Can an article sit on multiple KBs

[Jen_C]

Hi All,

I have multiple knowledge bases, service desk agent facing and customer self-serve facing. There are some articles that are relevant for both audiences. I was using AI to try to discover if one article can be assigned to multiple KBs to avoid duplication and maintenance efforts. This is the result I got back from AI but I do not know if its correct. Any advice and guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Can a service now knowledge article sit on multiple knowledge bases?

Yes, a ServiceNow knowledge article can be associated with multiple knowledge bases. This can be useful if you have multiple departments or teams that need access to the same article. By associating the article with multiple knowledge bases, you can ensure that it is easily accessible to all relevant parties. To associate an article with multiple knowledge bases, you can simply select the appropriate knowledge bases when creating or editing the article.

how do you select multiple knowledge bases

To select multiple knowledge bases for a ServiceNow knowledge article, follow these steps:

1. Open the knowledge article that you want to associate with multiple knowledge bases.
2. Click on the "Edit" button to edit the article.
3. Scroll down to the "Knowledge Base" section of the article form.
4. Click on the magnifying glass icon next to the "Knowledge Base" field to open the "Lookup" window.
5. Select the first knowledge base that you want to associate with the article and click "Add".
6. Repeat step 5 for each additional knowledge base that you want to associate with the article.
7. Click "Update" to save your changes.

Once you have associated the article with multiple knowledge bases, it will be accessible from each of those knowledge bases. This can be helpful for ensuring that the article is easily discoverable by all relevant parties.

Thank you in advance

Jen

[Mark Manders]

Even with one article in multiple bases, you won't resolve the issue you will face when you have different instances. 

My suggestion for the related article feature is one like you have with major incidents: you create one, that is the parent, and several others are set as child. You would have to create a custom 'parent' field on the article form, where you can just create/copy the articles once and after that, every update on the parent, should reflect to the child. 

Mind you: I have not tried/tested this myself, because whenever this came up, I could use a general KB for these articles. I don't know how well this will function because of the check out/versioning of Knowledge Mgt within ServiceNow. It's a response based on my thoughts of what could work (so at least its not an AI answer that's wrong by default 🙂 )

[Jen_C]

Thank you so much for taking the time to put your suggestions together

[Eoghan Sinnott]

Have you looked into the idea of using Knowledge Blocks for it? You could use the one General article, and then use blocks within that article to have information for the different audiences. So wherever the audience is different, create a knowledge block for that to sit inside the article. Then you can use the User Criteria on the Knowledge block level to determine who sees what information. It's also an easier way of keeping all the content connected, so if something changes, you know which knowledge blocks need to get updated.

Speaking from experience, having several versions of the same knowledge article across different knowledge bases can get very hard to manage and stay on top of.

[BurtCrepeault-E]

The problem with AI is more pervasive than we might think. I arrived here by Googling "Servicenow can a knowledge article belong to more than one KB". I got this very positive answer in the "AI?" part of the results.

Moral of this story: always click on TFA!

[Andrew64]

Yes, you can if you have Employee Center. Employee center will let you assigned a Taxonomy for the content. The Taxonomy is global and can be used across more than one Knowledge Base. 

Unified Taxonomy for Employee Center (servicenow.com)
Associate a knowledge article with a taxonomy category (servicenow.com)