Features

ServiceNow connector features:

• Supported elements retrieval using the RESTful API.
• Basic authentication.

Retrieved Content

Currently, the ServiceNow connector retrieves the following types of documents:

• Knowledge Articles and Attachments
• Catalog Items and Attachments

Table Usage

Knowledge Content

To retrieve Knowledge Content the connector accesses the tables:

• kb_knowledge: Table with the Knowledge Articles.
• kb_category: Table with the details of the Article’s category.
• kb_knowledge_base: Table for the Knowledge Base information.
• sys_attachment: Table to extract attachments.
• sys_attachment_doc: Table to extract attachments.
• kb_uc_cannot_read_mtom: Table to relate Cannot Read user criteria and Knowledge Bases.
• kb_uc_can_read_mtom: Table to relate Can Read user criteria and Knowledge Bases.
• kb_uc_can_contribute_mtom: Table to relate Can Contribute user criteria and Knowledge Bases.
• sys_user_role: Table to extract the Public role sys id.
• user_criteria: Table of user criteria.
• sys_user: Table with the detail of users (Used for author details).

The roles needed to access these tables are: Knowledge, Knowledge_Admin and User_Admin or Itil.

Catalog Content

To retrieve Catalog Items’ content the connector accesses the tables:

• sc_cat_item: Table with the Catalog Items.
• sc_category: Table with the details of the Catalog item’s category.
• sc_catalog: Table with the Catalog of the Catalog Items.
• sc_cat_item_user_criteria_mtom: Table to relate Available For user criteria and Catalog Items
• sc_cat_item_user_criteria_no_mtom: Table to relate No Available For user criteria and Catalog Items
• sys_attachment: Table to extract attachments.
• sys_attachment_doc: Table to extract attachments.
• user_criteria: Table of user criteria.

The roles needed to access these tables are: Catalog and User_Admin or Itil.

Identity Extraction

These are the tables required to extract the list of users that can access Knowledge Bases.

• kb_knowledge_base
• u_acl_table_users (custom table and depends on a custom webservice)

The roles needed to access these tables are: Knowledge_Admin.

Limitations

Due to API limitations, Service Now connector has the following limitations:

For Knowledge Articles 

The connector will crawl active and published articles. 

Depending on the chosen security, could be additional filtering of articles:

• Public articles (from the base of active and published articles, the connector will allow only public items which means articles with Public Knowledge Bases, also the connector verifies if Can Read or Can Contribute fields are set should be only public user criterias, finally if Cannot Read is set, this item will be ignored)
• User Criteria: This option does not filter. This type of security will add the can read, cannot read and can contribute user criteria values as ACLs. For this acls is required a webservice to extract the list of allow users to read each user criteria.
• Knowledge Base: This option does not filter. This type of security will add the sys_id of the Knowledge Base's article value as ACL. For this acls is required a webservice to extract the list of allow users to read each user criteria.

For Catalog items:

The connector will crawl by default items active with role field empty (there is a option to remove this filter).

Depending on the chosen security, could be additional filtering of items:

• Public Catalog Items: using the base of active items with empty roles (if checked), the connector will check if Available field is set, the value should be public user criteria, in addition, if No Available fields is set the item will be ignore from the crawl.
• User Criteria: This option does not filter.
• Only public Knowledge Bases and their Articles are retrieved by the connector.  This means a user can see an article without log in (Articles with Knowledge Bases that have Public Role as Can Read user criteria). There is another option where we crawl all the content published and active, and the security is based on the Knowledge Base of each Article. That means the ACL for security is the Knowledge Base id.
• Due technical constraints on the security model of ServiceNow,  the security support for other content should be reviewed case by case.

Future Development Plans

The following features are not currently implemented, but are on the development plan:

• Non public knowledge articles retrieval.

Anything we should add? Please let us know.