Importing Knowledge Documents from 3rd party location

[Simon Ellis]

Has anyone dabbled with importing Knowledge Articles from an external resource into CA SD?  I need to setup a new tenant and that tenant has asked if they can bring there existing documents across from their current repository.  There current repository is another database.  I just wonder if anyone has successfully brought KA across at all.

[Grant Bruneau]

Hi gizmo,

 

I know of one of CAs customers who developed their own solution for this. I'll ping my CA resource to see if they can comment here.

[JEROME MAYER]

Hi Gizmo,

 

The method will mainly depend on the data type and the structure of the source and will generally require several scripts to run to normalize the data and convert it to xml import package format prior the import to SDM.

You mention the source is database. this is already a good start as you will be able to create our statement and manipulate the output.

The challenging part of those is the import of embedded images as either SDM provide method for it this not always work well and by experience same import file may sometime generate different result:

 

Another point is to consider the volume to import specially on multitenant as this may eventually be small customer.

i.e. if you only need to import 50 documents he may be faster to have a low cost resource to do it manually vs. creating all those script etc

the call is off course different if you are talking about 1000s kb docs.

/J

[Simon Ellis]

Hi jmayer, thanks for the reply....  The volume i've been led to believe is around 10,000, so on that we're pretty much shelving images and attachments and looking to try and just get the text in as a starting point for them.  Will look at seeing if we can get an output into xml format we can use.

[Legacy User]

I can't comment on using the built-in import knowledge capability of Service Desk; however we imported documents into Service Desk using web services. We prepared a spreadsheet with all the relevant attributes and the primary content of the original document stored as html. Using the createDocument method along with the attributes from the spreadsheet, we simply created the new knowledge document. We stored all images outside of Service Desk so they could be easily referenced with IMG tags in the html. Attachments were a challenge and we had to add them manually.

[Simon Ellis]

Certainly something we could look at as we are only looking at the text not images as they have over 10k records.

[Anon Anon]

I did reach out to ca technologies development on this topic, and I'm sure that you have considered this, but they noted increasingly we see organizations federating their existing knowledge bases to Service Desk.  With that in mind they are not currently looking at modifying the import capabilities. Service Desk supports doing this in Sharepoint and Google today, and my understanding is that this capability could be extended with some customization if needed.