For those unfamiliar with the feature, embedded help is a great feature for providing contextual information to users, depending on where they are on the platform and what roles they contain. You can define unique embedded help articles that contain rich HTML text or Video content, for each unique page on the instance. For example, your incident.do page could have a specific instruction set on the form fields technicians need to fill out, and what they mean. The same page could even serve up different content depending on the role of the user via a role priority.
Embedded Help manifests itself on the right-hand pane of the instance, and can be expanded and collapsed via the (?) icon in the upper right of the ServiceNow platform window. This icon is illuminated anytime embedded help content has been written for the current page. To learn more, listen to this podcast which dives into the details of embedded help.
Example Scenario & Implementation
In this scenario, Organization Generic Corp wants to provide embedded help content to provide user training for it’s employees that interact with CI’s.
Specifically, it wants specific roled CI owners to be able to see additional instructions and training content around creating CI relationships for CI applications. Non roled users should not see this since they won’t have the rights to create CI relationships, and as a result, the content would not be relevant.
Regular users should see a generic informational help content when they look at computers on the instance.
Implementing Embedded Help Content on Computer lists for Regular (non-itil) Users
Let’s start by implementing the information for regular users, on computer records. The quickest way to writing embedded help for a specific page is to navigate to that page first, and then to select the ‘Add Help Article’ option. This only shows when there is not embedded help content for the page.
If there is embedded help content already written for the page you are on, you can quickly edit it by pressing the three vertical dots and selecting the edit help article option.
Once you clicked the new or edit options, you will be brought to the embedded help content record. Since our example required a general help article for all users, we will leave the Role field empty. You’ll notice that the Page is automatically set to the page you were on. The Version field can be set to a specific version of ServiceNow, or you can use ‘All’ so that it will persist across upgrades. The HTML content supports HTML formatted text, or Youtube or Vimeo videos (as seen later in the example). Images are currently stripped out given the sizing of the embedded help pane.
After you update the embedded help content record, you will see the help content in the right hand pane.
Implementing Embedded Help Content on Computer lists for ITIL (roled) Users
Now, we will write additional embedded help content for computers, that is specific to users with an itil role. Since technicians generally see and can access more data, the information you want to give them may be different. Since we already have content written, you can now simply click ‘Edit Help Article’ to get back to the content.
Once in the article, press the ‘Copy’ button to make a copy of the embedded help content. You can then set the Role to itil, and make any content changes you desire.
Once you navigate back to the same page (as an ITIL user), you will notice the itil embedded help content is displayed. If you have multiple pieces of embedded help per page, the users roles are evaluated. There is a separate role priority table that defines the order in which content takes precedence.
Implementing Embedded Help Content on CMDB Application records for ITIL Admin Users
Let’s take a look at implementing the next example: For itil_admins, we want to include a video showing how to configure CMDB relationships. In addition, we want it to apply to the applications table, instead of the computer table, since the application records are what contain the dependency view. To begin, we collect the HTML embed code for the video that we want to use (from youtube). You can use unlisted videos if you don’t want completely public content to be used.
Next, we open an application record and select the ‘new’ option to create embedded help. From the embedded help content, we click the code editor <> in the HTML field. This allows us to paste the Youtube HTML directly. Once pasted, you should see a preview of the video. Don’t forget to set the itil_admin field into the role field of the embedded help content.
Once the content is complete, we return back to the application record as a itil_admin user. As we can see, the embedded help content with the embedded video is shown.
Congrats! We have successfully set up contextual embedded help depending on the users role, and which page they have navigated to!
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