Microsites

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated April 29, 2026
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Microsites

    The Rich Content Editor in ServiceNow’s Employee Center Pro provides a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface for creating HTML-based microsite content without requiring deep HTML or CSS knowledge. This tool enables content managers and admins to visually build, customize, and preview topic and portal pages across desktop, tablet, and mobile platforms. It allows non-technical users to create and manage content independently, streamlining content creation without impacting the portal’s existing theme or color schemes.

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    Key Features

    • Visual Content Creation: Build layouts using predefined modules or custom columns, then add components such as text, images, videos, and buttons.
    • Device Previews: Preview content on desktop, tablet, and mobile to ensure responsiveness, with a recommended workflow to start designing on desktop first.
    • Theme Consistency: Content inherits the portal’s theme unless custom styles are applied, maintaining a consistent look and feel.
    • Language Support: Optional multilingual support enables creating or translating content for different languages.
    • Publishing Control: Content availability is managed through publish plans or more complex campaigns, enabling staged or targeted release of microsite content.
    • Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts: Extensive keyboard navigation and shortcuts improve accessibility and efficiency in content assembly and editing.
    • Search Integration: AI Search in Employee Center returns relevant published content based on keywords and user roles, including access control based on audience configuration.
    • Source Code Editing: Optionally enabled for admins to edit HTML source code directly for advanced customization.

    Practical Use for ServiceNow Customers

    ServiceNow customers can leverage the Rich Content Editor to rapidly produce rich, engaging microsite pages within the Employee Center Pro without relying heavily on IT resources. This capability empowers content teams to maintain, update, and tailor content dynamically across multiple devices and languages while ensuring consistent branding and controlled publishing workflows. The integrated AI Search and role-based content visibility enhance user experience by delivering relevant, accessible information to employees.

    Rich Content Editor enables content managers and admins to create HTML-based content for the Employee Center Pro topic and portal pages using a visual drag-and-drop interface.

    You can create a layout, add components (such as containers, images, videos, and links), and adjust the settings of the components with little or no HTML or CSS (cascading style sheets) knowledge. The Rich Content Editor allows non-technical users to build sections of pages without the help of IT or technical users.

    The Rich Content Editor provides a library of components and a canvas area, where you use drag-and-drop method to create your content. The components can be edited individually and you can preview what you are creating on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device before you make your content available to your audience.

    Creating content does not interfere with your portal theme or color. Published content that does not use custom style changes uses the theme of the underlying portal page.
    Note:
    The Rich Content Editor uses the sn_cd.preview.portal_url_suffix sys property to determine the portal theme to use for the content you create. Using the preview portal when creating rich content reflects the portal theme to provide an example of how the content will appear. For more information, see Properties installed with Content Publishing.

    Overview of building microsites

    The Rich Content Editor makes it possible to build HTML content with little or no HTML or CSS (cascading style sheets) knowledge, using the following process:
    1. Create the Rich Content type record: Create rich content
    2. Create the page layout.
    3. Add components such as images, videos, text boxes, and buttons.
    4. Change the canvas size to create content for tablet and mobile.
      Note:
      For best results when creating content for all three platforms, first create your content for desktop, then tablet and mobile.
    5. (Optional) Select a different language to view your session in or request a language translation for the content you are creating. For more information, see Multilingual support in the Content Library.
    6. Make the content available to users via a publish plan: Create a publish plan for your content

      Alternatively, you can build out a more robust publishing configuration using campaigns: Creating campaigns

    Rich Content Editor interface

    The Rich Content Editor interface is comprised of a canvas where you assemble the content, content components that you drag-and-drop into the canvas, and menu bar icons to modify the canvas.
    Note:
    If the Edit Source code icon does not appear, ask an admin to enable the Edit code property. See Properties installed with Content Publishing

    Rich Content Editor components

    When you select a component, a toolbar appears at its top-left corner, allowing you to manipulate the component directly. Each component offers a variety of customization options that are accessed from the Settings tab.

    Rich Content Editor - Settings

    Keyboard shortcuts for accessibility

    You can assemble microsites and news articles in the Rich Content Editor using a keyboard for improved accessibility.

    The Rich Content Editor supports many operating system and text formatting shortcuts, including Save, Bold, and Undo. In Content Publishing versions 33.0.9 and later, users can navigate the top toolbar and style manager using the right, left, up, and down arrow keys. You can use these additional keyboard shortcuts to support your content creation:

    Table 1. Keyboard shortcuts
    Action Mac keyboard shortcut Windows keyboard shortcut
    Paste and match style of selected text box Shift+Option+Command+V Shift+Alt+Windows+V
    Tip:

    With the Rich Content Editor, you can easily use your keyboard to select individual canvas components. You can add text and columns, create text sections within those columns, and update headings within each section to adjust the styling and fonts to your liking; It helps you customize your content in a simple and convenient way.

    See Next Experience keyboard shortcuts for additional information.

    Searching for Rich content

    When employees enter a keyword in the global search bar, Employee Center uses AI Search to return published pages containing that keyword in the content name or body.

    Searching for by keyword "employee" returns pages created with the rich content editor containing the term

    AI Search returns additional results based on user roles:
    • Users with either the system admin or content admin role can see unpublished content.
    • For users with the content manager, content admin, or content approver roles, search results include content for which they are not the audience. However, they cannot view the content unless they are part of the configured audience.