morning good evening good afternoon from wherever you are joining um welcome to the session for knowledge management uh we're going to cover what why and how and this is part one of the series um my am i audible and everything all that's good i assume that's good okay all right so i may be mentioning a few things around the road map so flashing the safe harbor slide basically saying that if it's in the road map don't make decisions based upon it you should make your purchasing decisions based upon what's in the product currently a little bit about myself i'm saroop uh i'm senior director of product management here at servicenow i've been here for almost six and a half years i started as a product manager for knowledge and over the years i have taken on more and more responsibilities and are now focused on a broader portfolio for customer engagement and so self-service and omni channel is something that i look at however knowledge management is the passion of my life even during my education days i was working on it and for 10 plus years i was actually in the field implementing knowledge not the servicenow product but other products at various customers so what's on the agenda today today we're going to kick things off a little easy so talk a little bit about the fundamentals around knowledge management i'm going to spend a bit of time around kcs now it's centered service and why it is one of the industry best practices and why we align to it we're going to get into knowledge administration and setup so again some of the basic things things that you need to know around knowledge management getting it going for you and then we're going to focus on search part 2 which is scheduled for next week and i'm going to talk about that in a second we'll cover feedback management security analytics and knowledge demand inside so these are some of the more advanced topics that rely on the top of the basics that i'm going to cover today so since you are here we know that you are here for part one for part two as well please be there um this is uh the information for that i think our hosts are going to also put the link for that in the in the chat so please bookmark it rsvp for it we're looking forward to another session and i'm very excited to have so many of you today so with that i'm going to jump into the agenda i have a jam-packed set of slides that i want to go through with me i also have aditya and harriet from the product management team and they are going to respond to any questions that you may have you can put them on chat hopefully i pace myself well so that we can do some q a at the end of the call but let's let's kick things off so at a very broad level uh you have seen this slide multiple times if i've been talking to servicenow we call ourselves a platform of platform we have a platform for digital businesses so at the core of it we have a bunch of foundation capabilities configuration capabilities and intelligence that drive the various workflows of servicenow that we are more or less used to so uh customer and industry workflow for your customer facing use cases employ workflow for your employees technology workflows for the cio's organization including service desks and in the creator workflows if you are taking our products and building your own apps knowledge management is part of the platform foundation so this application is used across almost all the applications um and the workflows that we have there be it for customer service or for employee service or for iit service management and has been in the product even before the alphabet started with the servicenow releases um and and then not to forget that in the servicenow ecosystem you have the cross-functional ecosystem we uh are not the system of record in most times so we do integrate with other systems to get the data and we are the system of engagement so we're going to talk about knowledge management um a little more today and and the next session uh at a very high level knowledge management has been around uh essentially it started in the 1990s there were various thought leaders and practitioners one of them was davenport who coined this um very high level tactical you know definition is a knowledge game is the process of capturing distributing effectively using knowledge and there are various other people that have done amazing work and i've followed davenport and known akata kh and others for a while um what is the value that knowledge provides um in today's world and it has been true through the history is enterprises they compete on the products or the services that they deliver they compete on operational excellence for all of these they need to have a corporate memory how have we done this in the past how can we do it better and that's part of the intellectual capital and essentially knowledge sort of codifies that so um and and our nation's ability to succeed depends upon how well they capture and such you know share knowledge within the organization how well they can reuse too often that is under look um you know how do you reuse how do you disseminate knowledge and then how do you constantly look at reinventing and innovating using that knowledge even to the extent of you know continuously reusing knowledge and improving that knowledge because that's also important and in terms of business value this is a couple of bullets from gartner 2014 report it reduces the time to give an answer depends upon the org from anywhere from 20 to 80 percent um you know essentially that is what is called as deflection and obviously we all want to in this current economic situation but historically and globally all the time you do want to reduce the cost of our customer support and knowledge management definitely helps in that okay so there have been various knowledge management models and these are when i say models using the operational models of how to implement knowledge