KB User's Guide - Documents Tab - Scheduling a Future Publish Date

This document explains how you can schedule a document to be published automatically at a specific future date.

How It Works

If you are creating a new document, or if you are drafting updates to an existing document, it is possible to set the document to become published at a future date and time. This is particularly useful in cases where you may be creating or updating a large number of documents in preparation for a scheduled change, for example, a new service going live, or an existing tool undergoing a major upgrade.

When scheduling a future publish on existing documents, the currently published version of the document will remain unchanged until the scheduled publish date.

This function keeps the new version as a draft until it is automatically published, allowing you to compare the draft and published versions.

Scheduling a Document for a Future Publish Date

  1. In the document editor, make all your desired content changes.

  2. From the status dropdown menu in the upper-right panel, select Schedule publish....

    The arrow next to the Save Draft button opens the status dropdown, and Schedule Publish is found partway down this menu.

    • Note: This option will only be available if you have publish permissions in your KB space.

  3. A Schedule Publish window will appear. Click the calendar icon next to the Publish time field to open the calendar picker, then select the desired future date when you would like your document to be published. By default, the time will be set to midnight, but you can enter a specific time (formatted as hh:mm:ss in the 24-hour time format) if desired.

    The calendar picker that follows the timestamp field is highlighted, and the calendar picker that appears when it is selected is shown.

  4. Click Schedule to confirm the scheduled publish.

Viewing a Document Scheduled for Future Publication

The version of a document scheduled for future publication is essentially stored as a hidden draft, so any previously published version of the document will continue to be the official published version until the scheduled date and time passes.

The Status for a document that is scheduled for publishing will display as Published (Scheduled) when viewing or editing the document in the KB Admin Tools.

Example of the Published (Scheduled) status as it appears on the document review screen.

The version you will see when viewing the document will be the currently published version, and the version you will see when editing will be the future published version.

To compare the version scheduled for publishing with the currently published version, open the More menu on the document review screen, then select Draft vs. published. This same option is also available under the Options menu on the document edit screen.

The More menu that appears in the row of document action buttons on the doc review screen open, with the Draft vs Published option highlighted

This will open a window that allows you to compare the two versions side-by-side.

If you need to make additional changes to the scheduled version, you can edit the draft and save your changes. You may need to reset the scheduled publish date to ensure it remains correct. 


Keywords:
schedule publish future publish status Draft status of Published deferred publication scheduled automatically publish updates new version Suggest keywords 
Doc ID:
69832
Owned by:
Leah S. in KB User's Guide
Created:
2017-01-09
Updated:
2025-09-29
Sites:
KB User's Guide