HubSpot Ideas

simonsmith

Allow for private knowledge base articles

While we want most knowledge base articles to be public, there are some we want to keep private so that only our customer service representatives can view them. For example, a customer might ask a question that's sensitive, and we want to have an article for reps on how to respond to the question. So, ideally:

 

  • Enable a "Private" setting on knowledge base articles
  • Only allow certain users (maybe admins) to toggle this off once it's set
  • Don't show private articles in public knowledge base
  • Don't allow these articles to be searched through the chatbot interface or the knowledge base search box
31 Replies
atma
Participant

Doesn't the Archive feature serve this purpose?

simonsmith
Participant

Hmm, didn't think of that. I'll see if it works in this case.

mollymetzger
Contributor

I would love to be able to show knowledge base articles to a visitor based on their lifecycle stage.

 

That way, our customers can get more detailed and in-depth articles that we don't want our leads to see yet. 

simonsmith
Participant

@mollymetzger I like that idea too. Maybe there could even be the ability for dynamic content within knowledge base articles, so people see different content depending on variables such as the HubSpot list they're in. 

tomaylott
Participant

Knowledge Bases are a great feature to introduce, but some permissions flexibility would make it incredibly flexible. Some sort of basic tiered system (Only Me, Only Selected Users, Password Protect, Anyone with the link, whole organisation, Public) would really expand what they can be used for. It'd certainly give an extra layer of usefulness for things like internal / client training on technical / behavioural subjects!

MFrankJohnson
Thought Leader

While we've upvoted this idea and completely support it in concept, we don't think it's reasonable to expect HubSpot to 'guarantee' that knowledge base content set to anything other than public will be 'private' to our organization, specific users, contacts, or otherwise. By design, the knowledge base product content is intended for public consumption.

(see image)

hubspot-service-hub-knowledge-base.png

 

We suspect the entire KB product was built around this public viewing model. Simply setting some KB pages to 'no index no follow' probably wouldn't be a strong enough incentive for any organization to trust that their 'private' content would remain private and not somehow end up in a search engine somewhere.

 

Furthermore, adding a tiered layer of view settings on top of the KB would cerainly need to be accompanied by stricter user publication controls over who was permitted to both originally set content private and who was permitted to change that setting (if ever).

 

Just a few thoughts for anyone who may even consider entering 'private', 'confidential', 'proprietary', or otherwise 'sensitive' information into ANY KB on any SaaS platform in today's climate where so-called confidential business commuications can be seen spralled all over the internet.

 

Hope that adds to the discussion for the product team.

 

 

Best,
Frank

 


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www.MFrankJohnson.com


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The_Dude
Contributor

Our use case scenario is where we would have an internal knowledge base where our Sales Team can access anytime/anywhere.  This is particulary useful when they need info at their fingertips during a client meeting.

Another use case would be access to IT specific articles (network diagrams, API documentation, encryption docs and any other NDA binding documention).

Please make this happen since this is a feature that many of Hubspot competitors are offering.

 

 

tomaylott
Participant

Capture.PNG

 

Even something like the password requirement on pages would probably satisfy a lot of usage cases. I totally get what @MFrankJohnson is saying though.

CaptainWasHere
Participant

 +1

 

We definitely need this. We would love to use this for internal training as well as public FAQ. 

zefazef
Member

 Hi, it's a great idea !

Andrew3
Contributor

Definitely want the features described here.  AND definitely want strong assurance that the knowledge base articles targeted at our team are ONLY viewable by users.  Thank-you @MFrankJohnson for very helpful advice here before I started trying to implement something not really supported.

All the other flexibility mentioned by all other commenters here would be very helpful.

Fredrikhoglind
Participant

This would realy help us! 

Stanczak
Contributor

HubSpot just released membership-based permissions to control access to specific content: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/cms-pages-editor/control-audience-access-to-pages...

ericpeters
Member

This is exactly what we need.

Billhansenatl
Member

Hubspot needs to develop a syndiation process to spread content from their KB to other specialized distribution points, with a filtering mechanism to control what content goes where. For instance a brochure site could contain useful answers commonly found on the buyer journey, while a customer portal could contain content that is more complex or not something we'd like our non-customers (or competitors) to see.  From the standpoint of someone who pays for Hubspot CMS and Hubspot KB, the current state is an integration fail. 

therealdb
HubSpot Product Team

Hey Everyone!! My name is Dave and I work on the Service Hub product team -- we are about to release (into Beta) Restricted Article Access for the Knowledge Base.  This feature will allow you to password protect your KB (by article) and the segmentation of who can view this articles will be 'list based' -- ex. I have Silver, Gold, Platinum customers - as long as these folks are accurately tagged in a list, they will only be able to view those articles that list has been provisioned to see).

 

If you are interested in the beta, feel free to ping me directly: dbarron@hubspot.com -- I'd expect a beta release in the next few weeks 🙂 

simonsmith
Participant

@therealdb that would be awesome!

therealdb
HubSpot Product Team

@simonsmith can you shoot me an email? Just want to make sure I'm keeping track of the requests and communicating with quickly! 

Mike
HubSpot Product Team
 
karengerberry
Participant

@Mike  is there a timeline on this?