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Native Policy Editor & Collaborative Authoring

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Scope

A ServiceNow-native authoring workspace where HR Policy Owners create, edit, and manage policy content as ServiceNow Knowledge Base articles. Supports real-time multi-cursor (CRDT-based) collaborative editing so multiple owners can safely co-author the same draft, plus a draft → publish workflow backed by ServiceNow's out-of-the-box KB versioning, so every published change increments a version and prior versions remain listable. As of early July 2026 the editor also supports creating a brand-new policy directly within the tool (rather than only editing existing KB articles) and assigning a manager to a given policy.

This feature does not generate content autonomously — it is a human-authored editing surface. The only AI-adjacent behavior is the downstream re-sync: once a human publishes, the advisor's retrieval index (conversational-policy-advisor) is automatically refreshed to reflect the new content. The collaborative-edit relay for concurrent cursors runs via the Nova Advisor Agent's WebSocket layer, per the source PRD — worth confirming that dependency at construction time given it makes the editor's real-time collaboration availability tied to the advisor agent's uptime.

Value

Moves the team off the interim workaround of ad hoc editing through the raw ServiceNow interface or external Word docs, and gives Novaworks a governed, collaborative home for the content the entire platform — including the advisor and every other policy-governed Nova agent — treats as source of truth. Worth shipping standalone: an HR team could adopt the governed editor even before deeper conversational advisor capability matures.

Acceptance criteria

  • An HR Policy Owner can open Policy List, select an existing KB article, and open it in the Policy Editor to write/edit content.
  • An HR Policy Owner can create a brand-new policy directly within the editor (not only edit existing articles) and assign a manager to it in the same flow.
  • Two HR Policy Owners can open the same draft article at the same time and see each other's cursors and edits in real time via CRDT-based sync, without overwriting each other's changes.
  • On save, a draft article is written in place, or a new draft version is checked out if the article was already published.
  • Clicking Publish increments the KB version through native ServiceNow versioning, and prior versions remain listable.
  • On publish, the advisor's retrieval index re-syncs to reflect the newly published content — verified end to end against conversational-policy-advisor, not just that the KB record itself updated.
  • The advisor never edits or publishes a policy on its own; every content change originates from an explicit human Publish action in this editor.
  • specs-superagent: adhoc-hr-projects — that Feature Set wants to reuse this editor's CRDT-based collaborative-authoring capability for a different document type: a project charter, co-authored by a task force rather than an HR Policy Owner. The Scope above is KB-article-specific today; whether the CRDT relay and draft/publish model generalize to a non-KB document type is unconfirmed and needs resolving with that Feature Set's owner before their Construction phase depends on it.