Bulk Export Knowledge

[davyfarrell]

Does anyone know of a way to bulk export knowledge articles from ServiceNow? Not the lists of articles but the actual articles in a set of formatted pdf, word or html files?

[Robert Fedoruk]

Lots to be desired on this.   There's two major problems.

1)   If you're exporting to transport to another ServiceNow system, you need to export Knowledge AND your attachment/images table.   We did this years ago, and even though we got reliable exports, we then had issues importing due to the 1g+ size of the XML file.   We ended up exporting KB articles in sets of weeks.   Took days... but it worked.

2)   If you're exporting to transport to another system, I have no idea how you'll reliably gather and transport stored image data.

[Aditya Telideva]

Hi David,

sys_attachment_doc.list

Personalize to include "Sys attachment", this is the name of the document.

Export -> XML

Parse accordingly with an XML parser.

Alternatively you can export to a CSV, but it will still require some work to convert the Base-64 encoded data to binary. Thanks,

Thanks,

Aditya Telidevara

[mitzaka]

Can you please elaborate on parsing accordingly with the XML parser?

I also am after the task of exporting multiple knowledge articles from ServiceNow KB and trying to get them into Atlassian Confluence. Even if that is as PDFs.

Thanks!

[snowolper]

Best Practice:
Export/Import Knowledge Bases, Categories, and Articles in batches. Do not attempt to transfer all at once as some KB Articles may be bigger than others and can cause corruption, issues or unintended issues (missing attachments and other items) that are easier to fix in batches then an all or nothing method. 

Also, create a local update set prior to starting just in case. 

Example: 

Need to export Knowledge Base, its Categories and all its relative Articles from SNOWsiteA too SNOWsiteB.

Follow these steps:

1. Be sure to export the Knowledge Base from SNOWsiteA and import the intended SNOWsiteB (Production, Test, Development, etc.).
2. Export the Knowledge Base Categories from SNOWsiteA and import the intended SNOWsiteB 
3. Export the Articles from SNOWsiteA:
4. 1. Go to SNOWsiteA Knowledge > Articles > All.
   2. Create a filter to render a scoped export.
   3. Right-click at the tables banner > Export > XML
5. Import the Articles to SNOWsiteB
6. Post Import
7. • Update all articles hardcoded hyperlinks to correct links
   • doublecheck all attachments and images
   • doublecheck styling
   • all other check and tests need to be applied.