Moving Knowledge Articles to another Knowledge Base

[Tommy SN Sahlin]

Hi friends,

we have a knowledge base filled with thousands of old articles, migrated into ServiceNow from a previous wiki solution. Many of these are of poor quality and don't really qualify as real knowledge articles at all, however they are still needed and used for different purposes.

We would like to introduce a new Knowledge Base where we only want good, reviewed, real articles, that actually help to resolve issues, based on KCS principles. Some of these articles will of course come from the old, huge knowledge base. Our thought is to let our internal users (mainly service desk, service & product owners etc) gradually identify the good ones, and move them to the new knowledge base, where they will go through an approval workflow before being published.

We have versioning turned on. We are on Tokyo, soon to move to Utah.

Does this approach make sense to you? Any thoughts, considerations?

many thanks in advance  /Tommy

[Mike Van Vooren]

@Tommy SN Sahlin - I am assuming all of the articles that got copied into SN are using the "Standard" template with a single Article Body field?  I am also assuming you intend to use the KCS Article template for all the "good" knowledge you want to use going forward?  If so, you can consider the option we did. 

We created a button on the Editor called "Copy KA".  The original purpose was to take all the contents of the article from the "Standard" template and map them into a new Draft article in the KCS Article template.  We did this en-masse a few years ago when the KCS Article template was first introduced in SN and we learned you couldn't just apply the new template to an existing article.   

For an article where all the content is in the Article Body field, the Copy KA button copies all the fields 1:1 and maps the Article Body field to the Resolution field.  Then we manually Cut and Paste whatever we needed to into the other fields and clean up the Resolution field.  Once we were satisfied we got everything, we Retired the original article.  We still use this button today for copying KCS Article to KCS Article.  We also recently started using the FAQ Article template and created a dedicated button for those as well.

Yes, this is very tedious to do one at a time, but it sounds like you don't want to use the original knowledge base directly as it is anyway.  So this could work for you.

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @Tommy SN Sahlin 

Greetings!!

I can list few options

- Deactivate or retried the old / unused or bad KB by keeping in same Knowledge Base.

- or edit those KB which need to move to new Base and while editing choose new Knowledge Base.

Please accept my answer as solution or mark it helpful.

Regards

Atul G

[Tommy SN Sahlin]

Hi guys,

thanks for your replies! I'm afraid we have several different Artical Templates in the old Knowledge Base (sometimes I wish we had only used the Standard template, these different Article Templates are sometimes more trouble than they're worth I think, considering the limited benefit they provide). However, we can live with that for the time being, and are thinking of providing the same Article Templates in the new Knowledge Base for simplicity. We will be doing this transfer gradually, KA by KA on demand - just in time, not just in case 😉

I'll bring your valuable input with me, thanks again for sharing!

cheers  /Tommy