Hi Ann - a lot of us have implemented this requirement, and it's great. Be sure to tell your team this is happening so they aren't surprised when they have issues releasing a pub or updating a pub because some of the (previously released) topics suddenly throw errors. The easiest way to remedy this is to add the "Changes" Field to the Baseline tab in Pub Manager, then sort by that field. From there, you can select all the topics (then maps, etc.) that don't have anything in that field, and do a bulk edit to add some text. I think I added something like "bulk update of Changes field" or something innocuous like that. It didn't take a lot of time, but I wish I had known about it before we made the field mandatory because it did surprise us which was a little stressful. Good luck.

Hi Ann - a lot of us have implemented this requirement, and it's great. Be sure to tell your team this is happening so they aren't surprised when they have issues releasing a pub or updating a pub because some of the (previously released) topics suddenly throw errors. The easiest way to remedy this is to add the "Changes" Field to the Baseline tab in Pub Manager, then sort by that field. From there, you can select all the topics (then maps, etc.) that don't have anything in that field, and do a bulk edit to add some text. I think I added something like "bulk update of Changes field" or something innocuous like that. It didn't take a lot of time, but I wish I had known about it before we made the field mandatory because it did surprise us which was a little stressful. Good luck.

Thanks so much for your reply Elizabeth. Did you find a way to allow first version of content items to be created without requiring changes field to be populated or is it mandatory for all versions including the first?

Ann

It's mandatory for all versions but it's only the actively used versions that throw errors when you try to update a pub. It's not that big of a deal, really. The small amount of (very short term) pain was totally worth having the Changes comments always available to our writers IMO.