Create a service now knowledge article and add a word/excel document as an attachment

[vikramsv]

Need to find a way of importing documents into knowledge articles.

We have a huge document repository containing documents in Word and Excel format.

We want to "Create a service now knowledge article and add a word/excel document as an attachment" via import sets or other scalable mechanism

[rgm276]

Here is a reference that might be useful, not sure if there is anything more current or not

but this is an older webinar by a partner group on importing documents into knowledge

Import Knowledge — Fruition Partners

[kathi1]

I have a similar interest.   We have a Disaster Recovery KB article that we like to attach different documents from the Intel team, storage team, Network team or DBA team.   All of these documents live on a common drive that gets attached occasionally.   I would like to have a scheduled time of each month that when an article gets added to the common drive or edited, it is somehow attached in ServiceNow to the DR KB article so it is always kept updated.   We are on FUji.   Any thoughts?

[zhmur]

Hi Vikram,

Solving your task will require some scripting. In brief there are 2 approaches there:

1. If you have some binary data like pdf, images and so on. You can just upload them using script. This article will help you. I'm usually using PowerShell for this cause of very nice capabilities of fetching data from different sources. The problem in this approach is search capabilities. For example you can create special KB article for each file and include filename in short description and may be some other metadata if available (like tags, categories and so on). But still it will be hard to find information.

2. Second approach is much more complex. Steps in brief:

a) First you need to transform you data to HTML. This heavily depends on source files data types. In case of MS Word you can use some automated script (or other solution) to save source files in HTML format. After you need to perform clean up (cause usually MS Office html is overloaded with tons of redundant tags).  

b) After you need to upload to ServiceNow binary content from HTML. Like images, video files and so on. And put correct links to this external objects to HTML files.

c) Now you can upload HTML content to your ServiceNow instance.

In most of the cases you need some custom solution to meet your requirements.

[kathi1]

thank you