How do I create internal blog posts in Employee Center Pro?

sukelully · 7 hours ago

Hi all,

I'm trying to set up Employee Center Pro to enable blog posts as described here, but installing Communities (com.sn_communities) - a CSM application - also adds the public-facing Community portal with no obvious way of closing this to internal users. I only need the ability for internal employees to create blog post articles, comment on them, and host disucssions on private forums (ideally entirely within Employee Center Pro). I do not want a instance.service-now.com/community that is accessible to outside users.

Is there a way to limit /community access to internal users?
Is there a better way to achieve what I'm trying to accomplish? (Primarily creating blog post article page content). I experimented with using creating Rich Content pages with Content Publishing, but it is displayed in a carousel widget at the top of a Topic page (as shown by screenshot), instead of its own separate article page (similar to the news article as shown in the second screenshot).

Many thanks.

Rich Content displayed in the Rich Content (CD) carousel widget on a topic page.News article page example displaying the type of article pages I'm trying to create.

Ken tang · 6 hours ago

Hey, so you're running into the classic Communities plugin problem. You're right that com.sn_communities pulls in the public /community portal and there's no clean toggle to make it authenticated-only out of the box.

The portal itself is designed for external community engagement, so restricting it properly takes some work on the ACL/portal security side (specifically requiring the snc_internal role on the community portal pages and relevant tables). Doable, just requires some work
.

Honestly, for what you're describing, I'd skip Communities entirely and lean harder into Content Publishing (think this requires EC Pro) with News articles. I know you hit the carousel widget issue, but that's a configuration thing, not a Content Publishing limitation. News articles do support individual article detail pages, they support comments, reactions, categorization, and audience targeting, all staying within ESC. The key is making sure you're publishing to the right page/widget combo and not just dropping the rich content widget on a topic page. Point your content schedule at a dedicated News Center page and wire up the News Feed widget there instead. Each article gets its own detail page with a sys_id param in the URL, which is basically what you're looking for.

For the discussion/forum use case specifically, that's trickier without Communities. If comments on articles aren't enough, you might be looking at either accepting the Communities plugin with proper ACL lockdown, or evaluating something from the store. But if the primary need is just internal authoring + readable article pages with comments, Content Publishing is the right tool and you don't need to touch CSM at all.

View solution in original post

Ken tang · 6 hours ago

Hey, so you're running into the classic Communities plugin problem. You're right that com.sn_communities pulls in the public /community portal and there's no clean toggle to make it authenticated-only out of the box.

The portal itself is designed for external community engagement, so restricting it properly takes some work on the ACL/portal security side (specifically requiring the snc_internal role on the community portal pages and relevant tables). Doable, just requires some work
.

Honestly, for what you're describing, I'd skip Communities entirely and lean harder into Content Publishing (think this requires EC Pro) with News articles. I know you hit the carousel widget issue, but that's a configuration thing, not a Content Publishing limitation. News articles do support individual article detail pages, they support comments, reactions, categorization, and audience targeting, all staying within ESC. The key is making sure you're publishing to the right page/widget combo and not just dropping the rich content widget on a topic page. Point your content schedule at a dedicated News Center page and wire up the News Feed widget there instead. Each article gets its own detail page with a sys_id param in the URL, which is basically what you're looking for.

For the discussion/forum use case specifically, that's trickier without Communities. If comments on articles aren't enough, you might be looking at either accepting the Communities plugin with proper ACL lockdown, or evaluating something from the store. But if the primary need is just internal authoring + readable article pages with comments, Content Publishing is the right tool and you don't need to touch CSM at all.

Ken tang · 5 hours ago

glad my solution was right for you @sukelully . I used Echelon AI https://echelonai.com check it out,! Am sure it's something you and your team could benefit from in helping you implement this and other solutions.

sukelully · 4 hours ago

Hi, thanks for reaching out - appreciate the swift response!

I actually just came to the same conclusion after playing around with Content Publishing some more, News articles are definitely the way forward. I originally thought they should be reservered for well, News, but it seems that they are intended to be ServiceNow's default choice for article content and can accomplish everything I'm looking for.

Forums are less of a priority right now, so I'll see how I get on with using articles. Communities looks quite out-of-date and doesn't seem like it would be worth enough to spend the time tweaking for my use-case, anyway.

Thanks again for your help.

Ken tang · 4 hours ago

glad my solution was right for you @sukelully . I used Echelon AI https://echelonai.com check it out,! Am sure it's something you and your team could benefit from in helping you implement this and other solutions.