Knowledge article templates

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Knowledge article templates

    Knowledge article templates provide a structured format with pre-defined fields to ensure consistency across knowledge articles. This feature enables knowledge administrators to create, customize, activate, or deactivate templates, while security administrators can control field-level visibility. Authors benefit by creating articles using these standardized templates.

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    Key Features

    • Pre-defined templates: Standard, How To, What Is, FAQ, and KCS article templates are available. All come inactive by default except the Standard template, which is always active.
    • Template activation and association: Knowledge administrators activate templates via the Article Templates module and associate them with specific knowledge bases. Only active templates linked to a knowledge base are available for use.
    • Template structure: Templates and their fields are stored in dedicated tables (kbarticletemplate and kbarticletemplatedefinition respectively), ensuring organized management.
    • Role-based control: Knowledge administrators manage templates, security administrators configure field-level security to control user visibility, and authors create articles using these templates.
    • Feature activation: The Knowledge Article Templates feature requires enabling the Knowledge Management Advanced plugin (com.snc.knowledgeadvanced) to allow template selection during article creation.

    Practical Considerations

    • Existing articles from earlier Knowledge Management versions automatically use the Standard template of the upgraded version after an upgrade.
    • Article templates cannot be deleted due to database constraints but can be deactivated to disable their use.
    • The Standard template is always active and cannot be deactivated, ensuring a fallback template is always available.

    Key Outcomes

    By leveraging knowledge article templates, ServiceNow customers can maintain consistent article formats, streamline article creation, and enforce security controls on sensitive fields. This structured approach improves content quality, usability, and management across knowledge bases.

    Article templates have pre-defined fields structured in a specific order. These templates help create a consistent structure for knowledge articles.

    Using the Knowledge Article Templates feature, as a knowledge administrator (a user with knowledge_admin role), you can create article templates, add or customize fields in a template, and activate or deactivate a template.

    As a security administrator (a user with security_admin role), you can configure field-level security in any template to make it visible to specific users.

    As an author, you can create articles using pre-defined article templates or any newly created article templates.

    Pre-defined knowledge article templates

    Use either the standard template or one of the pre-defined How To, What Is, FAQ or KCS article templates.

    Note:

    When you upgrade Knowledge Management to Kingston or later releases, all the existing articles from the earlier version automatically use the standard template of the upgraded version. For example, if you upgrade Knowledge Management from Jakarta to Kingston, all existing articles use the standard template available in the Kingston version.

    All pre-defined templates are inactive by default. If you do not activate a template, the articles automatically use the standard template. As a knowledge admin, you can activate a template by navigating to Knowledge > Administration > Article Templates. Then in the article template list, set the Active field to true for one or more templates you would like to activate.

    Templates are associated with knowledge bases. Only templates which are active and associated with a knowledge base are shown.

    The template structure is stored in kb_article_template while the fields for each template are stored in kb_article_template_definition. For creating and manipulating templates navigate to Knowledge > Administration > Article Templates.

    The table below lists the fields available in each template and the name of the template table.

    Table 1. Pre-defined knowledge article templates
    Template name Template fields Maps to table SEO Description Tag
    FAQ
    • Question
    • Answer
    		 FAQ [kb_template_faq] Question
    How To
    • Introduction
    • Instructions
    		 How To [kb_template_how_to] Introduction
    What Is
    • Introduction
    • Explanation
    		 What Is [kb_template_what_is] Introduction
    KCS Article
    • Issue
    • Environment
    • Cause
    • Resolution
    		 KCS Article [kb_template_kcs_article] Issue
    Standard Text kb_knowledge Text

    Activating knowledge article templates

    The Knowledge Article Templates feature is activated with the Knowledge Management Advanced (com.snc.knowledge_advanced) plugin. After the feature is activated, when creating an article, option to choose a template for the article appears. For details, see Activate the Knowledge Management Advanced plugin.

    Deactivating knowledge article templates

    You cannot delete an article template because article templates have an associated child table. Deleting a template would also require deleting the child table. Due to the limitations on dropping tables, article templates and template columns are explicitly made non-deletable. Instead, you can disable the Knowledge Article Templates feature by clearing the Active check box on the Article Template form.

    Note:
    The Standard template is available by default and can’t be made inactive.