Bulk import Knowledge Articles and Translations
To bulk import multiple Word articles in a Knowledge Base (KB), the process is described here. Below is a step by step, including loading and handling of translations.
It is always good to first consider assessing your Knowledge Articles on for example relevance and correctness, before importing them into ServiceNow. It is always best to do this before importing.
Note: Before you begin, you can import the Articles as Published by setting the property “Show publish checkbox on the knowledge import pop-up” to Yes (true):
Import the articles
Basically it comes down to the following:
Search for “Import Articles”.
Note: An administrator can control the visibility of the Import Articles button by setting the other knowledge property Hide the 'Import' functionality (button and drag-n-drop) for all users (glide.knowman.import.hide_import_functionality) to true.
Select the Knowledge Base:
Optionally select a Category.
And drag and drop your multiple word files:
Click import and wait:
Closing the browser or navigating away cancels any in-progress uploads but does not delete articles created from completed imports.
And done:
The files are imported as the Language you have set for the logged in account. In this case English:
Import translations
The bulk import is nice. But what if you have multiple languages to facilitate? You already have the translations as Word files as well. How do we import those?
The initial import was done in English, as the logged in User has that set as the language. If we change that to for example Dutch, we can follow the same steps, but with the Dutch (NL) Articles.
In Preferences --> Display you can set your Language from English to Dutch (depending on the languages you have installed in your instance).
With the Language set to Dutch it will import the Word files as Dutch (or any language you have installed and prefer).
To connect the English version and the Dutch translation you now can update the Parent field of the Dutch article:
Make sure to Save the article.
Then navigate to the English Article and you will see in the “Translated Versions” related list the Dutch Article:
And with that, you are done!
Of course this manual process can be automated by using for example Flow designer or Scripting. The only thing needed for automation is a way of matching the English and Dutch article. For example if the Name is always the same (which is not often the case), you can match on that.
Any handy tips you would like to share are always appreciated! 🙂
Credit: the Flag icons used are from Blak1ta
