Exactly one year ago, I published the first edition of my "Knowledge Sources to Go" here in the community, and I'd like to take the opportunity to provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse and write down a few thoughts on the topic.
What was my motivation for this document?
Originally, this collection of links was only intended for my colleagues, which is why I first offered the document exclusively on the company intranet. Around the same time, I found my passion for the ServiceNow Community, and it soon became clear to me that the "Knowledge Sources to Go" would be better placed here. Since then, I have published another edition every month and always tried to include new topics in addition to expanding existing chapters. This of course led to a constant increase in the number of pages:
Why did I choose this format?
Some time ago, a community user suggested moving the document to GitHub so that many users could work on it in an open-source spirit. This idea may work well for software projects, but it was not an option for me. When I dived into the ServiceNow universe, I was especially fascinated about how well many users managed to make themselves known in the community with certain topics. To become known myself, I had to find a niche that was not yet occupied. And that's where my project "Knowledge Sources to Go" came in handy. I wanted to offer something that has a value for other users and which has my name on it. It was also important to me to offer the whole thing as a single document that people could download and take home.
How much effort goes into it?
To be honest, I didn't log the hours. However, if I had to give an estimate, I would say that it has been about 200 hours so far.
A huge part of the time invested by me is spent on the mere maintenance of the document, without adding any new content. To clarify what I mean, let's take a look at the distribution of links listed in the document:
The validity of all these links must be verified permanently, because nothing is more annoying than a dead link. Checking the Now Learning courses is particularly time-consuming, as existing courses regularly disappear or new courses are added here. But the age of the linked content also plays a significant role in evaluating and maintaining the links, since the high frequency of two new ServiceNow releases per year means that after just two or three years the linked sources can be so outdated that it no longer makes sense to continue listing them.
What's coming next?
I continuously think about whether the format of a PDF document is still up-to-date. Also, a single document cannot grow indefinitely. Besides the size limitation for file uploads in the Community, I can imagine that nobody likes to browse through a 1000-page document. The only alternative I can see at the moment is to decouple particularly large topics as individual community articles and link them in the document. You can find a "test balloon" for this new approach on my page MID Server Knowledge & Troubleshooting Resources.
What's your opinion?
Unfortunately, I get little feedback on what I could do differently or better. I would also be pleased if concrete topic requests were submitted to me. So the selection of new topics is left to my (limited) view.
Therefore, if you would like to share something with me, don't hesitate: You can do it via a comment on the article page or send me directly an email (to be found in the document) as well as message in LinkedIn.
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