Migration Playbook

eDesk Groove Knowledge Base

eDesk to Groove Knowledge Base: The Complete Migration Playbook

A 37-step runbook across six phases — track your progress, and open the right tool at every step.

0 / 37 steps complete 0%
TL;DR

eDesk has no public KB API — migrate articles to Groove via scraping or manual extraction, then load through Groove's REST/GraphQL endpoints with HTML transformation, image re-hosting, and redirect mapping.

Migrating from eDesk Knowledge Base to Groove Knowledge Base requires a fully custom ETL pipeline, as no native migration path exists between the two platforms. eDesk's public API does not expose any KB-specific endpoints, forcing extraction via HTML scraping of published pages or fragile interception of undocumented internal API calls, while Groove's KB API exists in both a deprecated REST v1 and an incomplete GraphQL v2 form. The fundamental data model difference is that eDesk supports nested category hierarchies and per-article access controls, whereas Groove enforces a flat category schema and KB-level-only password protection, requiring structural decisions before any content can be loaded. Additionally, all inline images hosted on eDesk's CDN must be re-hosted before migration completes, or they will break permanently once the eDesk account is deactivated.

Read this first

Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.

If you're also migrating CRM-type data (accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities,

If you're also migrating CRM-type data (accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, activities), treat those as separate workstreams. Groove is a shared inbox, not a CRM — it lacks native Lead or Opportunity objects. Do not bury non-KB data inside the KB migration scope.

Groove's REST API is labeled "no longer in active development." The REST KB endpoints

Groove's REST API is labeled "no longer in active development." The REST KB endpoints still work as of July 2025, but plan for possible deprecation. If building a new integration from scratch, check GraphQL KB mutation availability first via schema introspection, and fall back to REST only where GraphQL coverage is incomplete.

The runbook

Work top to bottom. Tick steps as you go — your progress is saved in this browser.

01 Discovery Establish why you are moving, what "done" means, and who signs off. 0/5

Objective A written scope with agreed success criteria, a named owner per workstream, and a budget approved by finance.

  1. Pull the real numbers out of eDesk

    Support ops 1 day

    Export counts for tickets (open and closed separately), contacts, organisations, attachments, macros, triggers, automations, views and SLA policies. Note the oldest ticket date — history depth drives the whole timeline. Estimating from memory is the single most common cause of a blown migration window.

    Data Profiler Get real record counts instead of estimating from memory
  2. Decide what history actually moves

    Support lead 2 days

    Agree a cut-off with the support lead: all history, last 24 months, or open tickets plus a read-only archive. Every extra year of closed tickets adds API time and cost without adding much agent value. Get this in writing — it is the decision people relitigate mid-cutover.

    A "move everything" default is what turns a two-week migration into a two-month one.

    COI & ROI Calculator Build the 36-month business case you will need for sign-off
  3. Confirm Groove Knowledge Base can hold your support model

    Solution architect 2-3 days

    Walk your current workflow through Groove Knowledge Base: multi-brand, business hours, SLA targets, CSAT, side conversations, public vs internal notes, and any channel you depend on (voice, chat, WhatsApp, social). List anything with no native equivalent — those are project risks, not configuration details.

  4. Build the business case

    Project sponsor 1-2 days

    Model licence delta, migration effort, agent retraining, and the cost of staying put (Cost of Inaction). Executives approve a number, not a plan, and you will be asked for it again at the go/no-go.

    Helpdesk Migration Planner Turn ticket volume into a dated eDesk → Groove Knowledge Base timeline
  5. Name owners and set the go/no-go date

    Project manager 1 day

    One named owner each for data, configuration, integrations, and agent enablement, plus a decision-maker who can call a rollback. Put the go/no-go meeting in calendars now, 48 hours before the freeze.

eDesk → Groove Knowledge Base specifics

200+ articles, organic traffic to KB, tight timeline
Managed migration service or dedicated contractor with KB migration experience.