within an organization various of them have been around um we are not going to go into most of these today what i'm going to focus today is around knowledge center service and that is what servicenow aligns to and this is a practitioner based service so before i do that i'm going to talk a little bit about the knowledge ecosystem and then it will probably be easier to talk about the standard so when you look at the knowledge ecosystem its knowledge is one of the content sources that you have within the organization and i use the term content a little generically uh knowledge is a specialized form of content as it it is actually it's reusable it's applicable uh in in specific situations um typically your customer or your employee um without using our customer service management products or employee service management products they're using different ways of finding that content whether it's the portal the mobile web or the mobile app embedded virtual agents engagement messenger or you are embedding our components into adobe experiences there are various ways of finding the content that the customer is going to do as they need the knowledge what we also do is to take that content and push it out via seo so that search engines can find it so if you are ever using these nipples and you go to your help site that's an example the service now is actually working to push content externally and several of our customers also use social integration tools to push content out to social media as well on the other side you have the agents um you know whether it is a customer support agent or an id help desk or an employee hr partner they are trying to solve issues and essentially they use knowledge from agent assist perspective and as a result of that they also create knowledge and this might be a bit of an alien concept for some but the folks that actually handle calls and are already responding to tickets are in the best place to actually create knowledge they capture the knowledge and the word of the customer and that makes it more likely to be findable by the customer when they actually try to find that knowledge um through self-service and i use a customer and employee interchangeably here but we also see uh centralized knowledge management teams um and they are required they they sometimes create content they are also sometimes part of the knowledge domain experts group and these are the folks that are curating the content that have been created on the fly or by them and keeping an eye on it and we'll talk about a feature that is specifically targeted to them and and they also create content and then we have a governance process and you know the knowledge manager and assume a healthy percentage of the audience and i see a lot of people have joined um would be in that area uh you're a knowledge manager you see an empty part at the bottom of the screen it is intentional because i'm going to talk about a few other things while knowledge is a curated organizationally or internally syndicated content we also see great value in user generated content and that's through communities obviously as you may expect we do have a product around this area and it is also tightly coupled in some places with knowledge so instead of looking at the knowledge base and sometimes not finding an answer our customers can look at a community and look at questions and answers or blogs or videos or documents that have been shared by others and this content is coming from the community participants and uh so agents can also participate in it uh questions that are unanswered in the community can be pushed to assisted support to the channel to the agents to actually answer that question as well and there is a process for that um and then there are moderators for the community governance much like the knowledge manager there are various personas in that particular area moderators are also looking at the content using some automated tools as to also make sure that the con the conversations that are happening are uh are good um people are not abusing the platform and all of that so there are tools for that but also the community moderators are looking at governance as the various forums and topics and all of that i'm not going into the community's product here there are various content that is available around that but that's a very good way of tapping into you uh use general knowledge and if you do want to convert something from the community to a formal knowledge we do have capabilities in the product to do that and that's the reason of putting this slide together um and so there's a concept of knowledge harvesting where a correct answer from the community can actually be created as a knowledge article with attribution to the person who gave the correct answer so it forms a very virtuous cycle around it now within this ecosystem we should also consider that there are you know other products and other content sources within the organization so uh whether it is product documentation collaboration portals microsites bunch of lms and all of that now within servicenow we have the capability of ai search which not only is used for searching the knowledge content but can also be used to search third party content and we work with a partner um coloration and i'll cover that in a little bit where you can work with them to get that content within within servicenow so that was about the ecosystem now i'm going to talk a little bit about kcs um kcs stands for knowledge centered service um this was developed i think it's more than 20 years now by a consortium it's called the consortium of service innovation and essentially what they do is they want to improve the processes of knowledge around support right or service wherever there is a transaction happening between a customer or an employee who's typically a requester and they may be requesting help or requesting a service and a