Is HTML5 an Answer for the KB?

[Garrick]

We play a maddening game in our IT world. After some discussions with many of you, it's one that seems to not be unique to my organization. We push our service desk, IT staff, and end users to utilize the knowledge base as the primary tool for helpful documents and to act as the repository of knowledge. However, since many of the articles have already been created the task is now to migrate old data into Service-now and going forward, use only SNC. This is where the game begins to be played.

One of the biggest complaints concerns I hear in why our staff doesn't use the knowledge base is the inability to easily add images. Sure, you can create some content, click the little paperclip, browse to the file, attach, then go looking for the next one. Then, use the Insert/Modify image button, select the image and voilí ! Done! Or alternatively, you could always host your images someplace and link to them. Phew. Our IT staff here have grown accustom over the last few years to flash based alternatives--being able to drag images much like Facebook, Picassa, or even Microsoft Word (not flash, I know).

The push back is understandable. I've determined it takes approximately twice as long to create an average KB article inside the tool than to create a Word doc. This discrepancy in time has dramatically slowed the progress of knowledge input and has led to extreme lack of utilization. One solution we've turned to is utilize lower cost resources (temps, contingents, interns, etc) to do the heavy lifting and remove the effort from our full time staff. This is working and is clearly more economically efficient; however, long term it fails to get the staff to embrace the technology and build their trust in Service-now.

One of the first questions I'm asked by IT staffers is if the KB supports drag-and-drop. We all unfortunately know the answer to this. While we wait for the next update, some HTML enhancements look promising. Though HTML5 is still quite a ways out, many of the features are already supported in our everyday browsers like Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome. The one that particularly caught my interest is HTML5's drag-and-drop capabilities. I'm not completely certain this would be any easier than a flash alternative, but it is an interesting development that may have promise for utilization here. I played with a few of the demos here and the worked well with Chrome and Firefox 3.5. Sadly IE, our corporate standard, had no hope on the drag and drop front. Even IE8 fell short here.

While I'm certainly unsure if this is a direction SNC should take, it does at least bring to the surface again the question surrounding enhancements to the KB entry process. The question I leave for everyone here is how have you worked out some of the details in this area? It'll be an interesting discussion for the next user group meeting after the holidays and I look forward to seeing everyone to discuss.