News articles
Summarize
Summary of News articles
The News article content type in ServiceNow enhances communication by enabling the creation and publishing of company news and announcements through the Employee Center and Now Mobile app. This feature combines the Rich Content Editor with efficient publishing methods for high-volume content delivery.
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Key Features
- News Feed Widget: Displays news articles in customizable formats (vertical list or three-column grid) across various sections of the portal.
- Featured News Widget: Highlights important news articles at the top of the News Center page.
- Search Functionality: Employees can search for news articles using keywords, with AI Search providing relevant results.
- Category Organization: Content admins can categorize articles, allowing employees to filter and navigate news by topics such as Industry news or Company culture.
- Mobile Compatibility: News articles are accessible via the Now Mobile app, mirroring the content available on the portal.
- Publish Plans and Content Templates: News articles can be published using a structured publish plan or automatically via content templates for large volumes.
- Customization: The News Center and Article Detail pages can be customized to include additional content widgets and display settings.
Key Outcomes
By effectively utilizing the News article feature, ServiceNow customers can keep employees informed on important updates, enhance user engagement through categorized content, and streamline the publishing process for news articles. This leads to improved communication within the organization and a better user experience on both the portal and mobile app.
The News article content type combines content creation features from the Rich Content Editor with new publishing methods that enable high volume content publishing to the portal and Now Mobile app to keep employees updated on company news and announcements.
News articles in the employee portal
News articles are delivered to users through customizable instances of the News Feed widget. The News Feed widget instances appear on the portal Home page, News Center, Article detail page, and the emp_taxonomy_topic page. The admin can configure the News Feed widget to display news articles in a vertical list or as a three-column grid, add a call to action that links to another page, or to display the news categories. For more information, see Modify the News feed widget.
The Featured News widget appears at the top of the News Center page to display highlighted news articles. For information on configuring the Featured News widget, see Modify the Featured News widget.For ServiceNow instances that are on version Washington or later, the News Center automatically appears as a menu option in the top-level navigation menu (mega menu) to give users quick access to all the published news articles. To remove it from the menu, see Hide News Center from the Mega Menu.
Review the following graphic to understand how employees see and interact with the widgets that display News articles:
- News Center widget displays highlighted articles on the home page
- News Center button opens the News Center page
- Featured News widget displays highlighted articles in the News Center page.
- All news list uses the News feed widget to show news configured for delivery to this page
- When an employee clicks a news article, the full article opens in the Article details page
The three subsequent widgets (News info, News Header, and News Article Detail) work in tandem to display a news article. The three widgets contain the instance option Use dataloader. We recommend enabling this option as it allows the news widgets to share data with each other, which reduces calls to the server and web page loading time.
- News Info widget: Holds the Published date and Copy Link button
- News Header widget: Holds the headline, subheadline and image thumbnail
- News Article Detail widget: Holds the article body as created in the Rich Content
- Other news uses the News feed widget to show news configured for delivery to this page
Searching for news articles
When employees enter a keyword in the global search bar, Employee Center uses AI Search to return published news articles containing that keyword in the heading, subheading, article content, or category.
If the user with the system admin or content admin role uses the global search bar, the results include unpublished news articles.
News articles in the Now Mobile app
The Now Mobile app features the News center screen, which displays the same News articles that are published to the News feed widget in the portal. In addition, content managers can configure News articles to appear on the Now Mobile app Home screen.
For information on the Now Mobile app user experience, see News in Now Mobile. For information on publishing news articles, see Create a publish plan for your content.
Organizing news articles
Content admins and managers can assign one or more categories to a news article, for example Industry news or Company culture. Once the article is published, employees can see the categories associated with an article when previewing it in the News Feed widget on the Home page or in the News Center. An employee can click the category to open the Category page, which lists all the news articles associated to that category in reverse chronological order.
The following table demonstrates how categories enhance the user experience:
| Capability | Screen shot |
|---|---|
| When an employee searches for a news article, they can filter the search results by news category. | |
| The News Feed widget displays the categories for each article, which link to a page for that category. Each category page lists the associated news articles, organized by publication date, with the most recently published articles displayed first. The page also holds a Category list widget with links to the other category pages. The widget displays the categories based on the configured order. If there are multiple categories with the same order value, the system lists them in alphabetical order. |
|
| The News Center holds a Category list widget with links to the category pages. When an employee opens a news article, the Article detail page displays the news category at the bottom of the article. |
Publishing News articles
Like the other content types, News articles can be published using a publish plan. In addition, the Employee Center Pro supports content creators in publishing large volumes of News articles through Content templates. The content admin creates a Content template to define where News articles are published and who will see the News articles. Then, content creators associate a News article with a Content template to auto-generate publish plans (see the following screen shot).
For more information, see Content templates.
- The Employee Center Pro does not include a Content template for publishing to the Related news widget. You must either configure a Content destination and Content template, or manually create publish plans.
- News articles are not yet available in Campaigns.
Customizing the News experience
The News Center and Article Detail pages support other Content Publishing widgets. For example, you can configure the News Center page to display upcoming events. For information on configuring the portal pages, see Creating portal pages.
To set a limit for the number of articles displayed in the News widget or to select different pages for the News Center or Article display, see the News section of Properties installed with Content Publishing.
- The Article details page widgets require a
sys_idquery string parameter with the sys_id of the specific News Article. - We recommend having a News Dataloader widget in the Article details page, and enabling the Use Dataloader option in the other widgets in the page. This facilitates data sharing between the widgets on the page, which reduce the page loading time.