fulfiller there is knowledge that create gets created in that transaction so how do we leverage um that process to create knowledge and make it more effective and drive more self-service um they are currently operating at a standard b6 and they have been around for a while i have been fortunate to be part of kcs and the consortium for the last i would say almost a decade now um and strongly believe in the in the in the methodology and we have seen some results around it we'll talk about that we were in fact one of the first few products that uh got verified for the v6 um as a one that is integrated directly with knowledge and incident and case management uh i think that should have come up earlier consortium for service innovation is the group that many manages the ksa standard um what does kcs lead to cases essentially in the shorter term you will see improved resolution time because they are using knowledge um they will be help you know doing that first call resolution will improve uh number of escalations will reduce the incident worker or the agent is going to have less stress they know that they can fall back on the knowledge base they don't have to hunt and peck and you know call up somebody to get an answer um long medium term they will see that that knowledge that got created now starts helping in resolving self-service since lesser number of incidents are going to come in that knowledge base is going to help in training the new employees ramp up time is going to reduce and then longer term you will actually start to see that your products and processes are benefiting from that knowledge that gets created because that's essentially an input back into the product teams as to what is working and what is not working issues start to get proactively resolved issues start to get automated as well in a sense that knowledge then starts to drive some of the other capabilities like chatbots and other you know organizational processes that help in uh resolving issues almost automated fashion what are the key concepts of knowledge center service um and there are a lot so i'm going to go through them at a fast pace and you will see some of these in the product at a very broad level uh its capture structure reuse and reim improve this forms what is called as the a loop or the solved loop so the key concepts are search early search often so as soon as you're looking at the incident or case open up uh search search the knowledge base and the system actually in servicenow already does that um and so you you should be searching before you are trying to resolve the issue if you find something link it link it to the case link it to the incident uh whether it solve the incident so you can actually link it so that it goes back to the employer customer who asked for that help as an article or you can do based upon assisted as well so that hey this helped me the agent can say this help me but this doesn't really solve but then when they escalate that gives some context to the some of the person who is working on it knowledge centered service also talks about uh collective ownership which basically means that if you find something that is not correct it's your responsibility as a support agent to provide uh to flag that article and you know a feedback management system of servicenow which i'm going to talk about it in the next session you will see that that flagman article actually creates a task for somebody to actually fix it or they should fix it uh most of the times kcs has a uh has this process of what we call as you know levels of ownership like you are a you are a candidate you are a contributor or your publisher most of them graduate up to a or a contributor or a publisher so they can actually fix that article and that is highly recommended and then you can create the knowledge in context if you didn't find it and there are templates available in the in service now as well so that they can actually copy the relevant fields from the incident or case put it into the put it into the knowledge article and it's very simple and it's highly configurable as well so if your article template is a little bit different you can change the configuration and then like i talked about uh depending upon the level of the kcs role that the user has candidate contributor publisher they will be able to even publish that article the key benefit here is that you are trying to create a content fast enough you may think that hey what about quality actually there are enough processes in kcs that actually drives the quality of the articles the templates and some of these that in the quality is actually really good and if these people are already communicating with customers already and they're responding to them over phone or over the ticket itself then why can't they actually write a good article and these articles are not an essay you're writing basically looking at a symptom and looking at a particular cause and then writing a resolution so that's what we do and then candidates contributors and publishers can actually publish those articles to the process there is the b loop or the evolve loop as well uh one of the key things around that is what we call as aqi which is the you know the process of managing quality and now it is called as a standard uh content standard checklist by the kcs consortium and we'll talk about that in a bit but that's how you can sample and manage quality there are other ways of there are other things that you do around linking accuracy um so are the folks are the agents actually linking an article just for the sake of it because the process said that or are they not linking and if they're linking are they linking the right stuff so that is there are audit reports around that and then there are a bunch of health reporting that you can either leverage directly from servicenow or you can easily configure but the process around the b loop is