Don't move on until

  • Record counts confirmed for tickets, contacts, organisations and macros
  • Success criteria signed off by the support lead
  • Freeze window provisionally booked with the business
02 Data Audit Find out what is actually in the data before you try to move it. 0/6

Objective A profiled, cleaned export with every quality defect either fixed at source or explicitly accepted.

  1. Take a full eDesk export and profile it

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Export to CSV or JSON and profile every file: row counts, null rates per column, distinct values, and type consistency. Compare row counts against the API totals from Discovery — a gap here means your export is silently truncated, usually by pagination.

    Data Profiler Profile the eDesk export for nulls, outliers and type drift
  2. Validate file structure before anyone writes a transform

    Data engineer 1 day

    Check delimiters, quoting, encoding (expect UTF-8, watch for BOMs and Latin-1), duplicate headers, and embedded newlines in ticket bodies. Ticket descriptions with raw newlines and commas break naive CSV parsers and silently shift columns.

    A single unescaped quote in one ticket body can shift every subsequent column without any error.

    CSV Validator Catch broken headers and ragged rows in the raw export
  3. Inventory PII and set retention

    Compliance / DPO 2 days

    Scan for emails, phone numbers, payment card fragments, national IDs and anything else regulated in ticket bodies and custom fields — support tickets are where customers paste things they should not. Decide what gets migrated, masked, or dropped, and record the legal basis.

    Ticket bodies and attachments routinely contain card and ID data that never appears in a structured field.

    PII & Compliance Scanner Find regulated fields before they land in a new system
  4. Quantify duplicates, orphans and dead references

    Support ops 1-2 days

    Count duplicate contacts (same email, different casing), tickets whose requester no longer exists, organisations with no members, and attachments whose parent ticket is gone. Fix these in eDesk where you can — migrating them just moves the mess.

    Data Cleaner Strip empty rows, stray whitespace and dead columns
  5. Clean and normalise the export

    Data engineer 2 days

    Trim whitespace, drop empty rows and columns, normalise casing on emails and tags, and standardise every timestamp to UTC ISO 8601. Timezone drift is invisible at load time and shows up weeks later as SLA reports nobody can reconcile.

  6. Produce a masked copy for sandbox work

    Data engineer 0.5 day

    Generate a realistic but fake version of the export for testing and for any vendor who needs sample data. Loading real customer PII into a sandbox is a breach in most jurisdictions, and sandboxes are rarely covered by your DPA.

    PII Masker Generate a safe copy for sandbox and vendor testing

eDesk → Groove Knowledge Base specifics

No public KB API
eDesk's documented API covers tickets, messages, orders, tags, templates, and custom fields — not knowledge base articles. (developers.edesk.com)
CSV export is irrelevant for KB content
The export feature covers ticket/reporting data and is capped at 1,000 rows per download.
Internal API exists
but is undocumented — browser network inspection during KB editor use reveals JSON payloads, but relying on internal APIs is fragile and may break without notice.
Rate limit (public API)
60 requests per minute with a restore rate of 2 requests per second. (developers.edesk.com)
Image audit
Grep all Groove article bodies for src= attributes. Verify each URL returns HTTP 200. Flag any URLs still pointing to eDesk's CDN domain.

Don't move on until

  • Export parses cleanly with no ragged rows or encoding errors
  • PII inventory complete and retention decisions recorded
  • Duplicate and orphan records quantified and triaged
03 Field Mapping Turn two schemas into one signed-off mapping spec. 0/6

Objective A reviewed field-level mapping covering every object, with an explicit decision for every field that has no target.

  1. Generate the first-pass eDesk → Groove Knowledge Base field map

    Solution architect 2 days

    Start from an automated match on both schemas, then review every row by hand. Automated matching gets the obvious 70% right and is confidently wrong on the rest — especially anything named "type", "status" or "custom_field_1".

    Schema Mapper Opens pre-loaded with the eDesk → Groove Knowledge Base field pair
  2. Map status, priority and channel values, not just field names

    Support lead 1-2 days

    Enumerate every value in each picklist on both sides and map them explicitly. Value-level mismatches are the defect class that survives all the way to production because the field itself mapped fine — a ticket that should be "Pending" arriving as "Open" reopens SLA clocks.

