Hi @Tom Sienkiewicz ,
Thanks for confirming. That matches what I was expecting.
I completely agree with you about avoiding customization here. CWM is evolving quite quickly, so staying as close to OOB as possible is definitely the safer approach.
And I agree with the use case as well. For Stories, Work Notes are usually much more useful operationally than Comments, especially when agile teams use them to track internal progress and technical updates.
I did a little more digging after your reply, and there is technically another option, although I wouldn’t call it an OOB CWM solution.
ServiceNow’s generic Activity Stream Compose component supports multiple journal fields. It can display journal fields such as Comments and Work Notes together, normally as separate tabs or in a stacked view. The underlying component therefore supports exactly the experience you are describing.
See here - https://horizon.servicenow.com/workspace/components/now-activity-stream-compose-connected?
The problem is that CWM does not currently expose that as a documented configuration option. The documented CWM configuration allows us to control the fields shown in the Story side panel through the CWM view of rm_story, but that does not change the journal composer in the Activity tab.
https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/yokohama/it-business-management/collaborative-work-management/conf...?
So at the moment I see three realistic options:
Stay completely OOB: add Work Notes to the CWM Story view or use Open full details when someone needs to add a Work Note. ServiceNow explicitly supports opening the original record from the CWM side panel for this purpose. -
https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/it-business-management/collaborative-work-management/update-detail...
UI Builder customization: if the Activity Stream Compose component used by the CWM page is exposed/configurable, its field definition could potentially contain both comments and work_notes. That would give users both options in the composer. Technically the platform component supports this, but it would mean customizing the CWM experience.
https://horizon.servicenow.com/workspace/components/now-activity-stream-compose-connected?
https://www.servicenow.com/community/next-experience-articles/journal-field-components-in-configurab...
Smaller custom action: instead of changing the Activity component itself, create an Add Work Note action/dialog that writes to rm_story.work_notes. This would leave the OOB Activity component alone, although it is still custom development.
Given how frequently CWM is updated, I would personally stay with option 1 for now unless having Work Notes directly in the Activity tab is a strong business requirement.
But I definitely agree that being able to configure Comments, Work Notes, or both should ideally be an OOB CWM setting.
The interesting part is that the underlying ServiceNow Activity Stream component already supports that concept, CWM just doesn’t currently expose it as a standard configuration.
Hopefully we see that added in a future release.
Dan Junqueira
