Activate and Configure Plugin Best Practices

[tompham]

What is the general best practice for activating and configuring a plugin in ServiceNow.   I've read the following: https://community.servicenow.com/community/blogs/blog/2017/03/06/how-do-you-plug-in-a-plugin-the-ins....   However, it does not provide a high level best practice on the general process.  

For example, our organization has two environments (Prod and SubProd).   If we wanted to activate and configure a plugin such as Change Management or PPM.   What is the best practice for performing this operation.   Would we need to activate the plugins first in both instance, then perform configuration on subprod, then prod? What is the general best practice for this type of work?

Thank you.      

[Adam Lankford]

Thomas,

Here is my process when I get a requirement that requires a specific plugin.   I activate this plugin in our sub-prod development environment.   I create update sets to capture any configuration changes to this plugin.   Once I'm ready for testing, I enable the plugin in my test environment.   I then migrate any update sets with configuration data.   The test environment is then tested/validated and any missed changes are migrated in new update sets from the development instance.

Once unit testing is completed, the same steps are preformed on the production environment.   Enable plugin, migrate update sets.

Hope this helps.

[lisaed]

Hi Adam

I read your comment about activating plugins and it sounds llike you have some great knolwedge that I can leverage, so a few questions on expertise required for activating plugins.     We have 2 resources who I would class as Admin level trained, that are being asked to do work like activating plugins.  

The question is.......What level of experience and training would you say would be required before you were doing work like this on the ServiceNow Instances?  

When you speak to activating and importing update sets, what level of expirience and training would you advise/expect would be reuqired to do something like activatre the SCCM plug in and have this fully working and integrated?         With your many years experience, you make it sound uncomplicated, but when in your SNOW maturity do you think you had the skills for this type of work.       I certainly do not want to overcommit newly Foundation trained staff to commit to work that is more complicated than some imagine, hence asking for your advise.       Thanks in advance for your assistance.     Lisa

[Paul Curwen]

I would always activate a plugin in a sub-PROD instance first. Evaluate it and test it out make sure it's what you want and is desireable. Once complete, you can activate it in your PROD instance with the reassurance that you have evaluated and tested it in the sub-PROD instance and the risk to PROD is therefore minimised. If you are making any configuration/customisation changes to the various files the plugin creates after the activation, then you would want to capture these in an Update Set/Application and promote to your PROD instance once fully tested and the plugin is active in your PROD instance.

[Adam Lankford]

Lisa,

I've been working in ServiceNow for about 3 years now.   Before ServiceNow, I've spent 15+ years administering systems like PeopleSoft and developing systems from scratch.   I would recommend that before any of this work is to be preformed that your administrators have taken the ServiceNow Administration course.   The next course that would be beneficial would be the Advanced System Administrator course.   ServiceNow does offer a System Admin Certification that we have required our admins to complete within one year of their Admin training course.

Demand for ServiceNow in my organization has really taken off.   I was originally the only administrator.   In the past 2 years, I've trained 4 others to be able to make changes and migrate them between environments.   Scripting knowledge is required for many development tasks in ServiceNow.   We have 2 individuals that are programmers by trade.   It was easy for these programmers to transition their programming knowledge to scripting in ServiceNow.

So in summary, you do need technical and experienced staff to configure ServiceNow.   There is a lot you can do without coding, but there are still many functions that require it.   Be sure to use your sub-production instances for learning and experimentation.   Peer review and technical lead sign-off should be required for any changes that are to be moved to production.

I hope this helps.   Please let me know if you have additional questions.

Adam Lankford