    Statuses with no target equivalent (on-hold, pending-customer) need a policy decision, not a best guess.

  3. Decide how custom fields land

    Solution architect 2 days

    Create the target custom fields first, matching type exactly (a dropdown mapped to free text can never be mapped back). Where Groove Knowledge Base has no equivalent, decide between a new custom field, a tag, or a note appended to the ticket body — and record which.

  4. Resolve identity and threading

    Data engineer 1 day

    Decide how source IDs are preserved — most platforms will not let you set the primary key, so keep the original ID in a custom field. Without it, reconciliation becomes fuzzy matching and every future support question about an old ticket is unanswerable.

    Losing the original ticket ID makes reconciliation and rollback effectively impossible.

  5. Plan attachments, inline images and threading order

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Confirm size limits, allowed MIME types, and whether inline images survive as attachments or need rehosting. Decide the comment ordering and author attribution rules: comments loaded out of order, or all attributed to the API user, destroy the conversation history agents rely on.

  6. Freeze and sign off the mapping spec

    Project manager 1 day

    Version the spec, walk the support lead through it row by row, and get explicit sign-off. Any change after this point goes through change control — mid-flight mapping edits are how partial loads happen.

eDesk → Groove Knowledge Base specifics

HTML sanitization
Strip eDesk-specific CSS classes, data- attributes, and tracking scripts. Remove wrapper divs that are layout artifacts, not content.
Image URL replacement
Swap all eDesk CDN URLs (typically matching cdn.edesk.com or your instance's upload domain) with your re-hosted image URLs.
Internal link rewriting
Replace https://your-edesk-kb.edesk.com/article/... with the new Groove URL pattern. This requires knowing the target slug for each article, so you need the full article list before rewriting links. Build a lookup table: {edesk_url: groove_slug} and do a string replacement pass across all article bodies.
Subcategory flattening
Groove's category schema is flat. Convert nested paths (e.g., Shipping > International > EU) to flat labels (Shipping - International - EU) or separate categories.
Slug generation
Create URL-friendly slugs from article titles or original URL paths. If eDesk URLs contain numeric IDs (/kb/123-returns-policy), strip the ID and keep only the text portion. Preserve slug text where possible to minimize redirect complexity.

Don't move on until

  • Every source field is mapped, deliberately dropped, or parked in a custom field
  • Status, priority and channel value maps agreed with the support lead
  • Mapping spec version-controlled and signed off
04 Test Migration Prove the pipeline on a small, representative slice. 0/6

Objective A pilot load into a Groove Knowledge Base sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.

  1. Stand up a Groove Knowledge Base sandbox that matches production config

    Solution architect 2-3 days

    Create the custom fields, groups, brands, business hours and SLA policies first. A pilot into a default sandbox tests nothing, because the failures you care about are all configuration mismatches.

  2. Pick a deliberately nasty pilot sample

    Data engineer 0.5 day

    Take 500-1000 records chosen for difficulty, not convenience: the longest ticket threads, tickets with the most attachments, non-Latin character sets, merged and split tickets, deleted requesters, and every status value. A clean random sample proves only that easy records are easy.

  3. Run the load with masked data and instrument everything

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Log every API request and response with its source record ID. When 40 records fail out of 10,000 you need to know exactly which ones and why, without re-running the whole batch.

    PII Masker Never load real customer PII into a sandbox
  4. Measure real throughput against the rate limit

    Data engineer 1 day

    Record achieved records-per-hour under Groove Knowledge Base's actual rate limits, including retries and backoff. Extrapolate to the full volume: if the maths says the full load exceeds your freeze window, you fix that now, not on cutover night.

    Published rate limits are ceilings, not throughput. Assume real-world rates are meaningfully lower once retries and backoff are counted.

