Syncing Articles

  • Last updated on April 9, 2020 at 7:15 AM

How to Sync Articles

To sync your articles in from an external knowledge base, head to the Content section in your left menu.

From the content dashboard, click on Sync in the top nav, to reveal the sync panel.

Each integration option comes with easy step-by-step instructions to follow, and once you’ve filled in the blanks for your respective service, you will be able to perform a sync with that service at any time.

To re-sync your already integrated articles simply hit the ‘Sync Content’ button and hit "Re-Sync" for the integration you have set up.

NB Elevio will only sync one way. While it is simple to sync articles in from other sources, you will be unable to sync any articles out of elevio to elsewhere.
NB Articles synced in will automatically be shown in elevio. To hide them, select the three dots next to the article/category, hit edit, and set the Access to "Nobody" (image below)
Zendesk & Translations: When syncing via Zendesk, please keep in mind that a standard sync will not add translations added before the most recent sync - in these cases a full re sync is necessary to bring the translations over.
NB if syncing multilingual content - make sure the languages are enabled before the sync is done - this can be done as per this article
https://cdn.elev.io/file/uploads/p31zYIXbqva6xPpHQh2AIED3E1XMsHXSx5sqD_tcLUk/ADT1mU7XYfsAvCIZfeMnVNZ2obXhuP9t05JV1Y6Lj0c/Elevio Content Dashboard-2018-01-23 14_28-5Qc.png


How long does it take to sync

Syncing articles usually happens very swiftly. Based on where you are in the sync queue, a sync usually takes anywhere from 2 minutes to an hour (it's usually at the low end of the scale)

On our Premium plan, your account is automatically set to ‘auto sync’, which will occur every 6 hours (we can turn this off for you if you’d like).

Any manual syncs are added to the same queue, so there can be a bit of a delay if you happen to request a sync during that time.

Article order

When syncing in content from a third party, the order of the articles is only stored for the initial sync.

On subsequent loads we ignore the ordering. This means if you change the order of articles in the third party and then do a resync, that order change will not flow through. This is intended behaviour. 

This allows you to intentionally have different articles in each system.

I delete an article, but it's still in Elevio... why?

When you delete an article from a third party, such as Zendesk/HelpScout etc, that content is not removed from our local storage. 

This is intentional.

Not deleting our local copy is by design, so no destructive actions prematurely take place and break any existing links to that content. Essentially, there are too many ways in which an article can accidentally be removed if there is some issue with the sync process, which will result in any links to that content also breaking. 

When the article is re-synced, it will appear with a new ID, so any previous links to that content (also including helpers or embedded articles) will also break.

The same also applies to re-named articles as this is considered a change that needs a re-sync

You will need to ensure that any content you remove from your main source, you also remove from Elevio, or, make the move and use Elevio as your main source for content.

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