Knowledge base pratical usage for operation manuals and process handouts

[PatGee]

Hi All. Not quite sure if this question realy belongs to the CSM Forum or my be better addressed in another forum. So please excuse if that's the case.

I'm currently looking at better ways of creating operation handbooks and process guidelines/handouts than today (we still work with PDF files etc. to manage).

We're an outsourcing services provider and manage aproximately 150+ customers, each with customer specific configurations, documented in the opertions manuals. Besdide that, we have general process handouts and customer specific ones.

And we have different operator teams supporting customer clusters, and we also have the need of customer staff that also need to access some parts of an operator manual, but not all of it.

So now I'm trying to figure out, if the serviceNow knowledge Management may be a one stop solution to cover all our needs (and how that may look alike), or if we should switch to confluence (which we're also using for internal descriptions) and do all of our documentation there. The advantage of the confluence approach is, that our employees are familiar with the use of confluence, be that finding articles or creating/updating articles (we also have the breeze DMS plugin in place, so the review and approval part is also taken care of)., Beside, we have clear ideas on what confluence delivers and looks alike. Not so with ServiceNOW knowledge management. but of course, having everything in one pot would have it's advantages.

Does anyone out there in the community have practical experience in using serviceNow for product documentation, opertion manuals, process descriptions etc.

Looking forward on a lot of qualified feedback from the experts 🙂

Regards, Pat

[ralvarez]

Hi Pat,

I’ve been exactly where you are. I have quite a bit of experience with this—we went through Knowledge Base, Confluence, OneNote, SharePoint, and even Coda.

What finally worked for us was moving our documentation into ServiceNow, where our processes already lived. But the standard Knowledge Management module wasn’t quite enough. You might want to take a look at Documate (https://swissflowit.com/documate).

Cheers,
Roberto