  5. Reconcile the pilot and triage every failure

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Diff source against target on record counts and field-level values. Every discrepancy gets a root cause and a fix — "probably fine" at pilot scale becomes thousands of broken records at full scale.

    Migration Validation Tool Diff the pilot batch against source before scaling up
  6. Put real agents in front of the pilot data

    Support lead 2 days

    Have two or three agents work sample tickets end to end in the sandbox. They find the things reconciliation cannot see: unreadable threading, missing context, macros that no longer make sense. Fix the mapping, then re-run.

eDesk → Groove Knowledge Base specifics

Search test
Use Groove's public search API to search for key terms. Verify expected articles appear.

Don't move on until

  • Pilot batch reconciles to 100% on record counts
  • Agents have reviewed sample tickets and confirmed they are workable
  • Measured throughput extrapolates to a viable full-load window
05 Cutover Execute the switch inside a controlled, reversible window. 0/8

Objective All in-scope data live in Groove Knowledge Base, agents working in the new system, and a rollback path that stayed available throughout.

  1. Pre-load history before the freeze

    Data engineer 3-10 days

    Load closed tickets and contacts days or weeks ahead while eDesk stays live. Only open tickets and the final delta need to move inside the freeze — this is the single biggest lever on window length.

    Helpdesk Migration Planner Size the freeze window from Groove Knowledge Base's real API limits
  2. Publish the runbook with times, owners and abort criteria

    Project manager 1 day

    A timed sequence: freeze start, final export, delta load, channel switch, smoke test, go/no-go, agent switch. Name who does each step and the explicit condition that triggers a rollback. Decide the abort criteria before the night, when nobody wants to be the one to call it.

  3. Freeze eDesk and take the final delta

    Support ops 2-4 hours

    Stop new ticket creation, let agents finish in-flight replies, then export everything changed since the pre-load. Announce the freeze to the whole business, not just support — someone always tries to raise a ticket during it.

    Tickets created during an unenforced freeze land in the old system and are the most common source of permanently lost data.

  4. Load the delta and open tickets

    Data engineer 2-6 hours

    Run the delta load, then reconcile counts before touching any channel. Do not repoint email until the delta has verified — an inbound ticket arriving mid-load is far harder to untangle than a few extra minutes of freeze.

    Migration Validation Tool Confirm the final delta landed before you reopen
  5. Repoint channels and verify with live traffic

    IT / integrations 2-4 hours

    Switch email forwarding and MX or connector settings, update chat widgets and web forms, and re-authorise integrations. Then send real test tickets through every channel and confirm each lands, routes and triggers the right automation.

    Email forwarding changes can take up to a full DNS TTL to propagate — check the TTL days in advance and lower it if needed.

    Cron Expression Builder Schedule the delta syncs that run through the freeze
  6. Run the go/no-go and switch the agents

    Project sponsor 1-2 hours

    Walk the exit criteria with the decision-maker, call it explicitly, then move agents over with a named person on hand for the first few hours. Keep eDesk read-only rather than cancelled — cancelling the old contract on day one removes your only fallback.

  7. Keep eDesk serving traffic

    until Groove passes all validation checks. Do not update DNS or redirect rules until validation is complete.

  8. Track migration state via the ID map file

    The id_map.json persisted during loading tells you exactly which articles were successfully created in Groove.

eDesk → Groove Knowledge Base specifics

To roll back a partial load
Use the ID map to identify all created Groove articles. Unpublish each via PUT /v1/kb/:kb_id/articles/:id/unpublish, or delete them via DELETE /v1/kb/:kb_id/articles/:id. Groove's REST API supports both operations.
To rerun a failed batch
Because the load script checks the ID map before creating each article, you can simply rerun the script. Already-migrated articles will be skipped; only failed ones will be retried.
If Groove DNS was already pointed
Revert the CNAME record to point back to eDesk. DNS propagation typically takes 5–30 minutes. During this window, some users will see the Groove KB and some will see eDesk.

