How to paste inline images in comments and worknotes without training agents to be front-end developers.

[Michael Culhan1]

Most of the end users in my organization are at remote sites with slow and unreliable internet.  Because of this, most of the end user interaction with agents occurs via email.  Often, users will email a screenshot with an error or question and agents will reply with some instructions and screenshots.  On the agent side, this all happens inside our ITSM solution -- end user emails create a ticket and the agents reply within the ticket, pasting their screenshots and text.  The communications functionality of our current ITSM solution is a lot like Gmail, or any web email provider.  My question is, how do we achieve similar functionality in ServiceNow?  From what I can tell, we have two options:

• Use the [code] tag inside additional comments.  This would require training our agents to write html, which isn't going to happen.
• Agents use the email client to send customer html messages.  This would be fine except that we then have to show Sent/Received emails in the activity formatter to see these messages sent to the customer.  This includes all emails for notifications, etc, which really clutters up the activity formatter.

Note that the replies from agents are not really generic or repeated, so we can't use KB articles. 

Is there any other way to achieve this? 

[bammar]

Options I can think of - keeping in mind regardless whatever you do should and will be logged in activity formatter and if your support is image reliant that is the reality and logging needs to be done to audit the work done if an agent picks up the incident or the manager ever checks what exactly happened- 

1. attach the images to the record- this can be done as simply as dragging and dropping and when you writre the additonal comment the image will be attached to ensuing email.

2. Change Additional comments to an HTML format field

3. Add code tags to the additional comments field using a Business rule and clear it using a onload script

4. Add Activity formatter in its own tab on the form and it isnt there by default especially if your using tabbed forms- this way scrolling is less of an issue and also you have the power to uncheck emails from activity formatter as your own personal user preference- so you will still see the additional comment update but not the emails unless they choose to. It is well known the customer gets emailed on Additonal comments and close notes so its redundant to show it if you really dont want to on a day to day basis

5. Finally if the agent can clearly list what the person needs to do aka Click on the link on the top right that says XYZ. then go to the book icon etc- meaning use images as a last resort not a first resort.

6. Now that I marinate on this even more i wonder if you can show different formatters like one tab showing the form updates and another tab with another activity formatter only showing emails. You can also show a related list that shows email for the records as well. 

[yandp]

Hello @bammar , 
Would like to know more about, i am facing issues with this how to allow pasting the screen captured directly to additional comment.

I see your item 2, change the additional comment field to HTML, is this only change the field type to HTML will solve the issues, and user can copy and paste the image? 

or any coding/customisation required?

we are using the live feed to allow paste image, but after upgrade to sandiego, we cannot use live feed and new UI together, must find a way to settled this.

and we need this in custom application.

Hope to hear from you, Thank you so much.

[Michael Culhan1 · Accepted solution]

There is a system property glide.ui.journal.use_html that, when set to true, gives agents an html editor in additional comments and worknotes in Agent Workspace.  They can paste images there.

[Matthew Wright1]

Just for awareness 

Performance impact of enabling system property 'glide.ui.journal.use_html' when using other workspace agents on the instance
https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0952898