Bulk knowledge import of at least 10,000 pages

[Kim Tillano]

Hello everyone.  We have a resource that is currently built in SharePoint but uses some 3rd party tool so it is in html or xml or something.  We can export it to PDF or Word docs, and need to do a mass import to a ServiceNow knowledge base as soon as possible.  I've done plenty of digging in old threads and can't find much other than the existing drag and drop interface.

The content we need to move currently lives in an on prem SharePoint server that will be sunsetted in April due to no longer being supported by Microsoft.  As a result, we don't have time to do the manual cleanup/restructure that would be strongly desired.  It is a product reference manual, so the info is critical to many areas and it is VERY wordy, but will likely stay that way, anyhow.  This is not tech info or incident/problem resolution type content.  That being said, I know that Word docs can be imported via the drag and drop interface, but how can a script be written to do a bulk import of this size?  Is there a way for a script to identify the title for each page and assign it as the article title?

I realize this is not an ideal scenario, but I don't need to know why we shouldn't do this...I need to know if there is any way possible to do this.  We must have this completed by 4/1/2023.  Please provide as much guidance as you can.  Thank you.

[Rholmes007]

@Kim Tillano I'm so sorry i missed your reply. I know it's possible, but I was not on the Service Now team that did it. 

Let me see what I can find out for you. I'll set notifications in this forum. Sorry for the delay! 

[Karen Willis]

Leason's learned / questions you might ask: 

• Validate which "ownership group" will own the imported articles
• Validate if the current author/owner of the article is copied over (make sure no one person is the author of all 10,000 articles) 
• Stager the "Valid To" date (you don't want all 10,00 articles expiring in the future on the same date) 

[Kim Tillano]

We definitely plan to do these things along with identifying categories, met tags, etc.  I just need to know the best way to move them.  We are considering a script with a transform map to include all that info, but I would love to see actual examples from someone who has done this since I don't know how it works.

[Lauren Methena]

Now that I think about it, we had to make a bulk change to something. I think we were updating categories. Anyway, this was ServiceNow (SNOW) to SNOW, so not the same as updating from outside the system. 

However, we used an Excel spreadsheet to create a master document. We downloaded all the article info from our knowledge base into the spreadsheet. Then, we made our changes. Then, we uploaded the updated spreadsheet into SNOW.

Takeaways were:

• The SYS ID cannot change. It must stay the same. You cannot mess with those or everything will break and you'll open a portal to a new and dangerous dimension where even Spider-Man won't be able to help you.
• Keep the column headings the same, as those are mapped to your fields in SNOW.
• Be aware of the character limit in Excel cells. (The CONTENT field / column contained our HTML code for our articles, and several of the long articles cut off at that limit - and it was based on the HTML character count, not the article character count, so if an article had a LOT of coding in it, it would cut off sooner.)
• BEST PRACTICE: When you UPLOAD your Excel spreadsheet into SNOW, only keep the SYS ID column and any columns you want to change. What we SHOULD HAVE DONE (and what was recommended but somehow didn't get done?) was only have uploaded the SYS ID and category column into the system, since we didn't want anything else to change. That would have protected the data in all the other fields.

If you're able to create some sort of Excel table for your upload, then this might help. 

And if that isn't in the cards, hopefully this info will help in the future. 🙂