Authoring options for governance

Prerequisites

• Admin access to your Expert site
• Roles assigned
• Understand roles of contributing users

Stages of a publishing workflow

A publishing workflow allows for subject matter experts to contribute content and to submit content to a team for review. Implement a defined workflow to control your publishing process:

1. Draft contribution. In this the stage, assigned groups are responsible for a drafting content about a specific product or service. Draft contributors only have the ability to create new draft articles to be further reviewed. 
2. Draft review. In this stage, assigned subject matter expert groups are responsible for reviewing the draft and vetting the accuracy of information and adherence to company style and branding guidelines. Once reviewers make any necessary adjustments to the content of the article, reviewers change the article's classification to the appropriate stage in the process.
3. Draft publishing. In this final stage of the publishing process, assigned groups are responsible for final quality reviews before publishing the article for public consumption.

Implement your workflow

1. Configure your site privacy. Read site and page permissions to learn about privacy considerations.
2. Set up publishing groups. If your site is authenticated through SAML single sign-on (SSO) you must first create your user groups in your SAML identity provider (IdP). To follow an effective publishing workflow in Expert, set up groups as follows:
   • Contributors.  Users of this group can only create draft articles. Assign the role of Draft Author to this group. 
   • Reviewers.  Users of this group can create draft articles, review draft pages, and change classifications, tags and page summaries. This group cannot publish draft pages. Assign the role of Author to this group.
   • Publishers.  Users of this group can publish draft pages, modify permissions, create draft articles, review draft pages, and change classifications, tags and page summaries. Assign the role of Editor to this group.
3. Determine your contributors. Identify the various objectives for each stage of the workflow. Users with different capabilities form groups to create draft pages, review draft pages and publish the content. Consider the following when setting up the workflow.  
   • What is a contributor? 
   • What responsibility do contributors have?
   • What is a reviewer?
   • What requirements does a reviewer need to meet?
   • What is a publisher?
   • What responsibilities should a publisher have?
4. Add users to your publishing groups. If your site is authenticated through SAML SSO you must first assign user in their appropriate groups in your SAML IdP. Create your users and assign to the appropriate groups as determined by their contribution objectives.
5. Have contributors subscribe to page notifications. Direct all contributors regardless of group membership to subscribe to the pages (or section) for which they are responsible for reviewing and publishing. Subscription notifications provide contributors with details of when a new draft is created and updated and when content is published. 
6. Restrict group role functions. To accommodate your publishing workflow, you may want to further restrict which functions your groups have access to. In the example below, the Publisher and Reviewer groups are restricted from moving pages and from accessing dashboard features such as custom header and footer templates, the content ID manager, the template directory, and global variables to further control your workflow.
7. Hide page elements from specified groups:
   • Open the Header template in Edit mode and click </>HTML to view source.
   • Copy the following code into the header template page, but replace ADD YOUR REVIEWER GROUP NAME in the code with the names of the groups you have previously set up (namely Contributors, Reviewers and Publishers):

     <div class="script-css mt-style-conditional style-wrap" if="user.groups['ADD YOUR REVIEWER GROUP NAME']">
     .mt-icon-publish, .mt-user-menu-move-page {
         display: none !important;
     }
     </div>
     
     <div class="script-css mt-style-conditional style-wrap" if="user.groups['ADD YOUR PUBLISHING GROUP NAME']">
     .mt-user-menu-move-page {
         display: none !important;
     }
     </div>
     
     <div class="script-css mt-style-conditional style-wrap" if="user.groups['ADD YOUR REVIEWER GROUP NAME']">
     li.mt-custom-header-listing, li.mt-custom-footer-listing, li.mt-content-id-listing, li.mt-template-directory-listing, li.mt-global-variables-listing {
         display: none !important;
     }
     </div>
     <div class="script-css mt-style-conditional style-wrap" if="user.groups['ADD YOUR PUBLISHING GROUP NAME']">
     li.mt-custom-header-listing, li.mt-custom-footer-listing, li.mt-content-id-listing, li.mt-template-directory-listing, li.mt-global-variables-listing {
         display: none !important;
     }
     </div>
     

8. Apply user group permission to the content hierarchy. Control group access to the whole site, specific hierarchies, categories or guides to control your content creation process. Restrict your contributors, reviewers and publishers to certain pages or sections on your site.
9. Create draft status labels for your workflow. Create custom classifications for each stage of your publishing workflow to allow reviewers and publishers to review all draft content in their respective stages in the draft manager (accessed via the Dashboard) and to take appropriate action. Depending on your publishing workflow, assign classifications as follows:

   Stage	Who sets stage	When to set stage	Function of stage
   Draft	Contributors	New draft creation	Alerts reviewers and publishers that a draft is in the works
   Ready for Review	Contributors	Completed draft	Alerts reviewers that a draft is ready for review
   In Review	Reviewers	Review started	Alerts other reviewers and publishers that a draft is being reviewed
   Rework	Reviewers / Publishers	Content needs rework	Alerts contributors and reviewers that a draft needs more work
   Ready to Publish	Reviewers	Content is reviewed and ready to be publishe	Alerts publishers that a draft is ready for final review
   Live	Publishers	Draft is approved and published as "Live" page	Marks the page as a live page

10. Set the page status. Once custom classifications are created, the status of a page can be set under Page settings on individual pages. You may identify additional publishing stages, which can be easily added to adapt to your workflow.