If you signed up with KnowledgeOwl through a trial, your author account was created with full admin privileges and the Editor role on the knowledge base you created.
To add other authors to your knowledge base, you'll want to be sure they have the appropriate permissions. This should relate back to the "By whom" portion of the Purpose & audience.
As a reminder:
- An author is someone who can access app.knowledgeowl.com and create and update content, change knowledge base settings, or so forth
- A reader is someone who views your knowledge base
If you're a solo writer, you can skip this section!
To help you control permissions and access, you'll assign each author a role as part of their access to a knowledge base. If you need to refine who can edit which sections of content within a knowledge base, you can also create author teams. See below for more information on each of these options.
Required: Author role
When you assign an author to a knowledge base, you must designate what role that author has in the knowledge base. The role defines which actions the author can (and cannot) perform.
Your knowledge base comes with two pre-built author roles: Editor and Writer. An Editor can perform all actions in a knowledge base, including customizing any setting. A Writer does not have access to customize settings but can perform any action related to creating and editing content. For a more detailed breakdown of these two roles' permissions, see What is the difference between an editor and a writer?
If you have multiple authors, these two standard roles might not be nuanced enough. You can create custom author roles and assign them to individual authors, allowing you to get very fine-grained about what an author can and cannot do. (For example, customers with an internal review process will often have a role that can create and edit drafts but cannot publish or edit published articles.) If you do create custom author roles, we recommend documenting what the roles are and what permissions you gave them; templates for this documentation are included with the detailed list of custom author role permissions.
If you have multiple knowledge bases, the same author can have a different role on each knowledge base. So, for example, Linus might be an editor here in our support knowledge base but he might have a custom "Content Contributor" role in our public website knowledge base.
Optional: Author teams
Some knowledge bases include knowledge from different teams or departments. Sometimes, it makes sense to limit who can edit certain content, to avoid someone mistakenly editing the wrong thing. You can create author teams to help achieve this:
- Create author teams for the content you'd like to restrict editing on.
- Assign the relevant authors to that team.
- Then, restrict a category, subcategory, or article to that team.
Authors who aren't a member of the team will be able to see the content, but will be prevented from editing it in any way. Authors who belong to the team will be able to edit it.
If you'd like to prevent authors from even seeing content belong to other teams, you'll want to use reader groups.
