but currently, we are working on other priorities (everything related to article multiplacement) and can't focus on this request. 

With our documentation in Guide, it is essential for us to have features common to writing software, like internal comments and collaboration within the editing view of an article. We often have just one or two questions about an article that we need someone to look at. It is inefficient to have to pull the article out of Zendesk to collaborate on it or to send a screenshot to someone. Many users in our organization are surprised that we can't collaborate within Zendesk. Ideally we should be able to highlight parts of the text and leave an internal comment on those and tag an internal user/agent in them to look at. 

Same as Lindsey and others, we NEED the ability to make internal comments on public articles to help agents. This helps to reduce redundancy and minimize content (which therefore makes it easier to surface the RELEVANT content) for agents and users. 

As an app developer, we sometimes need to inform agents about a recent bug or issue, so it would be lovely to copy/paste the bug link in the articles that the user may go to or try to use to self-serve due to said bug. It will help the agent to remember there's a current issue and to let the user know we are aware and working on a fix. 

I also collaborate with people outside of my dept as a KCM, so I work with Product and Marketing teams who do NOT have access to or use Zendesk. While we have updated permissions for those "lite" users, it would be amazing to share the Guide link with them, and then they can essentially "comment" on the article just like a Google doc. Cross-department collaboration is at an all-time high and this feature would really help to streamline the effort. 

+1 to the importance of all the features being requested (highlighted in the "official comment" pinned to this post), as these are all very basic capabilities that are expected with any standard knowledge base provider. @katarzyna13, when trying to view the roadmap you linked in a comment above (from July of last year, 2022), I'm told that I'm not authorized to view. Do you have an updated link, as well as any updates related to the development of the features you pinned in this thread?