Migrating Knowledge Articles from BMC Remedy to ServiceNow

Knowledge Article Migration to ServiceNow

Hi All, I have been digging a lot around information migration from Remedy to ServiceNow and one of the largest challenges human beings had is KA migration. It took me a lot of effort in making a design that can at least assist some human beings to stick to their format and entire the challenge at the earliest.

Let’s overlook the whole lot I have accomplished and speak about a high-level design of reaching this undertaking that appears like a not possible one. Below are some of the easy steps for getting it accomplished however earlier than that, we must understand the history of facts saved in Remedy.

Coming to the Knowledge Management in Remedy, you would first want Knowledge Admin permission to view all articles in the system. Desired to get entry to stage that you need to get your self assigned is the AR Administrator so that you can get right of entry to back-end types and analyze the facts as per your requirement.

We will divide this mission into easy steps and then talk about the approach.

1. Remedy Knowledge Management Module.
2. Remedy statistics types and export formats.
3. Playing around with the data.
4. Loading the information in ServiceNow.
5. Data validation /fixes in ServiceNow.

Remedy Knowledge Management Module

KA module in BMC Remedy makes use of template shape and divides all KA’s in under templates and are seen to customers as per the format/fields described for them.

The above desk describes out-of-the-box templates described for ease for end-user and KA creators. Moreover, every one of them has its respective back-end varieties these shop the records however these types are no longer seen to the end-users solely Admin can view them. Let us discuss them in the subsequent section.

For greater facts about the BMC Remedy AR System expertise article template, see Knowledge article templates

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Knowledge article templates

Templates supply shape to your know-how articles and encompass beneficial points such as a prosperous textual content editor and guide for multimedia content. You have to pick out a template earlier than you can create a new know-how article.

BMC Knowledge Management affords the following out-of-the-box expertise article templates:

Decision Tree: Use this template to create expertise articles that grant useful resources in making choices whilst performing tasks. This template does now not help prosperous text.

How To: Use this template to create expertise articles that supply step-by-step guidelines for an entire task.

Known error: Use this template to create expertise articles that supply root purpose statistics and workarounds for a recognized issue.

Problem Solution: Use this template to file a resolution for a hassle after figuring out the root purpose at some point of a hassle investigation.

Reference: Use this template to create a facts resource.

KCS template: This template is structured by the Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) article definition. Use this template to create know-how articles that furnish the problem; surroundings data such as hardware, software, and so on; the decision of the problem; and the underlying cause.

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Note:

• Articles created with the use of any template, barring the KCS template, are entirely useful in the BMC Knowledge Management application. You can create articles and function all movements on articles without KCS articles via gaining access to the BMC Knowledge Management software thru BMC Remedy Mid Tier.
• To work with KCS articles, you need to have BMC Knowledge Management 9.1.00 or greater and Smart IT 1.3 or greater set up on your system. The KCS articles are utterly practical in Smart IT. From the BMC Knowledge Management application, you can solely search for and relate to KCS articles.
• The KCS template is a ready-to-use template that is structured by a pattern template described using the KCS framework. However, you can use any know-how template to function the KCS-defined expertise administration functions. 

Remedy information varieties and export formats

Every shape in the BMC Remedy does now not store data, some varieties pull records from different varieties and show them as a reference. When a person opens any of the articles from the above-mentioned templates, the structure that shows the article to the person is the ‘Knowledge Article’ shape in Remedy however it does now not shop all records with recognize to the article. It pulls the information from back-end varieties corresponding to the article template.

Let us take an instance of the “How To” article. If an end-user /service Desk agent opens an article of ‘How To’ type, the structure seen to the person is the ‘knowledge article’ shape however some of the facts displayed to the person are from the respective back-end form.

Below are the shape names in BMC Remedy, which shop respective data.

Data Export Formats

You can export the outcomes of a BMC Remedy AR System record to the following file formats:

• Export from the BMC Remedy AR System (file extension .arx)
• XML for BMC Remedy AR System (file extension .xml)
• Comma-Separated Value (file extension .csv)

Playing around with the records

As per the above steps to export the data, you will have statistics in two formats:

• XML
• CSV

Note:- make certain you are which include the DocID column in your exports.

The export will create a listing with all of the attachments, however, they will be renamed with a sequential number. Open the XML facts file in excel and copy/paste the doc ID and attachment columns into a new excel spreadsheet. Remove the blanks, leaving two columns containing the Doc ID and the attachment name. And the different export will have facts in CSV format.

Loading the facts in ServiceNow

As of now, we have statistics in two separate sheets, one from CSV export and the different copy-pasted from the XML file.

1. Load the records from the XML file in one import set.
2. Lad the CSV statistics into ServiceNow (create a radically change map to load all of the articles into ServiceNow from the CSV export).

Create a take a look at the expertise article in ServiceNow to act as your attachment holder and then use the Node.js script right here to add the attachments and connect them to your temp KB article.

You will have to make some updates to that node.js script (example – goal table, sys_id). Node Script

Note:- I am right here assuming that you already comprehend the fundamentals of seriously changing maps and records loading into ServiceNow. for extra small print use the beneath hyperlinks as references.

Then create a serious change map for the import set created using the excel file with simply Doc ID and attachment name. Add one on after script that will replace the attachment documents in sys_attachments with the sys_id of the right article in ServiceNow and use Doc ID as your key to figuring out the right attachment for the respective article.

Data validation /fixes in ServiceNow

There are a lot of possibilities that errors can show up and that’s the motive we want to revisit our work and operate validations so that we repair them. Usually, the method relies upon the developer, good judgment to logic. But the most necessary trouble you want to cross-validate is attachment duplicity.

Conclusion

As we illustrated via case studies, Pod Builder permits customers to shortly construct pods on their facts that additionally work seamlessly with out-of-the-box pods supplied using BMC. While Pod Builder is now not geared in the direction of fixing complicated information by becoming a member of and aggregation scenarios, it is an effective device that approves any purchaser to point and click their way closer to constructing enormously interactive and visually attractive charts on the pinnacle of any tabular facts set, whether or not in Excel spreadsheets or relational databases.