Don't move on until

  • Full historical load complete and counts matched
  • Inbound channels repointed and verified with live test tickets
  • Rollback decision point passed explicitly, not by default
06 Validation Prove the migration is complete, then close it out. 0/6

Objective Documented evidence that data, workflow and reporting all survived, and a signed acceptance.

  1. Run the full reconciliation

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Compare source and target on every object: total counts, counts by status, counts by group, attachment counts, and field-level spot checks on a random sample. Produce one report you can hand to an auditor.

    Migration Validation Tool Reconcile eDesk and Groove Knowledge Base record-for-record
  2. Verify field completeness, not just record counts

    Data engineer 1 day

    Re-profile the loaded data and compare null rates per field against the source profile. Matching record counts with a field that silently arrived empty is the failure mode counts alone will never catch.

    Data Profiler Prove field completeness held up through the load
  3. Rebuild reporting and compare against baselines

    Support ops 2-3 days

    Recreate your core dashboards — volume, first response time, resolution time, CSAT — and compare to pre-migration figures for the same period. Explain every variance; a changed SLA calculation is a real finding, not a rounding error.

    SLA and first-response metrics are usually recalculated from the loaded timestamps, so they will differ if any timestamp mapping was approximate.

  4. Test the workflow layer end to end

    Support ops 2 days

    Fire every trigger, automation, SLA escalation, macro and notification with a live ticket. Workflow does not migrate — it gets rebuilt — so it is untested until someone has actually watched it run.

  5. Confirm compliance and produce the audit trail

    Compliance / DPO 1 day

    Re-scan the loaded data for regulated fields, confirm retention and deletion policies are configured in Groove Knowledge Base, and file the evidence with your PII decisions from the audit phase.

    PII & Compliance Scanner Produce the compliance evidence your auditor will ask for
  6. Sign off, then decommission on a schedule

    Project sponsor 1 day

    Get written acceptance against the Discovery success criteria. Keep eDesk read-only for an agreed period (30-90 days is typical), take a final archive export, and only then cancel. Diarise the decommission date so it does not quietly renew.

eDesk → Groove Knowledge Base specifics

Encoding verification
Verify UTF-8 encoding is preserved. eDesk articles with em-dashes (—), curly quotes (" "), or non-Latin scripts are common sources of encoding failures. Decode and re-encode as UTF-8 during transformation.
Spot-check 10% of articles
Open side-by-side in eDesk and Groove. Compare rendered output — check headings, lists, tables, and inline formatting.
Internal link check
Search for any remaining eDesk URLs (edesk.com) in Groove article bodies. All should have been rewritten to Groove URLs.
Encoding check
Search for common encoding artifacts: ’ (curly apostrophe), â€" (em-dash), é (accented e). These indicate UTF-8 was misinterpreted as Latin-1.

Don't move on until

  • Full reconciliation report attached to the project record
  • Reporting baselines match pre-migration figures within agreed tolerance
  • Formal acceptance signed and archive retention scheduled

Field mapping reference

The field-by-field mapping for each object. Use this as the starting point for your mapping spec.

KB Object Groove KB Object 9 fields
eDesk fieldGroove Knowledge Base fieldNotes
Library Knowledge Base 1:1 if single library. Multiple eDesk libraries → multiple Groove KBs
Category Category Map by title. Groove adds slug, SEO metadata, positioning
Subcategory Flattened category or naming convention Groove's category schema has no parent field — flatten or prefix names
Article Article Core content unit. HTML body, tags, category assignment
Inline image Inline image (re-hosted) Must download from eDesk CDN and re-upload or host externally
Keywords Tags eDesk "keywords" map to Groove's tag array
Article tags Tags Direct mapping; merge with keywords
Password protection Password protection Groove supports at KB level only, not per-article
Layout/CSS KB settings/theme Manual rebuild — no automated transport
Article Groove Article 16 fields medium

Published article bodies can be scraped and re-imported via Groove's REST API, but HTML structure varies by eDesk template and may require per-account scraper customization.

