Create an incident or a service request by an email generated from another plateform

[Elelyon2]

Hi I need to build an interface to automatically create incidents or service requests from other systems that do not support API. It should be done by email.

My question is: Is there a template for the emails that needs to be generated by those other systems (subject, body content)?  The question is not how to configure ServiceNow per say but rather what preformatted template I should provide to the administrators of the source system that they should use as guideline for the email they'll send to ServiceNow

Any example would help?

Thanks

[Uncle Rob]

No.  Its entirely dependent on what the business stakeholders want the resulting record to look like.
We don't even know what kind of record you want.  Incident?  Requested Item?  Change?  Change Task?  Problem?  Something custom?

So here's what you do.
Whomever needs to receive these records tells you what fields need to be filled in what what information.
Then you tell your other system's admin to structure a body with name value pairs.  The names MUST be the database name of the servicenow field.  So say we wanted a short and long description, as well as a priority... my email to the other system admin would be ....

"Please structure the body of your message like so:

short_description: <your short description>
description:  <your description>

priority: <a number from 1 - 5>

correlation_id:  <whatever your system's unique ID is for this record>

etc, etc, for all the fields you need to populate.  Then Inbound Actions will match name value pairs to fields of the same name in the destination table.

"But Robert, isn't Flow Designer better for this?"
"Not until Flow Designer can interpret name value pairs from email like Inbound Actions can"

[Elelyon2]

Hi Robert,

thank you for your insight. It's what I was looking for as guidance. It's in a context of creating incidents and service requests. I also understand that in my configuration of ServiceNow I'll have to create Inbound Actions. Here are my sub-questions:

1- I see that you gave me information on the body of the email, should the subject be specific or it doesn't matter?

2- I'll have to make one action to 'Create an Incident'. All emails generated by other systems will be able to use that template as they will be filling the same fields in ServiceNow; am I right? 

3- For Service Request creation action, one of the fields passed in the email should be the database ID of the service request in Service Now so it would know which Sr to create, am I right?

4- Finally how does ServiceNow knows which Inbound action to trigger when it receives an email? Is there a flag or indicator that should be put in the email?

Thanks a lot. Having these guidelines will be very helpful and enough to solve my issue.

Much appreciated