Knowledge Article Migration to ServiceNow
Hi All, I have been digging a lot around data migration from Remedy to ServiceNow and one of the biggest challenges people had is KA migration. It took me a lot of effort in making a plan that can at least help some of the people to stick to their plan and complete the task at the earliest.
Let’s forget everything I have done and talk about a high-level plan of achieving this task that looks like an impossible one. Below are some of the simple steps for getting it done but before that we should know the background of data stored in Remedy.
Coming to the Knowledge Management in Remedy, you would first need Knowledge Admin permission to view all articles in the system. Actually preferred access level that you should get yourself assigned is the AR Administrator so that you can access back-end forms and analyze the data as per your requirement.
We will divide this task into simple steps and then discuss the approach.
- Remedy Knowledge Management Module.
- Remedy data forms and export formats.
- Playing around with the data.
- Loading the data in ServiceNow.
- Data validation /fixes in ServiceNow.
Remedy Knowledge Management Module.
KA module in BMC Remedy uses template structure and divides all KA’s in below templates and are visible to users as per the format / fields defined for them.
Out-of-the-box article templates |
Description |
|
Decision Tree |
Use this template to create knowledge articles that provide aid in making decisions while performing tasks. |
|
How To |
Use this template to create knowledge articles that provide step-by-step instructions to complete a task. |
|
Known error |
Use this template to create knowledge articles that provide root cause information and workarounds for a known issue. |
|
Problem Solution |
Use this template to document a resolution for a problem after identifying the root cause during a problem investigation. |
|
Reference |
Use this template to create an information resource. |
The above table describes out-of-the-box templates defined for ease of end-user and KA creators. Moreover, that each of them has their respective back-end forms those store the data but these forms are not visible to the end-users only Admin can view them. Let us talk about them in the next section.
For more information about the BMC Remedy AR System knowledge article template, see Knowledge article templates
Remedy data forms and export formats.
Every form in the BMC Remedy does not store data, some forms pull data from other forms and display it as a reference. When a user opens any of the articles from the above-mentioned templates, the form that displays the article to the user is the ‘Knowledge Article’ form in Remedy but it does not store all data with respect to the article. In fact, it pulls the data from back-end forms corresponding to the article template.
Let us take an example of the ‘’How To’’ article. If an end-user /service Desk agent opens an article of ‘How To’ type, the form visible to the user is ‘knowledge article’ form but some of the data displayed to the user are from the respective back-end form.
Below are the form names in BMC Remedy, which store respective data.
|
Template Name |
Respective Back-end form |
Main Form |
|
How To |
RKM:HowToTemplate |
RKM:KnowledgeArticleManager |
|
Known error |
RKM:KnownErrorTemplate | |
|
Problem Solution |
RKM:ProblemSolutionTemplate | |
|
Reference |
RKM:ReferenceTemplate |
Data Export Formats:
You can export the results of a BMC Remedy AR System report to the following file formats:
- BMC Remedy AR System export (file extension .arx)
- BMC Remedy AR System XML (file extension .xml)
- Comma-Separated Value (file extension .csv)
For more information about the BMC Remedy AR System report file types, see saving or exporting BMC Remedy AR System reports.
Playing around the data
As per the above steps to export the data, you will have data in two formats:
- XML
- CSV
Note: - make sure you are including the DocID column in your exports.
The export will create a directory with all of the attachments, but they will be renamed with a sequential number. Open the XML data file in excel and copy/paste the doc ID and attachment columns into a new excel spreadsheet. Remove the blanks so that you are left with two columns with Doc ID and attachment name. And the other export will have data in CSV format.
Loading the data in ServiceNow
As of now, we have data in two separate sheets, one from CSV export and the other copy-pasted from the XML file.
- Load the data from the XML file in one import set.
- Lad the CSV data into ServiceNow (create a transform map to load all of the articles into ServiceNow from the CSV export).
Create a KB article in ServiceNow to act as your attachment holder and then use the Node.js script here to upload the attachments and attach them to your temp KB article.
You will have to make some updates to that node.js script.
Note: - I am here assuming that you already know the basics of transform maps and data loading into ServiceNow. Node Script
Then create a transform map for the import set created by the excel file with just Doc ID and attachment name. Add one on after script that will update the attachment records in sys_attachments with the sys_id of the correct article in ServiceNow and use Doc ID as your key to identifying the correct attachment for the respective article.
Data validation /fixes in ServiceNow
There are a lot of chances that mistakes can happen and that’s the reason we need to revisit our work and perform validations so that we fix them. Usually, the approach depends on the developer to developer, logic to logic. But the most important issue you need to cross-validate is attachment duplicity.
Pick up some of the random articles from each of the categories and check if the data/attachments have been correctly mapped to the respective articles.
NOTE: - THE ABOVE ARTICLE / STEPS ARE JUST HIGH-LEVEL INFORMATION ON THE PROCEDURE TO BE FOLLOWED.
References: -
