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Published on by
Ieshia Lilly
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** Recording Available**
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Join us for a series of live sessions focused on Knowledge Management topics such as getting started, processes and roles, best practices, analytics, release updates, and more!
The academy occurs every second Tuesday of the month at 9 am PST/12 pm EST. We'll have product experts on hand to provide demonstrations, explain concepts, provide guidance, and answer questions.
In this session, we'll cover what's new in the Washington DC release for Knowledge Management such as Accessibility enhancements, and the Knowledge Management V3 homepage deprecation and replacement with the Knowledge Management Service Portal. If you have Next Experience UI users who access Knowledge Articles via the All menu then this is a must-see session so you can prepare for your Washington DC upgrade.
Resources
Knowledge Managers Discussion on Community - https://www.servicenow.com/community/knowledge-managers/gh-p/knowledge-managers-
Now Learning training - https://nowlearning.servicenow.com/lxp/en/pages/lxp-search?id=search&q=knowledge%20management&spa=1
Customer Success Center - https://www.servicenow.com/success.html
ServiceNow Impact - https://www.servicenow.com/impact.html
Custom Training and Adoption - https://www.servicenow.com/services/training-and-certification/custom-training-and-adoption.html
Consortium for Service Innovation and Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) resources - https://www.serviceinnovation.org/kcs/
About Live on ServiceNow®: Live on ServiceNow is our latest event series to help you deploy, adopt, and achieve value faster from your ServiceNow solutions. Each event features an interactive discussion with a product expert, so be sure to come prepared with your questions!
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Start:
Tue, Feb 13, 2024 09:00 AM PST
End:
Tue, Feb 13, 2024 10:00 AM PST
Here is the Q&A from the session:
Q: What Washington DC updates are available in the Store that can be applied in Vancouver?
A: Knowledge Management features are currently part of the Family Release cycle. When released, Now Assist in Knowledge Management will be a store application.
Q: Are there any plans to have a "Tune up your Knowledge Management" added to the Impact Initiatives? We have done a few of the initiatives for other modules and I would really like to have one done for our KM
A: We are exploring Impact Accelerators for Knowledge Management currently but do not have a timeline on when they will be released
Q: We have just rolled out Employee Center. We found that we had embedded permalinks to other articles, which caused our users coming in through Employee Center to be redirected to the SN Portal instead. We read on a forum that we can use relative links, creating a link with everyting after the "?", (?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=KB0015086). The question is: Is this a supported methodology? We'd like confirmation before we go through the process of converting all of our links. Is there any documentation on this?
A: The Employee Center product hub would be the best source of information for this ask. Here is one article referencing this: https://www.servicenow.com/community/employee-center-articles/redirect-inactivate-service-portal-e-g...
Q: Does the Knowledge V3 homepage redirect support Employee Center?
A: The redirection does not support Employee Center out-of-the-box, as all customers may not be using Employee Center, but do have access to the Knowledge Management Service Portal.
You have two options:
- You can either modify the Self-Service > Knowledge module to redirect to Employee Center, please be advised this could result in skipped items in Upgrades in the case we make future changes to this module.
- You can deactivate the module, again keeping in mind skipped updates, and create your own module that redirects to Employee Center. In the module, choose:
- Link type: URL (from Arguments:)
- Arguments /esc
Q: Will we be able to configure AI Search on the Knowledge Management Service Portal as of the Washington release? I didn't see this indicated in ServiceNow docs. If not, when?
A: AI Search is not currently supported in the Knowledge V3 homepage and Knowledge Management Service Portal. Next Experience and Core UI users can use Global Search to search for articles via AI Search. This functionality is in our backlog, but no estimated release date yet.
Q: Is there any linkage between the Knowledge Portal and the Employee Center? A lot of customers want to avoid portal sprawl
A: This is no out-of-the-box linkage. The Knowledge Management Service Portal is a purpose-built portal for viewing knowledge articles and was released in Jakarta. We recommend using Employee Center and Unified Taxonomy to display articles by Topic rather than redirecting to Knowledge Management Service Portal pages to show by Knowledge Base. The redirection will only impact users working in Next Experience or Core UI and not personas who primarily work out of Employee Center. If you desire to have the same portal functionality for both interfaces, you can create your own module as described above.
Q: A useful feature of the KMv3 homepage is that it is viewable within the core platform UI. Are there plans to allow the Knowledge Portal to do the same?
A: Yes, the re-direction allows for the Knowledge Management Service Portal to be viewed within the Platform UI.
Q: We need a lot of our knowledge to be browsable publicly, which is not possible with Employee Center. We'd like to be able to use a unified taxonomy, but the restrictions on Employee Center being internal-user only prevent this. Do you know of any plans for opening up the employee center or unified taxonomy for use on portals by external users?
A: Please reach out to the Employee Center team via the Employee Center product hub or your account team as their team is responsible for product enhancements relating to their portal functionality.
Q: Will the article views change with the KM portal?
