Embedded Help planning

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Embedded Help planning

    Embedded Help planning in ServiceNow involves carefully creating and organizing help content to appear contextually on specific UI pages and roles. Proper planning ensures users receive relevant guidance tailored to their roles and the pages they access. This helps improve user experience by providing targeted assistance within the application.

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    Key Features

    • Page Identification: Determine the exact UI page name from the URL, including any special characters like dollar signs, to correctly associate help content.
    • Modifier Field: Defines whether help content appears for all users accessing the page (Normal) or only during Guided Setup (Setup). You can repurpose Setup content for broader use by changing this field.
    • Qualifier: Enables customization of help content on common pages used across multiple applications, allowing tailored guidance depending on context.
    • Role Targeting: Assign the minimum role required to see the help topic, ensuring that users with higher roles see either the same or more specific content.
    • Product and Version Control: Write content primarily for the Enterprise product; base system content is version-specific, but custom content can apply to all versions.
    • Domain Separation: For organizations using domain separation, specify the domain to control where the help content applies.
    • Content Constraints and Formatting: Embedded help supports formatted text but excludes images; videos must be embedded via source code using supported platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. Links must use full URLs, and highlighting text is discouraged to maintain readability across themes.
    • Internationalization: Support for multiple languages allows localization of embedded help content to meet diverse global user needs.

    Practical Considerations

    • Base system embedded help topics cannot be edited directly; instead, create copies to customize content.
    • Changes to embedded help are not included in update sets and do not automatically propagate across instances, requiring manual migration if needed.
    • Using qualifiers and role targeting strategically helps deliver precise and relevant help content to users based on their role and the page context.

    Before writing custom embedded help, plan the content and note the information used in the Embedded Help form. Careful planning ensures that the topic appears for the right page and role.

    Each UI page can display embedded help, specified in the Page field as shown in the following example.

    Figure 1. Embedded help topic for the Service Catalog home page
    Page name in URL pointing to page name in form

    In planning for embedded help topics, consider how the following fields are used and note the values that you need for your custom topics.

    Page
    Identify and note the UI page name which is found in the URL when the page is displayed as shown. If the page name begins with a dollar sign, such as $mid_server_user, include the dollar sign in the page name. Before you write an embedded help topic for the page, search for the page name to locate a file you can copy.
    Modifier
    • Normal content appears for any user with the appropriate role who navigates to the page.
    • Setup content appears when the page is accessed from a link in Guided Setup.

    Many embedded help topics in the base system are for Guided Setup. You can copy Setup content and change the Modifier to Normal to quickly provide help for all users.

    Qualifier
    Identify pages you want custom help for that are used in many applications. For example the home.do page opens for every Homepage module and for many Dashboard modules. The embedded help administrator can use qualifiers to customize content for a common page in the instance.
    Role
    Specify the lowest level role to provide access to this embedded help topic. All roles that contain the role also see the content, unless another topic targeted to their role exists for the same page.

    For example, if you add embedded help content for the itil role that describes your business process for entering incidents, the itil_admin role also sees the content. If you write a different topic with the itil_admin role, the itil_admin sees that content instead of the itil content.

    Product
    Write content only for the Enterprise topic. You can copy an Express topic and change this field to Enterprise if appropriate.
    Version
    Base system content is typically specified to the current software version. If you are editing the content for a custom application or to provide information relevant to your organization business process, select All.
    Domain
    If your organization uses domain separation and customizes help content, specify the domain the content applies to.
    ServiceNow Help
    If the check box is selected, this field indicates a base system topic. You cannot edit a base system topic, but you can create a copy to add custom content.
    Content
    You can use the formatting tools to format the content. The following list describes the limitations.
    • You cannot include images in embedded help content.
    • To embed video, you must code the video information in the source code <<>> view. Video content from YouTube and Vimeo are supported.
    • To add a related information link, you must use a full URL, not a relative URL.
    • Best practice is not to use the highlight text tool, as the color may make text unreadable depending on the theme the user has selected.
    • Any changes you make to embedded help are not automatically deployed to another instance.
    • Changes to the embedded help table are not captured in update sets, update_sync=false is set intentionally.