Seeking Advice on Authoring Tools for Knowledge Management

[ZoranG]

Hello,

I am seeking advice from professionals who use ServiceNow as their Knowledge Management System (KMS).

Summary of the Problem: While ServiceNow effectively meets the Knowledge Management (KM) needs for CSM and ITSM, its authoring tool for writing knowledge articles is rather limited.

Our Needs: We recognize that our requirements extend beyond traditional knowledge management. Specifically, we aim to articulate captured knowledge in ways that support various use cases, such as:

• Support: Creating FAQs
• Learning: Developing interactive guides
• Natural Language Processing: Serving as a source for retrieval-augmented generation

The Challenge: What are the state-of-the-art tools and practices in knowledge capture and authoring?

Are you using any of these tools for your article authoring in ServiceNow?

Are you using any of these tools: ScreenSteps, Visme, Articulate Rise / Storyline, Adobe Captivate?

I appreciate any insights or recommendations you can provide.

[Kim27]

The Xanadu instance includes an TinyMCE upgrade (yeah! 🎉). THE ACCORDION IS FINALLY INCLUDED!!! 

TinyMCE upgrade

The HTML editor field now uses upgraded version of TinyMCE. TinyMCE has been upgraded from v4 to v6.8.3. This upgrade provides enhanced table functions as well as enhanced formatting and editing features like accordion, addition of custom styles through dictionary attributes, enable/disable text menubar, enhanced power paste. These enhancements enable users to format content to better suit their needs. Add the supported plugins to the system property glide.ui.html.editor.enabled_plugins​ and add the supported toolbar options to the system property glide.ui.html.editor.toolbar to configure the editor according to your needs. The upgrade includes changes in plugin names, toolbar names, and new system properties to support configurations for the new version.

[Mark VL]

Hi ZoranG!

A great solution for knowledge article editing (used by many name-brand customers) is the ServiceNow-native application, Amaze, offered through the ServiceNow Store.  Amaze can not only make article creation much faster and easier for you and your team with its intuitive, drag-and-drop functionality (no coding needed!) and dozens of ready-made templates and components, but it also makes the process much more effective.  

Because the articles are more appealing and professional-looking, many of our customers experience a dramatic increase in employee engagement due to the better communications.

Amaze has some significant new features with our latest release as well like an in-depth, analytics dashboard so you can assess your knowledge management efforts in real-time.  There are also some new, innovative AI capabilities for article creation.  

Check out the Amaze application at:  www.intellective.co/amaze.  

[GeorgeO]

I use Adobe RoboHelp (very new to ServiceNow, but not RoboHelp). I can output from RoboHelp to ServiceNow, which makes authoring much easier than using the TinyMCE editor built into SN. I simply add a knowledge block to capture the CSS developed in Robohelp, and make sure to insert it after publishing the RoboHelp articles to ServiceNow.

As an Adobe tool, you can add Captivate projects to RoboHelp projects (haven't done it but know it's doable) to add software simulations within the RoboHelp project (I imagine that wouldn't port over well to SN).

You can also add videos (which do port over to SN), use output with conditional expressions and dynamic content filtering for different audiences, etc etc. 

I don't know anything about natural language needs, but the search feature is quite expansive and uses a BM25 algorithm (Okapi BM25 - Wikipedia) to return the most releavant results.