My Zendesk Help Center is out of sync with ScreenSteps, What do I do?

Updated Aug 01, 2019

The source of the problem

Sometimes customers get into a situation where they are seeing duplicate articles in Zendesk or their updates that they are saving in ScreenSteps are not showing up where they expected. The cause of this problem is when the customer has done one of the following:

  1. They have deleted an article in ScreenSteps or Zendesk and then created another copy.
  2. They have moved articles around in Zendesk after connecting ScreenSteps to Zendesk.

How to avoid this problem

The best way to avoid this problem is to understand how ScreenSteps connects to Zendesk which will be explained below.

Also, once you have connected ScreenSteps to Zendesk you should do the authoring and organizing of your content in ScreenSteps and not in Zendesk. ScreenSteps is not designed to sync changes that you make in Zendesk back to ScreenSteps.

Understanding how ScreenSteps connects to Zendesk

Each ScreenSteps manual, chapter and article connects to a corresponding category, section and article in Zendesk. When you initially import your content from Zendesk, ScreenSteps stores a record of the Zendesk ID for the corresponding category, section or article. Look at the example table below.

ScreenSteps Type & Title ScreenSteps ID Zendesk ID
Manual: Getting Started 16 44552
Chapter: Setup 33 55326
Article: Configure your account 442 98832

This is just an example but as you can see ScreenSteps stores a Zendesk ID for every manual, chapter and article in your ScreenSteps site.

What happens when you push updates to Zendesk?

When you push an update to Zendesk, ScreenSteps updates the category, section or article with the same ID that ScreenSteps originally stored. It doesn't matter what the title is in ScreenSteps or in Zendesk. ScreenSteps is going to update the Zendesk asset based on the ID that ScreenSteps has stored.

What happens if ScreenSteps can't find that ID in Zendesk?

If ScreenSteps can't find the ID then it will store an error message.

You can select Click to resolve to see options for resolving the error.

You will see several options.

Look at the table below to determine which option you should choose.

The article exists on Zendesk
  1. Find the ID of the article in Zendesk (you can find this by looking at the URL of the article in Zendesk)
  2. Select “Change Zendesk HC ID” and enter in the updated ID.
The article does not exist in Zendesk Select “Create a new copy of the article in Zendesk HC”. The article will be created in Zendesk and an updated Zendesk ID will be saved.
Checking your connections

You can check to see if your manuals, chapters and articles are connected to the right categories, sections and articles by following these steps.

Checking manuals

Select View in KB from the manual menu. If the page opens to the correct page on Zendesk, then the connection is correct. If it does not, then update the Zendesk ID in ScreenSteps.

Checking chapters

Select Edit Connection to Zendesk HC for the chapter.

Then click on the link. If it doesn't match the correct section on Zendesk, then update the Zendesk ID.

Checking articles

Select Edit Connection to Zendesk HC for the article.

Then click on the link. If it doesn't match the correct article on Zendesk then update the Zendesk ID.

If you have duplicates in Zendesk

  1. Decide which article you want to keep in Zendesk
  2. Delete the other one from within Zendesk
  3. If necessary, update the Zendesk ID that is stored in ScreenSteps for that article.


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