How to add articles to multiple collections?

Could this be a feature request addition

Actually, she won't be able to copy the article either. She would have to create a new article and then copy/paste the content from one to another.

Very annoying thing :)

@user382​ , In my experience, adding the same article in two collections is bad for user experience. You should design your help center correctly to avoid duplications.

Of course, copy article features will be nice to have as well adding articles to multiple collections.

For features requests, there is a group @Product Wishlist​ = )

Yes, this is exactly what I had to do...copy/paste over and over. - I would have to agree Milan. This is a very tedious task and the option to duplicate the article to multiple selections would be very helpful. I manage multiple communities and although not all communities have the same requirements, most do. Not very user friendly.

Keep in mind that copying the content to a separate article is also bad practice for your SEO and the helpcenter search

@roy s11​ and @kevin b​ that's correct, not the best option but that's the only one that helps @nora c​ .

It would be great, obviously, if she can reorganize Help Desk, but have on mind that there are heavy limitations in terms of Collection > Section > Article setup, there's no option to have further levels of categorization rather than just "Collection > Section > Article" :(

There's space for massive improvement there.

Thanks for flagging this, @kevin b​, it's a really important point! @nora c​, can I ask a little bit more about your use case for having the same article in multiple collections?

Hi Eric, yes of course. I manage multiple communities as an HOA company. Most of our communities have the same restrictions and requirements. So basically we have the same contact info, sign restrictions, parking info, etc. It's just too time consuming to have to copy and paste each article into different collections if we need the same info across all communities. Hope that makes sense. Not necessarily concerned about our SEO.​

Same with us. We have articles that need to be a part of multiple collections because its the same function built into a few different parts of the app

Ahh, now I get you, thanks so much for clarifying! Does each collection within your Help Center represent a different community?

I think this is a really big issue for a lot of companies with different permission levels. At my company, I would like to create different collections called:

Talent Software for recruiters

Talent Software for recruiting managers

Talent Software for administrators

These collections could then be linked to different kinds of users and have a very set structure for what they contain. However, they do cover some of the same topics (how to login etc.). At the moment I have to duplicate the articles in order to have them in the different collections. If were to only show certain articles to certain users using the privacy settings then the administrators won't be able to link the collection called "Talent Software for recruiters" to users with a lower permission level.

What I would like to do is simply add the same article to different collections (I know this is available in Hubspot's Article Feature) much like you would add the same videos to different playlists.

Hey @amy d​, I really appreciate you being so detailed with your feedback here. I'm going to tag in our @Product Wishlist​ group here so that I remember to add your feedback to my monthly report which I submit to our product team!

Thank you! 🙂

We also need this feature as we have 4 apps in our help center and some of the content is similar across apps. For example, there is a common set of permissions required for the system we integrate with (NetSuite) and we have a 'Getting Started' section for each app. This means we have 4 articles with duplicate content.

From my point of view, it could absolute make sence, e.g.

one collection for user group A

one collection for user group B

=> some articles make sense in both collections => link them twice

This goes hand in hand with the need to have the ability to set article visibility at the collection level. If I want to make all the articles in one collection visible to workers and then another collection visible only to Clients - I have to edit every article in each collection (I should just be able to add it to the collection and have it take on the permissions of that collection). There will be some articles (ie; how to edit your profile) that might be applicable to both - so being able to surface an article in multiple collections without having to actually maintain 2 (or more) copies of the same article would be helpful.

Exactly. Not sure why this isn't obvious. Especially if you are focused on "jobs people need to get done". Most applications for different use cases REQUIRE different collections of features and help for different types of users. Not allowing articles to be in multiple collections forces huge redundancy, which makes keeping everything in sync almost impossible.

@Product Wishlist​ Curious if there have been any updates on this. Agree with the challenges of restricting articles to one collection and the benefits to allowing such.

I also want to log a vote for the ability to display an article in more than one collection. My help library has a "Getting Started" collection, and a "Help and Troubleshooting" collection, and obviously some of my articles would fall under both. It's fine if people find what they need through search, but a lot of folks prefer to browse for a heading that looks right for them, and see what's underneath.

@matthew h12​ @aparna​ @Product Wishlist​  Any update on this? Another challenge of duplicating the article, if not expressed in the previous chain, is when the user searches, they find two articles. We have multiple products that integrate with each other, so in our case, we need the exact same content in two collections otherwise, the user has to pop out of the article structure to learn a piece of the other product and then return....making for a complicated linking situation and not at all user-friendly experience.

@Product Wishlist​ is there any update on this? We have multiple products that each have a separate collection, but there are some articles that need to be across all products, copy and pasting these multiple times is time consuming and tedious. 

@Eric Fitz @Product and UX Team  Is there an update on when this feature will be available? 

I’m surprised that this feature is not available. Most software companies I’ve worked with use DITA methodology to write topic-based documentation to have re-usable content--- write once, use in multiple places. While having an article reside in multiple collections isn’t exactly a DITA solution, it definitely supports the need for having the same information available in different categories.

We also need this feature. At the moment we are duplicating topics in various places, for the reasons described above. Another work-around which no-one has mentioned is creating a separate collection of common topics and have a 'shell’ topic in each of the other collections which links to one of the common topics. It solves the search issue because the bot will only bring up one topic instead of multiple versions of the same thing, but it's not great for users drilling down to find something using the contents tree.