Migrating knowledge articles from BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management
If your organization uses BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management and plans to use BMC Helix Innovation Suite Knowledge Management (ISKM), you can migrate existing articles by using the migration functionality.
We recommend that you use only one Knowledge Management solution across all BMC Helix applications in your environment. Running multiple knowledge providers simultaneously can cause inconsistent search results, visibility issues, and broken links.
After migration is completed, users can search for and work with migrated articles directly in ISKM and BMC Helix ITSM consoles. Authoring in BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management is no longer supported after ISKM is enabled.
Benefits of migrating to ISKM
ISKM provides the following capabilities over BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management:
Provides a common interface for knowledge access across BMC Helix ITSM, BMC Helix Business Workflows, and BMC Helix Digital Workplace, reducing training and onboarding effort.
Preserves existing articles, metadata, relationships, and usage data through a guided, one‑time migration from BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management.
Enables users to search and access knowledge articles within ITSM workflows and through Digital Workplace.
Uses the BMC Helix Innovation Suite scalable architecture to support enterprise‑scale growth and future platform enhancements.
Supports governance of knowledge content by using structured templates, mandatory metadata, and defined lifecycle states.
Aligns knowledge content with BMC HelixGPT and future AI‑driven capabilities for contextual recommendations and agent assistance.
For details on the benefits of ISKM, see Product overview.
Data processing stages during migration
The migration follows an extract, transform, and load (ETL) approach.
- During extraction, articles and related data such as relationships, statistics, inline images, and registered custom template definitions are retrieved from BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management.
- During transformation, the data is normalized and mapped to the ISKM schema. For custom templates, field-level mappings between BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management and ISKM templates are applied, and the data is adjusted to handle unsupported or non-migrated values.
- During the load phase, the transformed data is migrated into ISKM. For custom templates, corresponding templates are created in ISKM based on the validated mappings, and associated articles are migrated. The system preserves content order, rich text formatting, inline image references, and supported metadata.
- After loading, the system triggers full-text search indexing and vector database indexing. The process updates BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management article URLs to point to the corresponding ISKM articles.
A migration task table tracks each step, the number of records processed, and their status. If a custom template fails validation or exceeds supported limits, it is skipped, and the failure is logged while the migration continues for other templates.
Migration process overview
The following image provides an overview of the process that you need to perform to migrate knowledge articles:
| Action | Reference |
|---|---|
| Review the key considerations to learn about the type of data that is migrated and the features that have different UI or behavior after migration. | Key considerations for migration |
| Perform the pre-migration tasks. | Pre-requisite tasks |
(Applicable only for custom templates) If your organization uses custom templates (or knowledge sources) in BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management, you need to prepare equivalent templates in ISKM before migrating articles. | Preparing custom templates for migration |
Initiate migration and indexing to migrate data and make articles searchable in ISKM and integrated applications. | Performing the migration |
| Validate the migrated data to confirm that articles are correctly available and usable. | Validating data |
Key considerations for migration
Before migrating from BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management to ISKM, consider the factors listed in this section.
- Migration is a one-time, full migration of all supported articles. Selective migration based on criteria such as date or template is not supported.
- Migration is supported for the custom templates and the following out-of-the-box BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management templates:
- How To
- Reference
- Known Error
- Problem Solution
- KCS
- Custom template migration supports:
- Up to 10 RTF fields per custom template
- Up to 30 attachments per article
- All migrated articles are added to the IT knowledge set and IT line of business by default.
Data that you can migrate
When you run the migration, the following data is extracted from BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management, transformed, and loaded into ISKM:
- Article content and structure
- Full article body (rich text)
- Multilingual versions of each article
- Article metadata, including product categories, operational categories, business service, company, organization, department, region, assigned group, and site
- Article history and user interactions
- View count, helpful or not helpful votes (mapped to ISKM two-value feedback)
- Feedback comments
- Pins
- Social posts
- Article history logs
- Update requests
- Relationships and associations
- Article associations (migrated as Related To)
- Linked ticket count
- Indexing and search readiness
- After articles are migrated, the system triggers FTS indexing and Vector DB embedding and indexing
- These indexing jobs make sure that the migrated articles become searchable within ISKM and consuming applications.
What's changed for some of the features?
The following table lists the features or tasks that have different UI or behavior after migration.
| BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management | BMC Helix Innovation Suite Knowledge Management |
|---|---|
| Permissions from BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management | Existing permissions are mapped to ISKM permissions. Foundation data–based visibility is handled in ISKM knowledge sets. For details, see Setting up roles and permissions and Managing knowledge sets and knowledge templates. |
| Articles with pending approvals or work in progress statuses | These articles are migrated as Draft |
| Articles with Optional review 2 (Proofreading) statuses | These articles are migrated as SME review |
| Fields as Approval status, Organization, Settings, and To be approved by | These fields are not migrated. Any filters created using these fields in BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management will not be available after migration. |
| Feedback rating of 5 options: Poor (1) to Excellent (5) | Simplified feedback rating of 2 options: 0 (Bad) or 1 (Good)
|
What is not migrated?
- BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management KCS data. For details, see KCS knowledge article assessment.
- Articles created by using the Decision Tree out-of-the-box template
- Articles converted from external file formats. For details, see Converting articles from external file formats.
- Article visibility groups (recomputed based on foundation fields)
- Search boost values
- Authoring notes
- Environment metadata
- Extended approval configuration. For details, see Configuring approvals.
- Archived articles
- Notifications history
- Resolution categories
- Feedback Original Locale value (160)
Where to go from here
- (Applicable only for custom templates) If your organization uses custom templates (or knowledge sources) in BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management, you need to prepare equivalent templates in ISKM before migrating articles. For details, see Preparing custom templates for migration.
- To perform migration, see Performing the migration.
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