Knowledge base articles can be time sensitive. Perhaps you have content like announcements or event details that are going to end. Or maybe you have an impending update to the interface that risks the article becoming irrelevant. In these cases, you might wish that you could add an expiration date to your articles so your customers aren't misled about their content? Well, not anymore!
Zoho Desk provides the ability to schedule an article to be expired after a specific date. That is, you set a specific date and time when your article should expire, and the article expires at that time. This way you can remove those articles which have lost its relevance from the Help Center.
When an article expires, it is moved to the Expired Articles section. This means that it is only removed from the Help Center and not the Zoho Desk itself. You can republish an expired article to make it available for your end-users again. Let’s take a look at how to expire articles.
To set an expiration schedule:
- Click the Knowledge Base (KB) module.
- Open an article to view its details.
You will see a section called Article Expiry on the right panel.
- Under the Article Expiry section, select the date and time that you want this article to expire on.
- Click Publish.
Now when this date hits, the article will automatically expire and your end users will no longer be able to access it on your Help Center.
Expiration Notifications
Zoho Desk sends out email notifications about the articles that:
- are going to expire in the next 7 days
- are going to expire tomorrow
- had just expired
These notifications are sent to the article owners. Please note that you can choose to customize the default templates used for the above notifications. To customize the template, go to Setup >> Templates >> Email Templates.
Tracking Expired Articles
Once an article has expired, it will not be available under the Published view. Instead, it is moved under the following Views specific to expired articles:
- My Expired - Shows all articles that are owned by you and have expired
- All Expired - Shows all articles that have expired