Wiki Product Documentation Satisfaction

[JoeZucker]

Hello ServiceNow Community!

I'm interested in your candid feedback about our wiki product documentation. I would greatly appreciate your response to any of the following questions.

• How satisfied are you with our product documentation?
• How can our product documentation be improved?
• Would you prefer to see documentation that is version specific for each release?
• On a scale from 1 to 10, how would you rate the effectiveness of our product documentation and why?
• Do you have any additional comments?

Thank you in advance for your participation!

[MatthewPearson]

Hi Joe,

I'm actually from the UK, but came across this post and wanted to give feedback.

First of all, the Wiki is my go-to place for information while I customise ServiceNow and there are a number of pages that I refer to frequently and find very useful.

However, I've got a number of specific gripes:

* More detail is needed in code examples (e.g. GlideDateTime - ServiceNow Wiki - see my comments in the talk page, but there are many other pages where this applies too). Many code examples given are trivial snippets and don't show any thought for how these might actually be used. Quite often there is no code example given for an API function, and this makes the documentation un-useable.

* I'm not convinced that ServiceNow are really following up on Feedback pages. In some cases there are comments that either have no reply or just an acknowledgement, and then nothing changes for months.

* When feedback on an article has been addressed, it would be useful if it is put under a new heading in the feedback page (e.g. Archive of Addressed Feedback). Doing this makes it easier to see what feedback is current, and preserves older comments that have been made.

* When something is only available from a certain version, it would be useful if it were marked as such on the wiki. Currently it seems that the policy on the wiki is to only document current functionality as it is in the most recent, or possibly even in the next version. Customers need to know when there is a change in functionality between versions.

If you would like more on this, then please let me know...

Thanks - Matthew Pearson

[JoeZucker]

Matthew,

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond. This is very helpful information.   In regard to responding to Feedback pages, ServiceNow has a renewed focus in our response strategy. You should see considerable improvements in response times as well. We are also examining and implementing a more efficient process with this as we move forward. Please let me know about your experience with this issue in the coming months.

Regarding versioning, I agree! We will be improving our strategy with this in the future, by releasing distinct product version documentation that corresponds with each release.

Should you have any additional comments, please keep them coming!

Thanks!

Joe

[MatthewPearson]

LDAP Integration - ServiceNow Wiki is an example of where more clarity on the versions that features are available in would be useful. Reading this article, it says that a MID server can be used for LDAP integration and it's only by scrolling to the bottom of the page and looking in the Enhancements section that we can see that this is only available Dublin+.

A way of solving this is to create a wiki template that is used whenever you want to mark something as Dublin+ or Calgary+. This is similar to that currently used for Notes, e.g. {{Note|here is a note}}. This could then be a standard link to the Calgary/Dublin release notes (or a specifc section therein) and could have a little icon and ...

The thing that this does is that it makes sure that the marking of version information is right in front of people as they read the document, but it can also be done so that it doesn't get in the way of reading the document.

I've managed MediaWiki in the past, so if you want more on this, then let me know...

[MatthewPearson]

Hi Joe,

As mentioned previously, for me the 'go to place' for product documentation is the wiki, but I'm finding that it is being increasingly updated with information that is relevant to Eureka. This means that often when I look something up, if I want to be sure of it, then I take a quick trawl through the article history to see if there is a recent large update to add Eureka information. It would be a great help if there were some simple way that information in articles could be tagged with which version the information pertains to. Some pages are becoming un-usable because of precisely this.

Thanks

Matthew