Preparing content for knowledge articles in new instances

[Maura]

We recently went through a merger and are preparing for a greenfield deployment. While some of the articles may be pulled over, we're wanting teams to create content prior to a time that they'll have access to the new environment. Anyone have experience with this type of situation? Is the best practice to create articles in one of our existing environments to pull over (we don't want a lift and shift of content since they don't have the same standards). Or are there guidelines for creating in Word (or some other format) that would make things easier? Based on information in the Bulk knowledge content thread, I'm wondering if we need minimal formating and in an Excel/CSV sheet.

We've put this question out to our implementation partners but also wanted to get the input from the community. 

[Lauren Methena]

This is a big question and one that has been answered in the community. (I can provide links if needed.)

Yes to minimal formatting.

Maybe to Excel.

The issue you will run into with Excel is that the cells have character limits. When we did a bulk import of content from a spreadsheet, each column tracked back to a field. The CONTENT field contains your HTML source code. If you have a long or complicated article with MORE HTML code in it, it will truncate and cut off your article. (This happened to us. 😞 )

Because we had articles from multiple and inconsistent sources (i.e., PDFs, websites, Word docs, etc.), we chose to bring in people (contractors and volunteers from other departments) to move over articles one at a time, stripping the coding in Notepad and reformatting in servicenow to keep the formatting as clean as possible in the source code. (Something Chuck Tomasi with ServiceNow praised during the Holiday SNUG in December, where I spoke.)

If you have too many articles for that, you can try putting everything in Word docs, use NO FORMATTING other than the most basic stuff (i.e., bold, normal line breaks - none of that automatic extra lines before and after paragraphs, etc.), and you can try importing docs en masse. CAUTION: tables are impossible to import into ServiceNow this way. You'll have to do all of these by hand. You'll have issues with images, too.

If you do the mass import, you'll still need to have someone go check behind the import and fix formatting and images. (Sidenote: recommend adding images to image library and inserting them into articles vs. pasting them in. Better for the long term and better if you have other attachments you want to add to articles - the images will get mixed in with other attachments, because they're treated the same way in the system.)

Test different ways before you do the big import - see which "pain" you want to choose essentially - and go from there.

Feel free to follow up with me if you have more questions. Good luck to you! Please mark helpful if it is. 🙂 

[Lauren Methena]

here's the word template I use. It's bare bones. You can delete the table at the top and import with it, or you can copy/paste really easily into ServiceNow. So, this would allow you prep stuff ahead of time, as you were suggesting, edit ahead of time, and then have slightly less work once you can load your articles in.

If you want apply headings, etc., do that in ServiceNow.

Some of this is specific to our standards and guidelines, but you get the idea. 🙂 You can change up some of that based on your needs. Good luck!

[stevemac]

When we moved from Peregrine / HPs Get Answers to ServiceNow one of our developers created a utility to process specific records in Get Answers and insert them into ServiceNow via API.  From memory we did ~6000 knowledge articles.  Whilst I do not have access to the code (long gone), the process was along the lines of

• Create KB Article
• populate topic, category, body, owner, group
• add attachments

This was done when in Knowledge V2 - so only one knowledge base to deal with.  An option in Knowledge V3 would be to create a Knowledge Base specifically for import and then review / update the articles into the correct knowledge base and set the appropriate category and other attributes