eDesk fieldGroove Knowledge Base fieldNotes
Title title None
Body (HTML) body HTML cleanup, image URL replacement, internal link rewriting
Category category_id Lookup Groove category ID by title
Keywords tags [] Merge with any existing tags; normalize case
Tags tags [] Direct mapping
Author author_id Map to Groove agent/user ID
Published status State (publish/unpublish) Use publish endpoint after creation
Created date created_at Not settable via Groove REST API. Original publish dates are lost. Document the original dates in a separate record for reference.
Updated date updated_at Set by Groove on write — reflects migration date, not original edit date
URL slug slug Extract from eDesk URL path or generate from title. If eDesk URLs embed numeric IDs (e.g., /kb/123-returns-policy), strip the ID prefix when generating the Groove slug.
— description Generate from first 160 chars of body or meta description
— meta_robots Default: INDEX,FOLLOW
— og_title, og_description Populate from title/description for SEO parity
— related_ids [] Set after all articles created (requires second pass)
— position Set to maintain display order
— locale Set if using Groove's translation system; defaults to KB's primary language
Category Groove Category 6 fields
eDesk fieldGroove Knowledge Base fieldNotes
Category name title Direct; handle duplicates across libraries
Parent category — No direct field in Groove; flatten or prefix
— slug Auto-generated or set manually
— description Optional; populate for SEO
— position Controls display order
— featured Boolean

Risk matrix

Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.

ObjectRiskNotes
KB Articles medium Published article bodies can be scraped and re-imported via Groove's REST API, but HTML structure varies by eDesk template and may require per-account scraper customization.
Categories high Nested subcategory hierarchies in eDesk have no direct equivalent in Groove's flat schema, requiring a manual architectural decision on naming conventions before any articles can be loaded.
Inline Images high All images are hosted on eDesk's CDN and will become permanently broken links once the eDesk account is deactivated unless each image is downloaded and re-hosted prior to migration.
Draft Articles high Unpublished and draft articles are not accessible via public page scraping, meaning they cannot be captured by automated methods and must be migrated manually or risk being lost entirely.
Article Metadata high Creation dates, author attribution, view counts, and internal tags have no extraction path from eDesk's public KB pages and cannot be faithfully reproduced in Groove.
SEO Metadata medium eDesk has no equivalent to Groove's per-article SEO fields such as meta_robots, og_title, and og_description, so these fields must be populated from scratch during migration or left at platform defaults.
URL Structure medium eDesk URLs embed numeric article IDs while Groove uses slug-based paths, meaning URL structures will change and 301 redirects must be manually mapped to preserve organic search traffic.
Access Control Settings medium Per-article password protection from eDesk cannot be replicated in Groove, which only supports KB-level protection, requiring articles to be reorganized across multiple KB instances.
Article Tags low Groove supports tags on articles via a string array field, and tags extracted from eDesk articles during scraping can generally be mapped and imported without structural changes.
Translations low eDesk does not natively support multi-language article variants, so there is no translation content to migrate, though Groove's locale system provides new capability that can be populated post-migration.

The hard parts

What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.

No Public eDesk KB API

eDesk exposes no public API for Knowledge Base articles or categories, requiring content extraction via HTML scraping of published pages or undocumented internal API interception, both of which are fragile and incomplete.

Category Hierarchy Flattening Required

eDesk supports nested parent-child category structures, but Groove's category schema is strictly flat with no parent_id field, requiring all nested hierarchies to be collapsed into a naming convention before import.

Inline Image Re-Hosting

All inline images in eDesk articles are served from eDesk's CDN and must be downloaded and re-uploaded to Groove or an external CDN before migration, or they will break when the eDesk account is deactivated.

Groove KB GraphQL API Incomplete

Groove's preferred GraphQL v2 API still has KB endpoints under active development, meaning KB article operations may require fallback to the deprecated REST v1 API with uncertain long-term support.

Draft Content Inaccessible via Scraping

HTML scraping can only capture published articles visible on public pages, meaning any draft or unpublished eDesk KB content is invisible to automated extraction and must be handled manually.

