Why is Knowledge Center Article Editor so unreliable?

[Javier Tirado1]

We are trying to start using Knowledge Center across several departments on my company, as we see great value on using articles for incident deflection and end-user trainning. I saw Knowledge Center was introduced in the Zurich upgrade and was happy to use it (at the end, a dedicated workspace should be easier to use for the agents).

To my surprise, we are facing countless issues with the Knowledge Center Article Editor.

I don't understand why ServiceNow has released a product so unready for the general use. We are not talking that it is difficult to use for people new to ServiceNow, I as a 5 year experienced admin have a hard time getting articles right on the editor. It reminds me of the early stages of MS Word, when you moved an image and deconfigured the whole page. Moved vignettes, wild images that expand the whole screen instead of alligning with the text... I checked the source code and the blocks are completely senseless, as soon as you move an element it gets absurdly complex. I think that the decision of making it an HTML editor instead of markdown is the culprit.

The problem now is, I'm having a hard time convincing agents to create content for the Knowledge Base because of this. I'm about to revert everything to how article creation worked before, it's far more straight forward than with Knowledge Center.

What's your opinion? Does it get better in Australia or Brazil?

[Vikram Reddy · Accepted solution]

Hello @Javier Tirado1,

Short version: no, it doesn't get better in Australia, and there's nothing published yet suggesting Brazil fixes it either, so if you need stability now, turn the new editor off rather than wait on a release to save you.

The block based editor you're fighting is the Enhanced Content Editor (ECE), controlled by the system property sn_km_center.glide.knowman.ece.enable. Flip that to false and Knowledge Center falls back to the legacy rich text editor: images and columns stop shifting around, you just lose the Article Optimization panel and the AI context menu. Knowledge Blocks (reusable content blocks) only work with ECE turned on, so that feature disappears too if you switch back, which tends to be the bigger loss for teams that were counting on it.

The formatting collapse you're describing, columns and text box blocks losing their layout once an article moves into the review queue, is an actively reported behavior in the community right now, not something you're doing wrong. The current workaround floating around support is repairing the com.snc.knowledge_center plugin and clearing cache.do, and it only resolves the issue for some admins, which tells you there isn't one clean root cause yet.

On Australia, already GA: I checked what actually shipped for Knowledge Management there, and it's AI layered on top, mainly Now Assist duplicate article consolidation, not a rework of how ECE handles blocks or layout. Brazil is targeted for Q4 this year with early access around September, so there's no release content published on it at all yet, but going by the pattern so far, ServiceNow's investment is going into AI features sitting on top of the block editor, not into rearchitecting the block model underneath it.

On HTML versus markdown being the culprit, I'd push back a little. The mess isn't really the markup language, it's the block and column nesting model ECE builds on top of it, that's what turns "move one image" into "wrong layout everywhere." Swapping to markdown alone wouldn't fix that unless the underlying block structure changed with it.

Thank you,
Vikram Karety
Octigo Solutions INC

[Vikram Reddy · Accepted solution]

Hello @Javier Tirado1,

Short version: no, it doesn't get better in Australia, and there's nothing published yet suggesting Brazil fixes it either, so if you need stability now, turn the new editor off rather than wait on a release to save you.

The block based editor you're fighting is the Enhanced Content Editor (ECE), controlled by the system property sn_km_center.glide.knowman.ece.enable. Flip that to false and Knowledge Center falls back to the legacy rich text editor: images and columns stop shifting around, you just lose the Article Optimization panel and the AI context menu. Knowledge Blocks (reusable content blocks) only work with ECE turned on, so that feature disappears too if you switch back, which tends to be the bigger loss for teams that were counting on it.

The formatting collapse you're describing, columns and text box blocks losing their layout once an article moves into the review queue, is an actively reported behavior in the community right now, not something you're doing wrong. The current workaround floating around support is repairing the com.snc.knowledge_center plugin and clearing cache.do, and it only resolves the issue for some admins, which tells you there isn't one clean root cause yet.

On Australia, already GA: I checked what actually shipped for Knowledge Management there, and it's AI layered on top, mainly Now Assist duplicate article consolidation, not a rework of how ECE handles blocks or layout. Brazil is targeted for Q4 this year with early access around September, so there's no release content published on it at all yet, but going by the pattern so far, ServiceNow's investment is going into AI features sitting on top of the block editor, not into rearchitecting the block model underneath it.

On HTML versus markdown being the culprit, I'd push back a little. The mess isn't really the markup language, it's the block and column nesting model ECE builds on top of it, that's what turns "move one image" into "wrong layout everywhere." Swapping to markdown alone wouldn't fix that unless the underlying block structure changed with it.

Thank you,
Vikram Karety
Octigo Solutions INC

[Javier Tirado1 · Accepted solution]

Thanks Vikram for the deep dive. It's a shame they are falling into the AI bubble same as the whole world... Instead of focusing on creating robust tools.

I have turned off the ECE property (it's accessible from the Knowledge Center) and it still let us use the Knowledge Center while using the old editor in it, which makes it perfect for our needs. Will tap on the ECE from time to time to see if something changed.