1. Type Knowledge into the All menu on the left-hand side of your screen and click Create New. Your article will immediately be assigned a unique KB number.  

2. Choose the appropriate Knowledge Base. Public will allow anyone to see your article via http://kb.ucdavis.edu. If your department has its own database and you would like your article to be available only to those who are able to view that database, place your article in your department database.

3. You’ll receive a dialog box asking you to Apply Default Values. Click OK.

4. If you wish to apply a template, select one of the options from the Apply template drop down. Based on the article type you select, the article body will populate with headings

5. For Category, click the magnifying glass to bring up the Category picker.  Select an appropriate category/subcategory for your article.

6. Workflow is Draft by default and cannot be changed until the article has been saved.

7. Enter the Assignment Group responsible for maintaining this knowledge article. The Assigned To field is not critical but can be helpful if you want to keep track of who is working on an article.

8. Generally, the Roles field is left blank. 

9. The default Valid To is January 1, 2100. This is the date when this article will expire. Leave this as is unless you purposely want it to expire sooner.

10. Short Description will be the title of your article for searching/display purposes. Make it short, informative, and logical for your viewers.

11. Enter the content of your article into the Article body field. 

11. Add keywords to the Meta field to help users find what they are looking for in the KB.

Tips for adding meta to articles: 

• • After writing your article, review important topics, keywords, concepts and add them to the meta field.
  • Consider terms users would use to search for your article, and add them to the meta field, even if you don't consider them the most accurate terms.
    • Common misspellings can be added. eg. A ServiceNow article could include "Service Now" in the meta.
    • Former names that people may still be using. eg. BeyondTrust application was formerly known as Bomgar. Add the "Bomgar" to the meta.
  • Think of common synonyms for your topics. eg. Password and passphrase
  • If users ask questions with a particular phrase, you can add that entire phrase to the meta. Separate words with an underscore. For example, "how_do_I_reset_my_passphrase".
  • Repeat your search terms up to three times to give it additional weight.
  • Avoid terms that are too generic and will return too many results.
  • Use commas to separate meta terms.

12. When you have entered all necessary information into the article, click Save. The article will be saved in Draft mode. When the article is ready to be published, click the Publish button on the top right of the screen and it will be visible in the Knowledge portal.

Tips and tricks for creating knowledge articles

• It's important that you understand the audience for the knowledge base article. When writing an article, make sure it is suitable for the users of technical abilities. For every person that needs to know the SMTP outgoing port for Outlook there's another five people who don't even know what Outlook is or why they're forced to use it at work.
  
  • Avoid filler text. A good rule of thumb: Tell the customer what they need to know and move on.
  • If you're comfortable with an HTML editor click the < > icon to bring up the HTML window to insert your formatted code.
• You have limited formatting choices available via the WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editor, but if you click the HTML button, you can format the article via direct HTML editing. Please refer to the Knowledge Management style guide for instructions on how the articles should be formatted. In addition, you can also refer to the existing knowledge articles for reference.
• If the article is pasted from an external text editor (like Word) it'll often include formatting <span> tags that will don't work well with ServiceNow. If creating an article outside of the ServiceNow editor be sure to paste the clean HTML code.
• Only certain HTML elements are allowed in the Knowledge base. Code not permitted will be automatically removed when the article is saved. See Knowledge base - Allowed HTML elements for details.