Product Documentation

[Jamsta1912]

Hi all,

I was wondering what general opinions there are out there on the product documentation, developer docs etc?

I'm asking because I often find them hard to use, and not as user friendly or helpful as the Wiki of the olden days.

For instance,

I just searched for 'email.body_text' in the Istanbul documentation and the developer docs. I got very little back in the search results that was immediately useful.

Do any of you good people of the community have any similar frustrations, or thoughts on how best to make use of the docs?

Jamie

[Pradeep Sharma]

What's new and what's fixed on docs.servicenow.com

+ darrinladd . Just wanted to make sure you saw this feedback.

[Darrin Ladd]

Thanks pradeepksharma!

[Jamsta1912]

Thank you Pradeep for this link

[Darrin Ladd]

Hi Jamie,

Thanks for taking the time to post some feedback and also collect information from others.   Could you point me to the Wiki results that you found immediately useful in your example?   When I search, I believe the majority of the results shown on the Wiki also show up on the doc site, but in a different form (e.g. individual sections of a page on Wiki are whole articles on the doc site).   The difference in structure is something that is being worked on to combine individual articles on the doc site into longer, more comprehensive articles.

Thanks again,

Darrin

[Jamsta1912]

Hi Darrin,

Thank you for coming back to me. I appreciate it.

In my example, in the Production Documentation I performed a search for 'email.body_text':

https://docs.servicenow.com/search?labels=4&q=email.body_text  

You'll see the top search results are:

-Inbound email action example: requesting a change

-Message body size limit properties

These do both contain references to 'email.body_text' but I was looking for a more general description of 'email.body_text', what it is and how it can be used.

If I search 'email.body_text' on the developer site:

https://developer.servicenow.com/app.do#!/search?category=All&v=helsinki&q=email.body_text&page=1

the top two results from API again do reference 'email.body_text' but are actually examples of how to use getTableName().

Now if I search the old Wiki, the top result is the 'Inbound Email Actions' page:

wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Inbound_Email_Actions#gsc.tab=0

and on this page I can find a good description of 'email.body_text' and it's in a great context, with an overview of inbound actions and a description of other variables used to access email objects.

More generally, I find that on the old style wiki, the pages have good overviews and introductions to topics. They cover key concepts and use cases before delving into the detail. The new documentation is less effective at easing us into topics. It's more economical and thorough when it comes to the low level API, but it seems to take for granted that we have some prior knowledge of the context / use cases.

I still quite often fall back on the old Wiki, but I see it's going to be archived on 10th December!

Regards

Jamie.