TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 07, 2012

Category: System Definition

Exporting Service Catalog Items in One Step

Thursday, 26 January, 2012 10:54 Written by Mark Stanger
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his post comes in response to a request I received from some of my colleagues at ServiceNow to be able to export a catalog item definition to XML and transport it between instances. I’ve written before about how you can quckly export and import data between ServiceNow instances using the XML export/import context menus. While this works great for a lot of situations, it doesn’t work so great for data that resides in multiple tables, but really makes sense to be exported as a single unit. The components that make up a Catalog item definition are actually stored in over 21 separate tables! It is possible to export a catalog item but you have to do at least 21 separate exports to do it. In this post, I’ll show you how you can set up a UI action to export information from all 21+ tables that make up a catalog item definition…in one click!

Export Catalog Item

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Login Terms and Conditions Dialog

Wednesday, 12 October, 2011 08:57 Written by Mark Stanger
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ServiceNow provides various methods for logging users into an instance. Local login, LDAP, SAML, and Digested Token are all used pretty regularly by customers. One thing that is often requested, but usually not successfully addressed, is the need to have the logged-in user accept some terms or conditions of use before they are allowed to use the system. The solutions attempted before usually suffered from a variety of issues ranging from overly-complex modification of one or more installation exits to being able to easily bypass the terms page entirely. In the end, these solutions seemed to be broken on some level. As we’ve seen requests for this type of functionality increase over the past few months, Jacob Andersen (who developed almost all of the integration and SSO information at SNCGuru) and I decided to collaborate to create a solution that actually works!

Login Terms Acceptance

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Adding ESS Chat Capability to a Standard Homepage

Thursday, 15 September, 2011 10:02 Written by Mark Stanger
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f you’re reading this you’ve probably already seen the chat capability that ServiceNow provides. This is a great feature but it’s only currently available if you deploy the ServiceNow content management system (CMS) along with it. I recently worked with a co-worker, Greg Willis, to develop a way to add end-user Help Desk chat capability to a standard homepage. This article explains how you can do it too!

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Control the Execution Order of Request Items in an Order Guide

Tuesday, 23 August, 2011 06:43 Written by Mark Stanger
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ately I’ve been doing some service catalog work for a couple of clients and I’ve come across a requirement that I really haven’t had to address before. The requirement deals with order guides…specifically with the ability to control the execution order of individual items within an order guide. You’re probably aware that ServiceNow provides complete control over the ordering of tasks within a catalog item, but what do you do with an order guide that needs to have one item complete before the next 2 items can start? There’s not a simple way to control this behavior by default so I came up with a way and I’ll share it here.

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Single Click Impersonation Return

Monday, 18 July, 2011 07:42 Written by Mark Stanger
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noticed an enhancement request from Matt Beran on Twitter over the weekend. The enhancement request was for an easier way to end a user impersonation session. Currently, you have to click the impersonation icon, wait for the dialog to appear, and select your original account to end an impersonation session. While this might not be a huge issue for some people, it can get kind of old if you’re trying to quickly do a lot of testing or troubleshooting that requires frequent user impersonations. This post explains how you can create a UI script to add a button that will end impersonation and return you to your original session in a single click!

One-Click Unimpersonate Button

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What Everybody Should Know About ServiceNow Security

Thursday, 30 June, 2011 10:56 Written by Mark Stanger
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Follow these guidelines to make sure you’re using the right security technique for every situation!

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Incident Priority Lookup

Monday, 23 May, 2011 08:21 Written by Mark Stanger
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One of the basic pieces of any ITIL-based incident management setup is a priority matrix. Impact and Urgency drive a Priority calculation that can then be used to prioritize work and drive SLAs (among other things). ServiceNow comes with these prioritization fields and also includes a default calculation for you. While this setup works fine, it’s not very user-friendly to configure. The priority matrix is completely code-based so admins are really the only ones who can modify it. You also have to know where that calculation takes place (the ‘calculatePriority’ business rule). It’s just not as simple as it should be.

Last week at Knowledge11, I presented at an incident management session. One of the things I talked about was how you can get yourself out of the code by using lookup tables. I’ve written before about Assignment Lookups and in this article I’ll show you how you can use a ‘Priority Lookup’ table to get away from writing and modifying your priority matrix in code and allow non-admin users to be able to manage this matrix for you. Special thanks to Ivan Martez and Martin Wood who came up with this idea!

Incident Priority Lookup

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Approval Email Mailto Image Links

Thursday, 19 May, 2011 07:15 Written by Mark Stanger
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ast day at Knowledge11! What a great conference! I’ve had a great time meeting with so many awesome people this week. Yesterday Ian Broz and I were helping Karen Lazarenko during a 1-on-1 (maybe 2-on-1 in this case) session. She had a cool idea to make approval request emails coming from her system a little bit more intuitive by replacing or modifying the ‘mailto’ reply text links for approval and rejection with images that more clearly distinguished the links and the purpose of the email.

The challenge that we faced was how to easily add those images while maintaining the mailto functionality and populating the correct information (including the watermark ID) on the reply email. Here’s a screenshot of the solution we came up with. Read on to see how we did it!

Approval Email Images

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Manually Add a Record to an Update Set

Tuesday, 26 April, 2011 07:14 Written by Mark Stanger
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he primary mechanism in Service-now for transporting configuration changes between instances is the System Update Sets functionality. If you’ve worked with Service-now much at all, you’re familiar with this functionality and know that it can be a huge time saver. You also probably know that there are a few gotchas to update sets that can cause problems if you don’t pay attention to them. One of these gotchas is that not all changes you make in your instance get recorded in update sets. Of course, this is by design and it’s usually a good thing that saves you from problems. There are, however, some situations where you need to capture updates to a specific record in a table even though you don’t want all of the records in that table being captured. In this article I’ll show you a solution to this problem.

Manual Update Set Inclusion

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Take Control of Your System Homepages!

Wednesday, 06 April, 2011 05:56 Written by Mark Stanger
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or the most part, homepage administration in Service-now is pretty simple. The basic concepts (which are documented on the Service-now wiki) are almost always enough to get by on. There are a couple of homepage administration situations that I’ve seen come up quite often that aren’t as easily understood. In this article I’ll describe the following situations and show you how to deal with them in your Service-now implementation.

  • How can I give ESS users (users with no role) access to more than one homepage?
  • How can I restrict roled users (itil, etc.) from modifying, adding, or deleting homepages?

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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...