Guide Production Instance Should be Available to Copy into Sandbox

It's unreasonable to test changes to CSS and scripts in the production environment. Our org uses a custom theme so we need replication of Guide to properly test changes.

Was searching around for an hour before I found Morgan's comments which summed up exactly the problem we are facing. I'm so glad I found this post so I can upvote it. 

We are looking to move our Bot into prod ASAP, so it would help to know if this is on the roadmap, if it will be here tomorrow, or if we're just going to have to bite the bullet and test live. 

It's really asking a lot to trust in this feature without testing it. I trust that it can be good and will be good, but if it annoys enough people getting off the ground while live testing, I'm sure we'll get calls to use other bots.

Please, if there's any info about a roadmap for this feature, please share it. 

Thanks :+1:

+1 we are working on the move from Chat to Messaging which has a lot of moving parts for us. It's unfortunate that we cannot truly test how the bot handles questions that could be answered by an article in our production environments. We also have multiple brands and help centers, so I'm not positive how to connect the multiple widgets to the correct help centers.

We have Premium sandboxes and need to be able to test new Guide CSS, themes, article organization, and other Guide items in it. Not having any replication is crippling for us. 

Hey Morgan, thank you for taking the time to provide us with this feedback. We are sorry for not getting back to you sooner.

This is a great feature request, and I have added it to the backlog for future consideration. This means we will consider adding it as a priority later in our planning cycle. We are going to leave this post open for comment to allow others to provide their feedback and use cases; however, please note, as is stated in our Community Guidelines, that we can not commit to prioritising any one piece of feedback we receive in the community.

+1 @richard49 .
we are working on creating additional sandbox with our enterprise suite and need to build, test applications in lower environments.  Please share the roadmap/ feature availability time line whenever possible.

Similar to Morgan we are trying to test the new AI bot features without disrupting the current bot that we have in production. We have a smallish team and I wanted a way to re-create the bot that I have in production adding the AI features and ask my team to assist with testing and provide feedback. But I can't do that because the help center isn't available in Sandbox.

Any update on when this will be available? We're getting a forced update to messaging in 4 days. I learned that our old web widget (classic) will no longer work. The new messaging web widget has completely different functionality so I'm trying to set it up in sandbox before we get switched to messaging. But like others have stated, I can't test in sandbox because there's no active help center.

Same here.
when is this going to be available for Premium customers?

Also need this functionality so we can thoroughly test AI agents for a restricted Help Center. We don't want to launch it live into production without testing and can't use the “Test Bot” option with a restricted help center. 

An option to copy guide/help centre must be made available while doing a sandbox creation/refresh  (as a best practice). This will remove any chance of impacting the production instance while testing AI/bots functionality; which we are forced to do in prod now.

Testing out your AI functions is a huge use case for this - it's a really important feature for us that we'd like to see released and I bet could be a useful tool for you for selling your own AI products!

+1 

+1  if i need to test some changes, i have to do it on my live helpcenter. I need a test environnement to experiment changes likes section/categories organisation etc

Please give a quick overview of your product feature request or feedback and note who in your org is affected by this issue [ex. agents, admins, customers, etc.]. (2-3 sentences)

When creating sandbox environments, the Guide production instance needs to be available to copy into the sandbox as well. Not having a production copy in the sandbox greatly impacts the ability to test bot an AI functionality. The new generative AI functionality needs to be able to pull information from Guide when suggesting solutions to customers. Re-creating a handful of articles in the sandbox version of Guide does not allow for large scale, production comparable validation testing. Not having this feature is forcing us to do validation testing of the bot and generative AI functionality in production. 

What problem do you see this solving? (1-2 sentences) 

This would allow for proper validation testing to happen in a safe, sandbox environment, with no impact to our customers.

A sandbox should provide the basic setup of production.  The Guide is mainly what we use and a sandbox is useless without it.

When was the last time you were affected by this lack of functionality, or specific tool? What happened? How often does this problem occur and how does this impact your business? (3-4 sentences)

This is an everyday problem right now as we are working through bot optimization and validation testing of generative AI.

Are you currently using a workaround to solve this problem? (If yes, please explain) (1-2 sentences)

There is no workaround.

What would be your ideal solution to this problem? How would it work or function? (1-2 sentences)

Guide needs to be available (as at least an option) to copy over into sandbox. Also, the Help articles about setting up a Sandbox need to be updated to tell customers the Guide isn't available.  I've wasted so much time trying to find out something we should be told about up front.    My recent ticket query was “The sandbox I created 8 May doesn't have the Guide, which is the critical item to test. I've added a few categories in, but we have 800+ articles that I need to test the UI on, so need the Guide content in the sandbox.”

After much back and forth with the ticket, this was included as a comment:  “Please keep in mind that we do not currently replicate guide/help center content in a sandbox.”  Very frustrating when that was what I was asking in the first place!

Are there any updates on this one? It's a major feature that is missing. Customizing Help Center code shouldn't be something done in production.

+1 to this. It is an industry standard to always test in staging before pushing to production. 

I've been using Zendesk Guide/Knowledge for nearly ~10 years, and whenever we're testing a new Zendesk EAP, testing a new functionality we've added to the theme/style sheet, or testing a big informational architecture change, it's always had to be in a fake sandbox help centre that does not match our production help centre perfectly, especially with all the content updates I make on a regular basis. 

This make the process of updating something in the help centre production environment extremely risky (testing something new in production while our support team and customers are also using it!), time-consuming (copying and pasting example articles over, or recreating something from production to test in the sandbox), and inefficient (repeating the work twice).

Ideally, this sandbox should have:

• Ability to either clone our production help centre perfectly, or to do a manually-requested sync with our production help centre to match perfectly
• Ability to deploy the changes in the sandbox to production (so any updates in sandbox are transferred/copied over to the production help centre too)
• Ability to revert the changes back to match the current production (in case the proposed changes breaks the sandbox)