Advice on changing group names

johansec · ‎08-16-2017

Our instance has gone live to our company about 4 months ago. When we set up our groups in AD our NOC named our groups with their standards. These standards included prefix that is confusing end users when viewing reports and selecting groups from reference fields.

I have been tasked with giving each group a "Friendly Name". So I cannot change the name in ad but can change it when it is being imported into our system. I am concern that there will be scripts somewhere that are referencing groups by their name.

I thought of maybe adding a column to the groups table that will contain a friendly version of the groups technical name but not sure if this is best practice.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Pradeep Sharma · ‎08-16-2017

Hello Cory,

To add, you can use "Code Search" functionality to find a particular line of group name and where it is being used in the system. Here is more detailed info.

Using Code Search to make developing on the platform easier

P.S: This will only scan few tables. Please refer section "Tables included in code search scanning:" in the blog.

View solution in original post

SanjivMeher · ‎08-16-2017

I would suggest changing the name and finding out if any script is using its name and change it accordingly.

Adding a column will not make any difference, since your display name will still be the out of box name field. And changing the display value to a custom field is not a good idea.

How many such groups do you have. And Why do we want to keep the name unchanged in AD but change in ServiceNow?

In my past projects, we used to have our own ServiceNow Groups and we were only using the AD Group email to send emails to the whole group.

Please mark this response as correct or helpful if it assisted you with your question.

johansec · ‎08-16-2017

We have around 60 groups.

This is a company policy to use this naming convention and they will not flex on it. Even if they did, it would still change the name and break any scripts referencing the old name.

I think I am going to have to do as you have suggested and change the name and see what breaks but just wanted to see if there were any other options first.

SanjivMeher · ‎08-16-2017

Yes. Changing the name is the best option for long term. You will just need to put some extra effort finding out where it is used.

Using global search you can find most of it. Only workflow context is the difficult part.

Please mark this response as correct or helpful if it assisted you with your question.

Goran WitchDoc · ‎08-16-2017

Could do a quick search through BRs for like current.assignment_group and see what you end up there. Don't know if you using more "group fields" than assignment group thou.