6 Reasons to Love Service Portal

[Matt Metten]

With the Helsinki release came the introduction of Service Portal. Those of us who have been knee-deep in CMS for the past few years are very excited about this new addition!

Here's a list of 6 things that I have come to love about Service Portal:

1. No Jelly
   While I'm disappointed to basically have to dump the years of learning Jelly, I'm so very glad to have more modern ways of serving up data. I also am happy for what this will do for the customer base as you now no longer need someone with such a specific skill set to run your portal. Finding AngularJS and Bootstrap developers is WAY easier than finding Jelly specialists.
2. No More iframes
   Probably the greatest limitation of CMS is the requirement to use iframes for anything involving data (forms mainly). While Service Portal has a bit of a catch up to do on some of the OOB features, the ability to get at the data in a single page view is pretty awesome.
3. Page Designer
   One of the most innovative UI changes in ServiceNow I've seen in recent years has to be Page Designer within the portal configuration tool. From one view you can build your pages, create your layouts, drop in your widgets, set your options, adjust CSS and define any meta properties you need. You can even preview the results as it will be rendered within various viewport sizes (mobile, tablet and desktop). We now have a very low-code approach to building out portal pages!
4. Widget Editor
   For those looking to get down and dirty with functionality, widgets are your friend. The widget editor itself is also an amazing approach to development. In one pane you can view your HTML code, CSS/SCSS, Client Scripts and Server Scripts. Throw in some JSON and you can preview your changes. All without reloading the page! You can even set the options for your widget. If you're a pro-code type, this is for you and it's a great improvement from the Dynamic Block days of CMS. And also for you pro-coders, make sure you check out the Github for Service Portal that's being compiled by the product team: https://github.com/service-portal
5. Robust Theming
   When using CMS your theme was basically a collection of CSS files. With Service Portal, you now have the ability to define a header and footer (both widgets by the way - think of the possibilities!), attach any CSS or JS files and set any Sass variables and away you go. You can then share this theme across multiple portals or not. So much more power available to you, in a very simple way of putting it all together.
6. Analytics
   My old digital marketing tendencies are pretty excited for all the things you can do now with the Log Entries available in Service Portal. Instead of serving up a list of "Popular Items", I can get more sophisticated and refine that list to "Popular Items (of people in my same location)" or "Popular Items (for those in my same role)". Why not? We have the data. Due to the iframe limitation of CMS we never had such portal specific data. I am probably the most excited to see what the community does with this information now as contextual experiences are a given with this new feature.

Hopefully you've had some time to kick the tires a bit on Service Portal. If you have, throw any comments you have below as I would love to hear what your impressions are!