What is the difference between users and contacts

[Tramell Jones]

What is the difference between users and contacts?  I have a list of contacts which i thought where part of the user list, when I try to create new users it's creating duplicates.

[DirkRedeker]

Hi

There is NO way to prevent ServiceNow to write the "Base-Data" to the user table, as this is an OOB built-in functionality.

Every time you write a record to the "Contact" table, it MUST utilize the base fields from the user table. You cannot stop this.

The screenshot below shows that the table "Contact" (1) is a child table of the "User" (2) table - because "Contact" extends "User".

You can see, that some fields/columns from the "Contact table are from the base table "User" (4) and some are specific to the "Contact" (3) table.

Let me know if your question is answered now and mark my answer as correct/helpful, please.

BR

Dirk

[DirkRedeker]

Hi

Do you have an update on this?

If your issue was solved, please mark the correct answer as correct/helpful.

Thanks for marking.

BR

Dirk

[Amanda Buggy]

Hi,

Because "Contact" is extended from the base table "User" you can not prevent contacts also being users.

EG every "contact" must be a "user", but not every "user" needs to be a "contact"

However you can filter them out or restrict them by checking the "class" eg and class is/is not "Contact" in your ACLs, etc 

This is similar to all the different task types (incident, request, case, etc) are in the "task [task]" table as it is the Base table but not in their own task "type tables" eg you don't see Requests in the Incident table.

This is because the extended tables share the core fields (number, assigned to) but also have extra fields (eg incident state) etc.

[Mario Escalante]

Hi,

I am new to ServiceNow and we just installed CSM.

I have the opposite problem. We have an employee that has been sending e-mails to open cases in CSM and he was added as a Contact. This week this employee was transferred to a new position and we had to create a user account for him, so he can login using OKTA.

He appears as Contact in ServiceNow, how can I convert it from a Contact to a User?

I will appreciate your help.

Thank you,

Mario

[DirkRedeker]

Hi

A Contact is always a user too!

You can go to:

> sys_user.list

And you  will also find also all records there.

To allow a Contact to Log In, make sure this record has a value in the "UserID" field.

If you want to log in at ServiceNow natively, you just need to set a password.

If you log in via OKTA, you will not need a password setting on SerivceNow.

Let me know if that works and helped.

BR

Dirk