TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 07, 2012

Posts Tagged ‘Integration’

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ervice-now makes configuring SSO into your Service-now instance very simple.  By enabling a plugin and configuring a couple of properties, single sign-on can be set up in less than 10 minutes.  Documentation surrounding these SSO methods are also well done and easy to follow.

Recently, I’ve come across a number or clients that want to use Service-now as their main company portal and wish to configure their Service-now instance to generate an SSO token that can be consumed by a third party service provider.  In other words, they desire to have outbound single sign-on directed to of their other internal applications.  Because of this increasingly common request, I have created an update set that can be used for such a purpose called, Outbound Single Sign-on via Digested Token.

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ast week I wrote about how to send a file to Service-now via web services and attach it to a target record.  While that is the most common request for attachment handling in regards to an integration, I often hear requests for this to be bidirectional.  Sending attachments from Service-now to a third-party system isn’t something that we’ve actually implemented in the past.  However, with the number of people asking for it lately, I decided to write up a solution.

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ttaching a file to a record within the Service-now interface is a trivial task.  However, many customers have found it necessary to send an attachment via web services to Service-now.  This need is usually spawned from an integration with a 3rd-party product.  The SOAP Attachments update set is the perfect solution for this problem.

The update set has now been added to the latest release of Service-now as part of the core code.  You will only need this update set if you’re on an older build.

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Scheduled Data Extract

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ervice-now provides numerous ways of getting data into the system. The import set functionality supports pulling data in from an attachment, FTP(S) servers, JDBC data sources, etc. However, a common problem that many customers have is trying to get data out of their SN instance and into their data center. The simplest way to handle this currently is by having a report emailed to you on a scheduled basis. There has to be a better way!

Scheduled Data Extract ModulesThe good news is that there is a better way. The “Scheduled Data Extract” update set has been designed to allow a user to have reports, tables, or table views sent to a specific directory on a local mid server or FTP to a customer’s FTP/FTPS server on a scheduled basis. The “Scheduled Data Extract” update set has been battle-tested and is used by several large Service-now customers today.

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ne of the most basic needs that a customer has when building out their CMDB is extending it to match the types of CIs that they’re currently using in their company.  This is especially true when bringing data in from a 3rd-party CMDB (such as IBM’s CCMDB, HP’s uCMDB, etc) with Service-now.  Some of these CMDBs have hundreds of class types with scores of fields for each class.  How can you get the 3rd-party data into Service-now when the schema is so different?

There are essentially four main steps to accomplish this: decide what classes and fields need to be brought across, create a mapping document, extend the Service-now CMDB to accept the new classes, and send the data from the 3rd party CMDB to Service-now.

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If you have looked at the schema for many of the tables within Service-now, you’ve probably noticed the Correlation ID and Correlation Display fields and may have wondered what they are for.  Typically, these fields are used for integrating a third-party system with Service-now. Let’s assume that I am doing an integration with a alerting system system from HP called OpenView.  In this integration, alerts are sent from HP to Service-now.  When the ticket is updates and/or closed, Service-now updates/closes the alert in OpenView.

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or some Service-now.com implementations, there may be a need to modify the default login page.  In other implementations, it may be necessary or desirable to remove the login page SNC login formaltogether (this scenario would only apply if you have set up Single sign-on for your instance and you didn’t want users to authenticate directly against Service-now).  Even if you thought you wanted to disable the login page entirely I wouldn’t recommend it unless you had some very stringent security requirements that you couldn’t make an exception to.  The problem with removing the page entirely is that you cut off access to your Service-now instance entirely if your SSO portal goes down.  In an event like this, you probably want your Service-now administrator – and potentially process users – to be able to access the instance through a local login account (which requires a login page!).

Whatever the reason is, you may find it necessary to modify the behavior of the Service-now login page.  If you do, there are a couple of options I would recommend.

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Latest Comments

  • Mark Stanger: This functionality doesn’t connect to an FTP server. See this line in the post above…...
  • Mark Stanger: The report page is back-end XML so there’s no way to directly manipulate the behavior of that...
  • Mark Stanger: Due to some ServiceNow limitations, the localhost MID server option had to be removed.
  • Matt Haak: Is it possible to use this with the local Mid Server (mid.server.localhost) It appears from this community...