ServiceNow as a Document Management Solution

JC Icaro1 · ‎08-03-2016

Is there anyone here using ServiceNow as a Document Management Solution? I just wanted to know about your experiences and what applications you used, eg. Managed Documents, Knowledge Management, any custom applications etc. I would also like to ask about your workflow, ie. how you go from creating a document, to managing the different document versions, and if there are applications (even if it is custom) that you can use to edit documents from within ServiceNow rather than needing to download them, editing on your desktop using Microsoft Office/Other Desktop Apps, then uploading it back.

Goran WitchDoc · ‎10-26-2016

Well, it was like 6-9 months ago (Pre helsinki version) that we took a look at it and I wasn't the primary one looking deeper into it.

For background we were using Sharepoint at the moment(think my former job still does as well). So that is the one we were comparing against.

This is the fragments 😃 I can remember and most of this was what we could find our self. So some of this things might not be true, it's just that we didn't find it.

Doesn't have the version handling with checkout doc etc. like you can do in sharepoint.
Didn't either find a good way to handle versions and approval flows.
Couldn't find any good reference customer with ServiceNow that was using it and where we could come and see with our own eyes how it should be done.
But the thing that I know made us take a step back was that it doesn't seem to be so much information about it and when we went to Knowledge 16, we couldn't find a single session about managed documents, which made us start thinking how much does ServiceNow value this functionality, Will it evolve in future release or slowly decay? I takes a lot of work to move everything into ServiceNow and at that point, we didn't feel secure enough that till would be solution that will be usable for many years.

Hope this helps you thinking about Managed Documents. But like i wrote, it was pre helsinki. I haven't had the time to look if there been any major changes in Helsinki or Istanbul version.

//Göran

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Brian22 · ‎06-10-2024

Hi, there is an update to this forum post. Any forum posts before 2023 are likely not to have the correct updated information on this topic. The document management system has been revamped as of Rome "Managed Documents" being replaced with "Document Management" as part of Document Services. It was updated again with Tokyo and serves as an alternative to attachments. The topic is not well publicized from what I can tell.

The official docs site for current version is here:

LIMITATIONS OF ATTACHMENTS (legacy ‘managed docs’ plugin vs new 'document management)

–No Document Metadata or search based on Metadata

–No Versioning

–No Lifecycle Management (draft, reviewed, published)

–No Universal Referencing (attachment is always local file to the record, reupload for every record)

–Limited UAC, anyone with access to record can access the file

–No external (public) permalink option for document (if desired)

Comparison: sys_attachments vs ds_document:

Capability	Attachments (sys_attachments) [legacy]	Documents (ds_document) [newer]
Security	No UAC. Accessible to all users who have access to the record	UAC - access to file is separated from access to the record.
Versioning	No versioning	Supports versioning, which allows users to track changes to documents over time.
Searching	No metadata based search	Metadata can be searched by name, title, author, and other properties.
Referencing	No referencing	Single document can be referred to multiple parent records
Storage	Same document must be attached repeatedly on every record where it would be referenced.	Same content can be referred to multiple target records