Organizations often struggle to notify people in crisis situations. Crisis situations can be system outages, natural disasters, or any event that requires people to be notified. A time consuming manual process is usually involved to send notifications ensuring the right people are notified. Sometimes laws, regulations, and/or audit require that the recipients of the alerts confirm receipt of the alert or confirm whether they need help or not.
Crisis Alert is a custom scoped application built on the ServiceNow platform leveraging ServiceNow Notify to solve this issue. It was built as a utility type application that provides input of Groups, Users, and/or a filter condition of users that need to be notified. Crisis Alerts can be created by other applications within the ServiceNow platform to drive the mass communications for those records. Notifications can be sent via email, SMS, and/or text to Voice and the solution will look at the targeted recipient's notification devices in ServiceNow and reach out to those users via those devices. If input is required from the user to confirm they received the crisis alert or that action is required is logged as well for auditing purposes.
Licensing Requirements:
- Platform Runtime for the creators of Crisis Alerts.
- Notify licenses for the recipients of the alerts.
- A Twilio account is also required but done separately.
The solution is comprised of two update sets found on ServiceNow Share: https://share.servicenow.com/app.do#/detailV2/66c49c9c1386a600f609d6076144b036/overview
- Crisis Alert Scoped Application vX.xml - This includes all the scoped application files. Upload, preview, and commit this update set first.
- Crisis Alert Global Scope Code vX.xml - This file can be found in the Supporting Files section on the Details tab. This includes global scoped files that are required for the application. Upload, preview, and commit this update set second.
Setup:
- Ensure that ServiceNow Notify is configured and working on the instance.
- It works best if you purchase a dedicated Twilio phone number for Crisis Alerts. This number can be purchased through your Twilio account and once purchased it will be automatically downloaded into your instance by clicking Twilio configuration under the Notify\Administration application.
- Copy down the E.164 formatted Twilio phone number that you would like to utilize for the Crisis Alert application. Example: +18005551212
- Upload, preview, and commit the two update sets from ServiceNow Share.
- Change your application scope to Crisis Alert by clicking the Settings gear in the upper right corner of your desktop browser, and then choosing Developer.
- Navigate to Crisis Alert\Properties, and enter the E.164 Twilio phone number into the x_snc_crisis_alert.crisis_alert.phone_number system property on this page.
- Set the Notify group for the Twilio number to the Crisis Alert Group.
- Navigate to Notify\Numbers and select the Twilio number that will be utilized by the Crisis Alert application.
- Type 'Crisis Alert Group' in the Notify group field..
- Click Update to save the record.
- Setup notification devices for the ServiceNow users.
- These can be added via Notification preferences from the User Profiles or a script can be leveraged to create them for all users.
- It may be useful to add the Notification Devices related list to the User form.
- When adding SMS type notification devices, the Service Provider field is required out of the box, but this field is not utilized by ServiceNow Notify so any selection can be made.
- Make sure the SMS and Voice phone numbers are entered in E.164 format.
- Navigate Crisis Alert\Create New to test the application setup.
- An annotation has been added at the top of the Crisis Alert form with further instructions. This annotation can easily be removed once you are familiar with the application.
The data center is on fire!
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