How do drafts, versions, publishing and approvals of FAQs work?
Malcolm! has an inbuilt versioning system and optional scheduled publishing and approval functionality.
Versions can be useful if you change the answer to a question but at a later date want to revert the answer back to a previous version.
They can also be useful for compliance and regulatory reasons, eg in the future you might want to review what your FAQ answer was at a certain point in time.
Versions also enable you to "prep" updated content ahead of it going live. For example if you are revising your product or service you might need to update your FAQ content. But you might not want that new updated content to go live until your the changes to your product or service also go live.
How Versioning Works
When you first create an FAQ you are creating a draft. When you have finished editing you publish that draft into a version. When you make a version live that version is then what your customers see.
You can choose which version of content is live via the publishing section of an FAQ. To get to this browse to FAQ via the Library, then once selected go into the Publishing section.
You can also start a new draft based on a published version.
How Scheduled Publishing Works
As well as choosing to make a version live immediately you can also choose to make a version live at a certain date and time in the future. You may only want a version to be live for a certain period of time so you may wish to set an end date. You may also want different versions live at different times. You can set this up and manage and edit upcoming schedules in the publishing section of an FAQ.
How Approvals Work
The Approval functionality adds a stage between turning a draft into a published version - the draft has to be approved. This functionality can be useful if you work in an organisation where a legal or compliance department wants to review any changes to customer facing communications. It can also be useful if one team member, for example a manager or editor, wants to ensure they personally review all content changes submitted by staff members (or perhaps freelancers) before those changes are allowed to go live.
Approvals functionality is off by default. To turn it on go to the Settings section, General settings, Content approval.
Although you can technically approve your own content the approval functionality makes most sense when you have several team members on an Instance. So it tends to be used by instances that are on our Team or Enterprise plan. You can choose which users on your instance have the approval privilege via the Team section.
Notes can be added to each draft you put forward for approval. An approver can accept or reject a draft and also add notes.
If you are waiting for your content to be approved, or you are a user with the approval privilege you can access your options in the Publishing section. This can be accessed globally (ie showing activity and options across all FAQs) within the first level of FAQ or via an individual FAQ where just activity and options for that individual FAQ is shown. )
