Searching within a PDF attached to a Knowledge Article

Nicola Janes
Tera Contributor

‎08-31-2022 12:51 AM

Hopefully this is a simple question... When a user i.e. employee conducts a search, does ServiceNow look at the contents of a PDF attachment to find that search or does it just look at the title?  We dont have the document management plugin, we are linking to these PDFs which are housed on a Sharepoint site.

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LeChara
Giga Expert

‎08-31-2022 05:25 AM

Hi Nicola,

While I was excited to see servicenow is at least starting to look into OCR in some aspects they still have not fully created a feature rich solution for this that I'm aware of.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/sandiego-application-development/page/product/rpa-studio/task/use-actionsui-ocr-text.html

I am still waiting patiently for servicenow to work on a Knowledge Article feature that supports OCR (Optical Character Recognition) I believe it has been discussed previously in the forums and there should also be and Ideal link for it you may have to search a bit to find it.  But currently no feature at this time. 

So just the title and what ever content you placed in the article is searchable, not the attached PDF.

 

Henrietta T
Tera Contributor

‎08-31-2022 09:00 AM

We've been told that if the document is uploaded to an article in ServiceNow that search does scan through the doc. But we're on AI search now, so I'm not sure if that has change.

Leri Andrews
Tera Guru

‎09-06-2022 09:14 AM

If your documents are stored outside ServiceNow I don't think it will index them unless you have specifically set something up.  If you're adding them as attachments to knowledge articles then absolutely you can instruct AI search to index them - but you have to be prepared for the search results to return the attachments separately from the knowledge article they are inside.  You can make the search results open the knowledge article when you click on it though, but it's still going to show a snippet of the contents in place of the careful description you may have in the article.