essentially around process performance assessment i'm going from the bottom because that's how the loop goes performance assessment so that's why the eq is looking at the content health so that is and that's where the coach and the knowledge domain experts come in doing the process integrations is something that we talked about a little bit how to have your service management capabilities um directly coupled with knowledge and then a program like this doesn't work unless you have leadership and communication um and like any other change management so that is what is uh critical to such a program so i'm talking a lot about kcs strongly believe in it and i have seen success around it and i know a lot of our customers actually follow it um because we do talk to customers in events organized by the consortium because they're adopters of our product uh so this is the full loop and you know how we do this is this particular slide doesn't do justice to how tightly coupled we are with kcs within the product you know we can easily create knowledge from cases or incidents curating knowledge from the community workflows to drive the improvements and then having access criterias and the way that you can share content at a both granular and a macro level across your internal external population and then we have capabilities like knowledge blocks and other capabilities where you can take a part of take an article make it full and soul public or available to a broader audience and then have parts of it only be applicable based upon your persona typically we see use cases like like policy documents so i'll talk about that as i go into the topics um this product has been around for a while it's very very rich and mature um and broadly i classify the product capabilities into three areas so there is the end user experience this can be the customer of the employee and there are various capabilities including the service portal and engagement center and various other capabilities through which you access knowledge and disseminate knowledge uh you have the agent experience so they are looking at knowledge in the context of doing work um and so there are various capabilities for them and as a result of it they are reusing knowledge they are flagging fixing or creating knowledge or creating gap knowledge gaps and the heart of the operation is the governance right so there are various capabilities around that uh a few of which we will be talking about through today and and the next session um and a lot of you i believe would be more interested in that area and as knowledge managers be wanting to know what servicenow provides in this area okay of of course we are kcs v6 verified um and so i'll jump into now the details of the product and the first subsection is around administration capabilities so this is where we are going to cover these topics and some of these are basic if you are already using knowledge today you may find that some of this is a repeat but i believe there is a healthy population of folks 80 of you here um who would be also new to knowledge management or new to service now so it will be good brush up and then for for everyone here so what i say first is if you have a servicenow instance um there is something we created called as a knowledge management guided setup and this is a very good place to start it is sequenced in a way of moving from simple to advanced capabilities your admin can go in there and maybe you can tag along and there is information around doing various high level setting up high level capabilities around knowledge and the good news is like wherever the topic is covered if you go to configure you can actually go to the actual configuration and the more information link actually points you to certain documentation that can help you learn more about that product so you will have a structured way of approaching the setup of the knowledge and i said it goes from simple to advanced so you don't need to go through all of that as if you're starting your knowledge journey but the the guided setup is going to actually help you in determining how far you want to go at a very basic level the the container in which knowledge articles are stored is the knowledge base so knowledge articles is that unit of content knowledge base is the container right and you can have multiple knowledge bases uh within your instance and within your implementation typically at a knowledge base level you can configure what are the workflows who can access the knowledge within that there's very low code configuration and then you can also put the categorization as well now there are various workflows available you know you can do instant approval and instant publish if you are following kcs and your your org structure is an organization is pretty mature or you have a publisher publish workflow um there is retire retire workflow as well so you can initiate retire based upon certain controls uh certain you know business rules or if you want to just return an article because it's no longer applicable you can do that this process for that um questions that i get normally is how many knowledge bases do you need uh product wise we do not limit um however you need to keep in mind that your knowledge should not be broken down so far that it is not findable and users cannot navigate the hierarchy so findability is important um but breaking down by departments is not a bad idea at a minimum like having an i.t knowledge base hr knowledge base and an then you know customer service knowledge base um then there is uh you know you need to keep that in mind then there is permissions right so uh you would want to have permissions in such a way that the entire knowledge base is accessible and not accessible to a group of audience but what you can do is you can also do permissions at an article level so sometimes i see this where they would create one knowledge base for