A: The Knowledge Management Service Portal uses the Article View page, for more information on this page, see the following:
Now Learning course: Knowledge Management (KM) Implementation
Q: Is it advisable to have our knowledge base categories mirror our taxonomy topic structure? My team is currently trying this approach, but we encounter the issue of needing to update either the topic taxonomy or the knowledge categorization independently as they both grow. Is there a possibility that the use of topic taxonomy could eventually replace knowledge categorization entirely? And similarly for catalog items?
A: You can associate a category with multiple topics. When using Knowledge Categories in conjunction with Employee Center, we suggest focusing on the topic and then relating categories as needed. Categories in this scenario are primarily used for the back-end structuring of articles. There is an Employee Center Academy session on this topic as well as an Academy session that touches on this in more detail.
Q: I see on the comparison article that we will be losing the 'Import an article' feature. Is there any workaround for us to keep 'Import an article'?
A: We suggest using the All > Knowledge > Articles > Import Articles in lieu of this, we do not have plans to add this to the Knowledge Management Service Portal as fulfiller/agent personas who have access to import articles can access this module.
Q: With Employee Center, will reporting need to be done separately between the two different experiences Ex. internal searches (technician searches) vs. employee center searches (end user searches).
A: This is an Employee Center question, please ask on the Employee Center product hub. If this is relating to AI Search reporting in particular, you can view searches via User Experience Analytics > Search Analytics.
Q: Our users currently use our (customised) service portals rather than Knowledge V3 homepage, so they won’t be affected by this. However our agents use the homepage while they are within the frameset (Core/Next UI). I assume with the knowledge service portal they’ll have to open it in a new window?
A: The redirect will open the Knowledge Management Service Portal in the same frame and not in a new window or tab.
Q: What happens to everyone's favorites? Our staff use them heavily, do they have to recreate them?
A: Favorites will continue to open in the page they were favorited in, for example if an article was favorited using the KB View (kb_view) page when using Knowledge Management V3, they will continue to use that page and view. If a user favorites an article after the redirect, the favorite will use the KB Article View page (kb_article_view) found within the Knowledge Management Service Portal. The redirect only applies to the Knowledge Management V3 home page and not the KB View page. If your organization wishes to update all favorites using the kb_view page to the kb_article_view page, a Fix Script can be created to update the parameters in the URL:
Here's an example of the KB View URL: now/nav/ui/classic/params/target/kb_view.do%3Fsys_kb_id%3D5422a8e1735c1010e37d71ef64f6a7fc
Here’s an example of the KB Article View URL: now/nav/ui/classic/params/target/kb _article_view%26sys_kb_id%3D5422a8e1735c1010e37d71ef64f6a7fc
You can see in this example the page parameter and appending of sys_kb_id (for the widget parameters) in the url would need to be updated/appended via the script.
Q: Currently Article feedback is not supported on Kb_view page. Is that fixed?
A: The Knowledge Management Service Portal uses the KB Article View (kb_article_view) page by default and supports feedback and advanced commenting. If you’re seeing a variation of this in your instance, please open a support case.
Q: What was the reason for choosing Service Portal as the underlying technology instead of using Next Experience?
A: We currently do not have enterprise service portal solutions based upon the Next Experience UI Framework. We made this decision to replace a technology from 2015 with a more up to date and configurable technology that has been tested and validated throughout multiple releases and has been through multiple defect/enhancement cycles. It also offers administrators the ability to configure the Knowledge Management Service Portal in a framework they are familiar with using without having to learn a new framework within a release cycle. We will provide more information on changes to the framework and portal as they are released.
Q: Are there email notifications on the comments that go to the author? (similar to the Flag notifications)
A: There are out-of-the-box notifications for feedback that generate Feedback tasks. See this product documentation on configuring actionable feedback. If you wish to generate notifications on the kb_feedback table itself for comments, your system administrator can create this notification.
Q: I just enabled the redirect in one of our sub environments and I tested out the "Copy Permalink" and the resulting article has ServiceNow branding and not our branding. Is that in a seperate place that we need to configure?
A: The branding of the articles within the Knowledge Management Service Portal will inherit the branding of the portal and not the branding of Next Experience. All portals – Employee Center, Service Portal, and Knowledge Management Service Portal are branded independently of Next Experience and Core UI theming. You will need to create a theme for the Knowledge Management Service Portal if you want it to align with the branding you have in Next Experience.
Q: Can we use the knowledge management widgets in our service portal to gain some of the new functionality there?
A: You can clone widgets from the Knowledge Management Service Portal to use in other portals. Be advised any cloning and customizations of out-of-the-box widgets may not be supported by ServiceNow Support.
Q: Can you show an example of images in an article? Ours are distorted in Employee Center
A: Please open a support case for this issue.
Q: If links to articles are to V3, will they redirect to the new view?
A: Redirects from V3 will work with the following exceptions:
- Contextual search in the Incident form
- Connect