Article Author Leaves -- Recommended Best Practices
Hello! We've recently been approached about authors in our Newsroom that are no longer with the company. We're wondering if other digital workplace owners have any best practices when it comes to this; do you leave the article as is, do you archive, do you delete, etc.?
I'm unaware if there is a way to change authors after posting, and it's not necessarily what we're looking for, but it could help in some cases.
Thanks!
1 Conclusion
I'm happy to share how we are handling this.
We don't use all of the content types, but here's what we do for the ones we do use.
We have deployed master archive rules for blog, forum and calendar channels:
- blog - 1 year after publish
- forum - 90 days after last comment
- calendar - 1 day after event
We do not have master archive rules for wiki nor document. This is because this is where evergreen content would reside and every use case is different. These content types are where a modified date and modified by person are displayed. So, we have taken measures when the original author leaves or changes roles within the company to ensure the new owner of the content updates the content to show their name in the modified by. This is by no means a fix for the issue, but it helps.
We are also currently going through a full content audit to ensure all content that is available to return in search results is valid, accurate and showing a modified by date of not more than one year in the past.
I'm happy to discuss further if you'd like, just let me know.
6 Replies
Hi Cristina Herrera, thanks for your question. You're correct in that you can't change an author after publication. I think the larger question that comes out of this is - how valuable or relevant is the information that's been provided to the organization after the author has left? Most commonly I see that articles are left in situ if they're still valid and timely. I have occasionally seen instances where articles written by departed users are deleted, archived or versioned, comments left indicating the member is no longer with the organization and one memorable instance where a customer used the description field of the channel to indicate a member had left, but again most commonly I see the information left in place if it has merit and relevance to the organization.
Brad Rooke Thanks, Brad! This helps a lot. We're starting to put together our Archiving policy, so lots of questions have been brought up
I'm happy to share how we are handling this.
We don't use all of the content types, but here's what we do for the ones we do use.
We have deployed master archive rules for blog, forum and calendar channels:
We do not have master archive rules for wiki nor document. This is because this is where evergreen content would reside and every use case is different. These content types are where a modified date and modified by person are displayed. So, we have taken measures when the original author leaves or changes roles within the company to ensure the new owner of the content updates the content to show their name in the modified by. This is by no means a fix for the issue, but it helps.
We are also currently going through a full content audit to ensure all content that is available to return in search results is valid, accurate and showing a modified by date of not more than one year in the past.
I'm happy to discuss further if you'd like, just let me know.
Tammy Triplett This has been great insight! I will be sure to reach out when we are further along in building out our Archiving policies. Thank you!
As an additional comment to this, we have to remove/replace the photo of any previous employee (GDPR rules) so a generic outline is left in place and of course the profile link to their name does not work. This visually provides a potential cue that the person is not with the company. The content is kept and I usually do a search of their name after we remove them to target and update any Wikis or Blogs that tell people to contact them about XYZ.
We are running into the same issue with uploaded files. The original uploader's name stays listed with the document even after they have been removed from the site. That listing is a profile link that now creates a broken link with an unhelpful message that the page can't be found. In order to remove this we have to touch each file and generate a new version of it to list ourselves as the new editor. It would be nice if the link could be removed once the user account is removed from the site.