Knowledge Base Best Practice for Attachments

[JimCheffer]

We are expanding our use of the knowledge base and the discussion about attachment document type comes up. Some people like PDF versus Word document. PDF looks nice but then we need to store the Word document somewhere. Has anyone discovered a best practice in this area. We would like knowledge to be the one source of truth so keeping the Word document with the article makes sense. Our knowledge makers will be about 5 people so control is not a big issue. Anyone out there run across this issue. Also any Knowledge best practices out there as well. Thanks in advance.  

[ItzJulia]

We have attachments to our knowledge documents.   We mostly use Word or Excel but have other types of attachments including video.   We have also stored documents attached to the articles (reference materials and such) but have not made them available to the public user by either not checking the box to show attachments or by not adding an active a link to the attachment in the text of the article.   ITIL users could find it if they like but most don't bother as they are focused on the content of the article and if there is no active link they don't bother with it.  

[JimCheffer]

Thank you for the information. We will have Word and Excel attachments as well. Our focus to the end user will be in the article text the more we discuss and begin the process of loading KB. Attachments will be used for user manuals and reference material.

[servicenowkevin]

At ServiceNow, we generally try to just have the text live in the article itself. It removes the need to have a .pdf/.docx.

At a place I worked previously though, we used a well structured repository for the .docx. You only had access to the folders that pertained to your area, so you couldn't alter another team's .docx. When a team made an updated, they'd create the new .pdf and either attach it to the article on their own, or have somebody from the KM do it if they didn't have permissions.

Have you used Managed Docs on the ServiceNow platform? There might be a away to use that and each time a new version of a doc is checked-in, a workflow notifies your team to go, create the pdf, and add to the article in Knowledge. I don't use Managed Docs that often, so you'd need to do a little research and see if that suggestion would work.

[JimCheffer]

I plan to look at Managed documents. As we discuss more, the plan is to use text as much as possible. Our thimking is if it is attachment then probably too much information and no one will look at it.