Recommendations for best practices for embedding videos in knowledge articles

[Lauren Methena]

Hello! We're exploring embedding videos in our ServiceNow knowledge articles, now that we are able to do this successfully.

Interested in your experiences with embedding videos.

Do you have a policy or any style guidelines about embedding them? What size they should be, for example? Or when to embed a video vs. when to simply provide a link that will take people to the video (if the video is hosted somewhere else)?

Do you link to internal media and external media? (For example, uploading a video file into the video library and embedding that vs. having the video file be an attachment in the article vs. linking to a YouTube video)

What guardrails should we be thinking about - or what other UX considerations should we be thinking about?

Is there a question I should be asking that I'm not?

Thank you, all! I appreciate you!

[Omkar Kumbhar]

Hello @Lauren Methena ,

Please cehck the below links if this helps

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/tokyo-platform-administration/page/use/using-forms/task/t_Embeddi...

https://www.servicenow.com/community/now-platform-blog/how-to-add-a-video-to-a-knowledge-article/ba-...

Thanks,

Omkar

[SanjivMeher]

I wouldn't recommend uploading the video to the ServiceNow, because the size could be very big.

What we do is load it to our company google drive. And then create an embedded video link from their and use it in ServiceNow. Not sure if you should load it to youtube. If you do so, make sure to keep the video private.

You have to use iframe to embed the video. If you are using gdrive, you can refer the you tube video section in the below article shared by Omkar.

https://www.servicenow.com/community/now-platform-blog/how-to-add-a-video-to-a-knowledge-article/ba-...

[Janelle3]

Hi Lauren,

We are also exploring video at the moment, and I would love to know any guardrails or recommendations you have come up with. We have started experimenting with the Attachment Type of video, we're not using Video Library. I'm guessing you would use the Video Library when you need to re-use a video across several articles and update it all at once across several articles, but we mainly would have videos that are limited to a single article.

So far I've found a few quirks:

When attaching a video, the width is not auto-sized to the knowledge article width, so by default it is very wide and requires a scroll bar. Therefore we'll probably recommend authors to upload the video with a smaller width and height (not sure what exactly yet!), and also tick "allow full screen" to allow the user to view the video at full screen size when required. It would be good if there was a way to have the video automatically display as a percentage of the knowledge articles own width (e.g. 90%, 100% of width). As users could be viewing articles on different devices, I don't really like having to specify a height and width in pixels.

Another thing we've found is that once a video is added to the article, we can't make any changes to the width or height of the video except by removing the video and re-attaching it with the new size specified. Maybe I just haven't figured it out yet!

We're at very early stages too so would love to hear from others.

Cheers,

Janelle

[Janelle3]

Just to correct my previous reply - after further experimentation with Video Library, my previous assumption may  be incorrect. At least as a user with Knowledge Admin, I haven't been able to find a way to update a video in the Video Library and have this apply to all articles that were using this video. Maybe this requires Image Admin or another role?