the agents one knowledge base for the requesters i necessarily do not like that idea because then you are duplicating knowledge and that uses human error you rather have one knowledge base and at an article level you can set the permissions um of what is available to agents versus the customers uh and you can also do an individual article level where you can block out certain sections of the article so for example if it is a troubleshooting article you want the customers to get the information about how to troubleshoot a certain problem but then if the agent needs to know that there is an internal problem or a defect that is going to address it that you can configure a field where you can store that data uh karen you asked the question about where is this guide available if you you can run the instance and say guided setup you will search for guided setup in the navigation under the knowledge menu you will find one approver workflows and all of that this is another consideration for if you how you're breaking up your knowledge base uh typically a knowledge base is associated with one workflow you can create conditions you can create uh ownership groups like within the knowledge base you can say that okay this is an hr knowledge base but if it is about payroll only these set of people can create or update articles in payroll uh or payroll articles need to be having a different workflow you can do that but those simple variations are what you should do if there is very complex variations and all together a different set of people from a different group all together then you think of a multiple knowledge bases but typically for permissions and workflows um uh don't give up easily there is enough configuration in the application that can support a single knowledge base with a variety of permissions and approval workflows within that then there is categorization so i'm going to talk about two capabilities around it one is inherent to the part of knowledge which is knowledge categories uh knowledge categories you can organize within the knowledge base you can have a set of categories you can go n levels deep uh we typically say don't go below three level more than three levels because your users are not going to be able to understand and find content and after three levels that's the best practice that we have product wise we don't have a limit that we have applied um ui wise you know three to four levels is what renders really well there is another capability that is specifically available for the employee experience which is called as a taxonomy so this is a taxonomy that is available across multiple entities within servicenow so can be associated with catalog items for articles for communications for quick links and that drives the employee service center ui so you can have dynamic topic pages you can have navigation you can have widgets which talks about specific of these topics so gradually we're going to be gravitating towards that unified taxonomy um we may end up on the categorization side to use the knowledge categories more from an organizational and from a governance perspective but as of now both of them exist if you are only using the knowledge portal the km service portal then categories is good enough for you article versioning um this is almost the first two or three features that i built when i came to servicenow um core core core to knowledge management uh if you're using the knowledge advanced plugin which is not by default on we're looking at how to make it default on for newer customers it enables the the knowledge transplant enables knowledge versioning when you go through a workflow each step in the workflow is a minor uh update so it's like you move from 1.1 to 2.0 1.2 to 1.3 and then when it gets published it becomes 2.0 um all version all major versions are created as a new record all minor versions uh are stored uh as checksums and all of that so you can go to a minor version if you need to but all major versions create a new record in the kb knowledge table and uh there is a script include which manages the knowledge versioning out of the box features if you want to change it you you're welcome to there are areas that you can do that templates another core core feature um this is how you this is another um governance capability for better readability of articles you want to break up the article into segments and these are shown as fields within servicenow uh now you can have various templates you can associate a template to a knowledge base so in a given knowledge base you can have x number of templates um and then the users can actually see uh you know the template preview as well when they select that and once they hit on new they will create uh it'll it'll show the fields and each field is a rich text field you can define all the template configurations as well um yeah and i'm not sure sharing the screen here under they can point you to the documentation and in the guided setup you can also see the documentation for article templates but as a part of the setup process you can determine what the field type is for each of those fields doesn't necessarily always need to be reached text it can be date time and other things you can also determine uh whether that field is expanded or collapsed by default uh when that article when the articles of that template are shown you can also apply specific css for the header unlike the value like issue or environment when the article renders um and also the body so if it's an internal text if you want to color it red so that you do not share you can do that as well heavily used feature this also is very heavily used when you create knowledge in context of a case or an incident because then you have the ability to copy content directly into these fields from the incident or case uh knowledge ownership groups um this was the other this was a i was mentioning this earlier