Need help understanding the knowledge lifecycle

[Ashley_smith]

Hi Folks,

We've been using ServiceNow since Sept 2012 (we went live with Berlin). We currently don't use Knowledge Management in ServiceNow, so I'm just having a look at it in our development environment, trying a few things, and reading as much as I can from the wiki and community site. I'm still a bit lost.

I believe we will want to use the submission based approach to knowledge, so that articles can be reviewed before being published. We would also want the ability to have any subsequent changes to the article (i.e. once it has been published, perhaps a month later) to also go through a review process. During this review, we'd like the currently active version of the article to stay active and visible.

However, in testing this I've come across a few things I didn't expect (or perhaps I just don't understand):

* When a knowledge submission is published (and so a KB article is created), the submission stays at a status of published. This is fine. But, if I then make changes to the submission and re-publish, a whole new (effectively duplicate) KB article is created. So my question here is: once a submission is published, should any further updates to the KB article be done via the submission, or directly against the KB article?

* When is a knowledge submission meant to be closed? Once the KB article is published?

* Are any edits to a knowledge article once it is live meant to be done directly to the knowledge article? Or are submissions meant to be used somehow?

* If you want to make edits to a KB article once it has been created, it seems that you have two choices:
1. Edit the KB article and hit save. Your changes are live instantly, with no chance for peer review / approval.
2. Edit the KB article and submit it for review. This allows for review, but the live article is no longer viewable.
What I'd really like is a 3., which would be: Edit the KB article and submit it for review. The current live KB article will stay viewable. Once the new version is approved, the live article will be updated with the changes. Is this possible somehow?

Thanks for your help!


Regards,
Ash

[Mark Stanger]

Hi Ash, unfortunately what you're looking for...true knowledge workflow and versioning...doesn't exist in the standard ServiceNow product. Crossfuze Solutions offers a full-featured knowledge management product that includes all of these features plus comprehensive security and approvals. Feel free to contact me if you'd like to learn more or see a demo.

[Beth_Carlson]

Hi Ash,
You are a step ahead of me. I have some of the same questoins. However, I just stared working for a new company 5 weeks ago and the company started using ServiceNow 5 weeks ago. We implemented it with the "Standard Knowledge Workflow" not the "Submission Knowledge Workflow". But now we would like to use the Submission Workflow. The "Use Submission Workflow" was set to Yes in our development environment, not production, to test it first. However, I can't get it to work! When an Incident is closed and the Knowledge checkbox is checked it doesn't create a knowledge submission, nor a knowledge article. It doesn't seem to do anything. Can anyone assist?
Thank you.
Beth Carlson
Owens-Illinois

[Eric K3]

I am having the same problem on our Dev instance.

Did you find a solution?