Per-Article Access Control Loss

eDesk supports password protection at the individual article level, while Groove only supports password protection at the entire KB level, requiring protected and public articles to be split across separate Groove KB instances.

What breaks

Known failure modes. Have a recovery plan for each before you cut over.

Embedded videos:

eDesk articles with YouTube or Vimeo embeds use <iframe> tags. Groove's editor may strip or alter iframes. Test embed rendering in Groove before bulk loading. If iframes are stripped, use Groove's raw HTML mode to insert them post-import.

Tables:

HTML tables from eDesk may not render cleanly in Groove's article viewer. Inspect and simplify complex table structures. Tables with colspan/rowspan are particularly prone to rendering issues.

Custom CSS:

eDesk KB layouts support custom CSS. This does not transfer. Any visual customization needs to be rebuilt in Groove's theme editor.

Image hotlinking:

If you don't re-host images and your eDesk account is deactivated, every inline image in your Groove articles will return a 404. Always re-host. Verify by searching for the eDesk CDN domain (typically cdn.edesk.com) across all migrated article bodies.

Duplicate categories:

eDesk allows the same category name across different libraries. Groove uses slugs — duplicate names will generate duplicate slugs, causing a 422 error. Rename before loading.

Article ordering:

eDesk's article display order may be implicit (alphabetical or manual drag). Groove uses a position integer. Map the order explicitly during extraction by recording the display sequence.

Draft articles:

Scraping only captures published content. If you need drafts, extract them via the eDesk editor manually using the JSON capture approach.

Character encoding:

eDesk articles with special characters (em-dashes, curly quotes, non-Latin scripts) should be verified after import. UTF-8 mismatches cause garbled text. Decode all content as UTF-8 during the transform step and reject any articles with encoding errors.

Internal cross-links:

If Article A links to Article B in eDesk, that link will break in Groove unless you parse the HTML and update the href to Article B's new Groove URL. This requires a two-pass approach: load all articles first, build the URL map, then update internal links. The second update puts articles into wip state — you must republish each updated article.

Slug collisions:

Duplicate titles generate duplicate slugs. Build collision detection into your load script: if a POST returns a 422 with a slug-related error, append a numeric suffix (-2, -3) and retry. Log all collisions for manual review.

Article lifecycle state change on edit:

Editing a published Groove article via the API puts it into wip (work-in-progress) state. Any second-pass updates (related articles, SEO metadata, internal link rewrites) require a subsequent PUT .../publish call to make the article publicly visible again.

Tools used in this playbook

All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

FAQ

Can I export knowledge base articles from eDesk?

eDesk does not provide a dedicated KB article export or API endpoint. The CSV export feature covers ticket reporting data only (capped at 1,000 rows). To extract KB articles, you need to scrape your published KB pages or manually capture article data from the browser's developer tools.

Does Groove have an API for importing knowledge base articles?

Yes. Groove's REST API v1 has full CRUD endpoints for knowledge bases, categories, and articles (POST to create, PUT to publish). Groove also has a GraphQL v2 API. The REST API is deprecated but functional as of July 2025. There is no bulk import endpoint — articles must be created one at a time.

Can Groove preserve eDesk subcategories?

Not directly. eDesk supports parent categories and subcategories, but Groove's documented KB category schema is flat with no parent-category field. Most migrations flatten nested paths into renamed top-level categories (e.g., 'Returns / EU').

Will I lose SEO rankings when migrating from eDesk KB to Groove KB?

You will lose rankings if you don't implement 301 redirects from every old eDesk article URL to the corresponding Groove URL. Build a complete redirect map before cutover and submit an updated sitemap to Google Search Console immediately after.

Can Zapier or Make migrate eDesk knowledge base to Groove?

Not effectively. Neither platform has pre-built triggers for eDesk KB articles or Groove KB operations. You would need custom HTTP modules on both sides, making it more complex than a direct API script with no meaningful advantage. Middleware is only suitable for light post-cutover forward sync.

Or skip all of this and let us handle it

Book a 30-minute call and we'll scope your migration in a single session.