uh this is a way within a knowledge base to say that hey a set of articles within a given knowledge base can be owned by a group and you can assign it by uh you can do that at the article level to assign an ownership group now it can be a group of users it can have a manager as well and the responsibility of the group is to approve knowledge articles performing aqi checks and then managing feedback tasks for those knowledge articles why do you need this because you know people come and people go um you do not want a single point of ownership on a given article which normally would have been the owner of the article or the author of the article of the last version of the article and as a group you can manage that and the other use case is like you know if you want only a certain set of people um like the payroll versus you know policies group within hr or um you know somebody who's just looking at systems versus uh email you know there are different groups that you might want to create and like i said when a feedback comes and we're not going to talk about feedback management today it can go to the group right the ownership group members also have contribute access to the article even if they don't have contribute access to the knowledge base level so we have not talked about user criteria yet but at a very high level they can edit approve articles even if they do not have the read contribute permission at the knowledge base level so this is another way of uh you know not giving contribute access to everybody to the entire knowledge base if you want contribute access only for articles for a specific ownership group that you can do that here knowledge blocks so this is uh specifically applies um and jeff your answer to your question is yes uh and david yes as well um all uh users of kb from an approver perspective would need it um okay knowledge blocks is a way for um you know creating a one article that may be used by multiple users within the organization or outside the organization and they see the content that is only applicable to them typical examples are like holiday calendars or policy documents which are specific based upon the role or the location of the person so you can create a one article and insert other articles which are of type blocks knowledge blocks are a type of article that make up that mega article and and when that article renders uh it evaluates the user criteria and the access permissions of the user who's viewing the article and only shows the sections that are applicable to them so very powerful in that sense um i'm going to just quickly touch upon actionable feedback this topic is covered in more detail in part two this is where we have created a feature to automate the uh handling of feedback so if somebody gives a feedback like rating is less than three by the way that level is configurable or gives a feedback that the article is not helpful then it generates this form on top of it where you can request more information and then the system creates a knowledge feedback task and you have various ways of finding that feedback task you can update the article you can create a new article you can update search configuration so that the user can find an another article and there are various ways of doing that and it also has a closed loop process back with the person who gave that feedback um and then uh you know in terms of i talked about ownership groups so uh if there is an ownership group then the feedback task is assigned to the ownership group and then the manager of ownership group can reassign the task if they need to um and then if no ownership group it gets assigned to the author or the reviser of the article so author is you understand what author is with the person create the article reviser is typically the persona who has created version 2 or version 3 of the article and typically we allow feedback only on the latest version of the article aqi is another concept that i mentioned earlier aqi helps in maintaining consistent quality of the articles attached to the knowledge base so as a knowledge manager you can create what is called as a checklist what we see within the application out of the box are the checklist of questions that kcs actually recommend so there are 10 questions and each of them have been given equal weight but you can decide the order of the questions which questions you want and the weight and you can do a relative weight of one ques one question or one item in the checklist being weighed heavily over the other all we say is um you know the sum of all the weights across all the questions should be hundred and we enforce that the reason being that we give a score then eqi score on 100 after the the coach or the domain expert has done an eqi review now the coach or the domain expert can go to a list of articles that are in a certain state and they can perform an aqi review which is what you see here they just say true false on the list of questions attached to that particular uh aqi and then there is a score and that is generated so and the knowledge management dashboard which is also something we cover next week it will have an average score across the articles and you can do it by knowledge base as well and typically what we say is anything less than 70 is a fail but that level is configurable so you can decide for your organization what that score should be at an article level and now sometimes you see that the level is lower because not all articles um you know have gone through the eqi and all of that okay uh i have to talk about yeah i think i'm good on time talk about knowledge search so we recommend that you start using ai search it is there are other enablement content around ai search that is available but i'm going to cover only the basics here uh it's a natural language search experience powered by nlu when we say natural language basically means that it understands