Sharing workspaces between App Engine applications

[Paul Bloem]

We have two App Engine applications that create cases/tasks for a number of different groups, and at least one of those groups will be assigned tasks from both applications. We would love to provide a simple, streamlined experience for those teams, but I'm not sure how to structure things to make that happen.

Currently, each application has its own workspace, but making users switch between workspaces seems clumsy especially if they aren't "Agent" type users that will be spending most of their day in ServiceNow. Is there a best practice for how to handle this? Should we be creating a separate App Engine app for each group like this that only contains a workspace tailored to their needs?

Any feedback or discussion would be appreciated, I know there may not be a specific "correct" answer.

Thanks in advance!

Paul

[WORKFLOW-COWBOY]

Hi @Paul Bloem - I am glad you are aware that there is probably not a "specific" answer as I don't think of the answer as "right" or "wrong". 

Have you asked the target users what they would like to use? I would temper that against what your team has the bandwidth to develop and support. 

I think it could come down to the name of the Workspace (the least technical part). For example, the name of the workspace might be centered around the team using it, the business function it provides, or even the main application it's related to. 

If you can coral the users into a single workspace, then variants and audiences would be your friends. Variants are going to allow both teams to view the same URL, but get served different pages based on their role (think something like a different dashboard homepage default for each department or a different form view for records). Audiences are going to determine what List categories and lists they can see on the lists page. Going this direction results in a more user-centric type of experience that may be different for some of the users, but allows you to keep things in the same workspace. This might increase reusability and is the type of logic used in many of the ServiceNow product Workspaces. 

OTHO, your user teams may prefer their own specific workspace ("The A-Team Workspace"). Or the Business Process might be complicated enough that it really warrants it's own dedicated workspace (this is how most ServiceNow product workspaces are built IMHO (Ex. SOW, SecOps, CSM, etc)). 

I think it comes back to what your team has the bandwidth to build and support in the long term.