Restrict Knowledge Base Categories on Roles

[Henrik Jutterst]

We've recently moved our ITSM system into ServiceNow and are constantly looking to move of our internal systems into ServiceNow platform. I really like the platform and want to make as much use of it as possible.

One think that I know we would like to move into ServiceNow is one of our systems for handling documentation into ServiceNow knowledge Base. But I still haven't found a good way to set up role based categories to restrict certain parts of the Knowledge Base.

As far as i know there are two ways to handle this:

1. Create a new Knowledge Base for each group/role in the system and setup rights based on that. Thus creating several Knowledge Bases and not an ideal way of gathering knowledge.

2. Set user privileges for each article in the Knowledge Base. Also not an ideal way of working when having thousands of articles to handle.

Question: Is there anyone with knowledge if there will be a feature to restrict knowledge base categories based on roles in ServiceNow? Roles is already an important part of access in ServiceNow, so why not in Knowledge Base?

Kind Regards

/Henrik

[Shiva Thomas]

Hi Henrik,

I fully understand your requirement. I just wanted to add some warnings, as storing articles are only one small part of a KB. As long as you have only one life cycle common to all categories this will be ideal.

Managing them, and serving them in relevant places, will be much easier if done like the Platform expect it.

Until not so long ago, there only one KB and the system worked like you would expect. But in the last two years all the development done by ServiceNow for Knowledge Management support the idea that one KB = one usage.

In many KB related settings, like Service Portals or Record producer contextual searches, you'll only have the options to select a whole KB, and not categories.

This is not a major issue, but may be a source of frustrations as you grow and mature into your ServiceNow platform. You'll have to swim harder to go the same distance if you swim against the current...

You may think of this as a vocabulary issue, and think of KBs to be the equivalent of your expected categories, and Categories and your expected sub-categories.

[Allen Andreas]

Hi Sir,

I appreciate your long-term look at what this user is/was trying to do.

We are in the same boat...to an extent...

I currently have us set up with different KBs....which has worked fine until we recently upgraded from Express to Enterprise and now we want to use the cool Service Portal. As you've stated...the Service Portal can only point to one KB.

That's unfortunate...and has caused us to reevaluate the way we have things set up.

So...some googling and searching led me to this post.

I am reviewing the possibility of merging all of our KBs to one KB with separate categories. Then....somehow settings restrictions on 'x' category to not be visible by non-roles...all the while...complying with the one KB requirement for the SP search, but then sort of loopholing it by allowing an ITIL, so to speak, search ALL KBs in that homepage, but then at the same time, limiting a non-role from seeing that article that an ITIL could.

It that all makes sense.

I just don't know how to script that in.

Henrick, may I have a sample of your code that you created?

[Henrik Jutterst]

Hi Allen!

We haven't moved into Knowledge Base yet, but as I see it now I think we need to create separate KB's for each purpose. And with that I really don't have anything to share with you yet.

I read in a post that you can have multiple Service Portals but that's not recommended by ServiceNow. Read the post here: Using Multiple Service Portals

I can post an update when I have more info.

Kind regards

/Henrik

[Allen Andreas]

Ah, thanks for responding back. Was hoping you may have cracked the code, lol, on this!

Keep us posted if you do find something out