variations of the word that you may be asking it's a self-learning machine learning based relevancy so if you search for a certain term you look at an article and immediately move back or you look at an article and you stay on that article for a while it keeps an eye on those kind of events and then learns from it and you know draws inference of that statement that question that you asked with an article we also have what is at the top what is called as a genius result where we can put an article at the top or a catalog item and you can directly make it actionable as well it's a modern user experience with facets and everything unified search experience across data silos so you can search across multiple systems ai search powers virtual agents ai search also powers our engagement messenger which is a way of embedding servicenow capabilities in a third-party ui uh if you need to do that so it's it's it's something that we as servicenow gain the capability with an acquisition in in 2019 this is the business value of ai search so essentially a lot of technologies that just do keyword search or do semantic search which is basically natural language processing where we start to see ai such come in as like contextual search like you index content from outside you use natural language processing you use machine learning to make the such contextual as well so that you know there is a correlation between the search term and the article when you go into cognitive search um we start to understand the intent of the query um so we start applying nlu on top of the query to understand the intel uh the utterance and the intent and then that helps us drive the the value results at the top or boost certain results over the other and then we can make even search actionable so that's what you saw at the top genius results where you integrate so if you're searching for uh what is my balance leave it can give you an action item say hey apply for a lead right so it's actionable it's integrated into the workflow and that's the power of putting um something like a standalone search deep into a platform like servicenow things like this we could never do in my earlier life and i was just doing knowledge management search and implementing these uh one-off cases into various crms um various best practices around search relevance is when it comes to ai search freshness of document matters like you know much like what you see on social media and linkedin how often the document has been viewed matters if there is a direct match to the title i think this is universal we'll talk a little bit about zing search as well in a bit uh title is powerful uh content match obviously uh how much of content matches in the body tags um and then the popularity of those tags associated with other articles so these are all factors that can improve the relevancy of articles but at the core of it it is a self-learning system which is one of the key benefits of ai search over the the older zinc search that we have um yeah i think the best practices are sort of repeated here synonym dictionaries is another key item here like having a synonym dictionary so that it expands your natural language processing capabilities so if if if a particular acronym is very relevant you know it is something that is very particular to your organization or your industry those need to be added in the synonyms different variations of that acronym or different variations of the name of a product those are those are usually helpful and tagging articles cleaning up the html and paragraph tags so if you if you have good headings and paragraph types which we already do within the knowledge article um sometimes it is coming from outside content as well so having very clean html tags and paragraph tags helps in finding the answers much like what you see on google as the featured snippet and all of that ai search also provides the ability to integrate with third-party content so there is a sharepoint connector that is available as of cubec and then there is we have partnered with a company called azion which has a bunch of connectors so you can work with ratio to add a connector to your servicenow instance which may not be available from servicenow and we have seen customers also build their own custom search connectors for legacy systems uh we have an api that is published uh and an instructions around how to you know crawl or and ingest content from third-party systems and make them more findable i do want to talk about zing and i'll do that pretty quickly uh zing is the search that has been there in the platform for a longer time some of you who have not migrated to ash can talk about it it it is uh mostly keyword based so it does the search relevance based upon how frequent the word word that you have asked is available in the content um if the sequence matches uh how heavily is that particular field from which the match is um is weighted so for example title is always weighted higher so if the match is found in the title what's of the body or in the meta tags versus the body those are how the search level c is is considered and again some best practices start descriptions which is exactly the title of the article um good practice is to have the product service in that reference the symptom or issue that the issue that that article is so my iphone is heating up you know you need to mention the product and the symptom uh in the title that that's how users will be able to find out uh and again uh good title is we'll have the keywords would also be concise so that's a good practice this is also a learned experience as well meta tags in the zing world is important adding meta tags adding piecing together multiple words in the meta tags repeating and stacking the meta tags those are all good things to do however i hope you use and migrate to ai search otherwise these are all very manually intensive things to do this