what should I do to "retire" a location in the Servicenow?

[major li]

Dear experts,

Currently in my organization, we are having a request from business user.

There is a location has been carved out so that the location record in [cmn_location] table is definitely deactivated.

But what about all the other records in the system? For example, the incident from the caller in that location, asset, CI or even service. 

Could you share your experiences in that topic? I would probably design a catalog item to automate the whole process.

Many thanks in advance. 

[Mark Manders · Accepted solution]

There are a couple of things you could do, but it all depends on how it is exactly working within your company. Locations don't have an 'active' field, so it will remain in the system. Usually, records on a 'location' either have the field optional for all locations (a printer can be installed in any location) or is automatically filled (like an incident taking the location from the user calling it in, unless the user reports it for another location, and the agent taking the call can change it). 
As said: it is all related to your configuration on the usage of locations.

What happened to the CI's? Is one location completely merged into another one? Are all assests and ci's moved from closed location to new one? Or are they no longer part of the company (in that case, inactivate the ci's).
The records created for the location (incidents/changes/requests): you need to evaluate if they are still needed (fixing the sink on the second floor men's bathroom is on longer needed, fixing the mobile phone of the sales director that is now working from another office, is still necessary). 
There is no 'one size fits all' in this, especially not because we don't know how the location field is used. We don't know your instance. You can find all 'task'-records that are still active on that location and either close them, or update them via script, or manually, but again: it depends on what the content of the record is.
Don't delete the location record. You still want it for historical references (what if a printer is moved from the old location, to another one and starts acting up again -> based on old incidents, you can see that it also acted up on that old location). 

[major li]

hi Mark,

thanks. 

after discussion, we would start with CSDM and then we filter all the table referencing to the [cmn_location]. 

probably, we would close the operational related table then go to foundation domain table.