is what i was talking about in terms of field weighting so you can control the relative weight of each field um so knowledge number uh like somebody searches by the article number it's weighed higher short descriptions meta field these are wet weight higher than the rest of the body so you can also use the the knowledge base category uh as uh as a field uh and if there is a match in the name uh of the category and the article and search term then that also works pretty well stop words this is something that the system automatically learns but uh sometimes you this is a way to go into this stopwatch stop words are where if it finds it in the search it ignores them and that that's the only reason that search our zing search would do that it says that a particular word occurs more than a certain number of times but it may be an important one so it's it's one of the troubleshooting steps we um suggest and there are knowledge articles around that uh sometimes the you know you can go and look at the text index look at the stop words um and then you can do some of the configurations around you know removing the stop word or decide that you do not index or do not query but you may say index but do not query there are various ways of handling this and there are knowledge articles around how to handle this better and the last one is that threshold that i was talking about synonyms i think i covered that from ai such com perspective as well but this is just a little bit of a deeper dive and and so you can do synonyms you can have a synonym assigned to specific knowledge bases i think um and then you can do synonyms as in like uh like outage stoppage disruption they all mean the same thing same thing so if an article has one of these and the searches on this then they will match there's also a way of doing associated you can say iot is internet of things but if somebody searches for chip it doesn't match iot right so you can do it associative as well um yeah uh there are other rules in zing uh partial match and idf these are configurations that you can do partial match basically says that how many uh terms should match before an article is returned in the search result again this is all that applies to zinc search and you needed all these you know tools because uh we didn't have self learning right so there are this is that's a match and then idf is something that we have in the zinc search made it default and essentially it boosts articles based upon how frequently that article occurs and sometimes if the sometimes if the search word is rare um compared to the rest of the articles and maybe that's that word is the key word then arctic idf will actually boost it's an inverse document frequency to boost other articles that have that real world again some concepts that you only need to be aware if you're not using ash but if you're using ai search a lot of these are self learning okay i think i've reached the end of my questions um end of my content so i'm ready for questions again i'm flashing the part two i'm going to cover some more of the advanced topics like feedback knowledge demand insights and all of that next time we still have a few more minutes i can do some q a i didn't have all the q a in front of me so i can help you out with that um we've answered some of the questions online awesome we have three unanswered questions um is it possible to have a servicenow to search as one type at the moment i have to write one word or at least three letters yeah so um in the old zinc surge um we had to restrict that because it had some both performance concerns as well as it was sort of polluting the search logs um so you would have this words which are incomplete and all of that i think in a i says there is some capability around that let us take this as an action item um we can get back to you is it hula yes yeah yeah i can see the questions now figured out on how to do that uh we can get that answer to you offline um if you can take an action item harriet yep yes um so the next question is from joe can you see that yeah so our tag similar to yes that is correct joe yeah um and then anonymous uh do search terms in relevancy score also include stop words or keywords only uh the answer is if it is zing search and i don't know that much about the ai search directly it is it is only the key words the stop stop words are ignored right so if it sees the stop word in the search term it will ignore it uh is there an ai search migration path documented yes i believe that is jonah i think we can try and answer that offline as well i don't have that link handy right now okay i think we have reached the end of the questions um thank you for your questions and uh thank you for your you know joining and hopefully this was helpful like i said next week we are back again i'm gonna talk about some of the more advanced topics around knowledge thank you um our host if you want to oh we are getting some more questions uh what are what are stop words so victor stop words are what uh the search engine the zinc search engine determines that um it is there are too many of those that are there in the index of the content of the system so when it's like if you if you're within servicenow and you want to search for service now you're going to find too many of those so it ignores servicenow as a search term and then focuses on the other things in the search term right so um like if the question is what is the stock price of service now somebody's asking another employee portal settling the ignore service i'm just going to focus on stock price that's that's what essentially stop words are and you can deal with that all right i think we have i think we have reached the end of it so thank you everyone um and thanks for our hosts and panelists who have been helping us in organizing this as i said hopefully this was useful and hope to see you back again next week thank you