Is my SN BAs/Devs lying to me?

[Brendan O_Sulli]

I am a help desk team leader and we have recently switched over to using service now. My fear was that since our team no longer updates our help desk form internally and is updated by our Service Now vendor team, we would have slower updates and poorer quality updates. 

Originally, we created an option in the Service Catalog section of service now which essentially has two drop downs (issue type and issue subtype) that users can select to indicate what issue they are facing.

I had asked for specific text to appear in the form when they selected either of the drop downs (this text details common issues and their solutions so they don't need to actually submit the form most of the time), but our service now contact said this was not possible. After lots of pushback they found a way to do it, but said that text formatting was not possible (e.g. no bolding, bullet points, underlines, font colouring, etc) so our text is kind of hard to parse for a reader. 

I also requested that there be a way for our team to update the dropdown items (issue type/subtype) and the help text without having to find money in our budget to engage the service now team everytime we needed to make an update.

They said this could not be done and recommended we just put a link to a document with all the common issues/solutions and we can just update the document when needed. But if you've ever worked a help desk role, you'll know users rarely read up on how to solve their own issue first.

I suggested that two tables be created with columns Table 1: 1. Issue type, 2. issue subtype, Table 2: 1. (Linked to table 1) Issue Type, 2. (Linked to table 1) 2. Issue subtype, 3. Help text

Where if we added a new row to table 1, new drop downs would appear in the form, and if we added a new row to table 2 the associated drop downs would have help text appear.

My questions are:

1. Is it possible to have the service catalogue form built but changes to drops downs and help text are updated/managed by a non-service now dev team?

2. Can text that appears dynamically based on drop down fields be formatted (e.g. using markdown or html styling standards), regardless if done by the ServiceNow dev team or not.

3. Are there other known solutions to the objective of having a service catalogue (SC) form contents managed by non-service now dev teams?

[haninger_3]

To make a drop down menu with entries you can control, it may be possible to have a "Lookup Select Box" that queries a custom table that you have write access to. Make sure you request an Active true/false field so that you can easily deactivate entries.

A UI page can have formatted text. It could be displayed or hidden dynamically using a UI Script or a UI Policy (a lower-code version of a UI Script).

Generally, having a non-admin manage catalog items gives me the heebie-jeebies. It would likely require you to have admin access, which I'd want to limit only to people I REALLY REALLY trusted not to go poking around where they shouldn't. You'd need to have really good control over yourself and make sure you make your changes in an update set in a sub-prod instance first, move the update set(s) to another sub-prod to see how that goes, and then to Prod when ready. You'd also have to learn what gets captured in an update set and what doesn't.

It's nice to think "if I break it, I'll fix it", but the reality is that your admins/devs are the ones who would likely be fixing your mistake. They are probably busy enough fixing their own mistakes!

For the most part, anything is possible the ServiceNow platform, given the time. You have to be really careful, though! The more you customize, the more you own and the more likely things are to break.

[Brendan O_Sulli]

I mean, I'm not looking to have admin access in service now. But I'm just surprised it doesn't really offer a basic functionality where form contents can be updated in real time without the use of a ServiceNow developer/specialist. Like I can build this type of functionality via SharePoint/Excel (for example) where specific users have access to a table they can only update in predefined/predictable ways which updates a form in a predefined/predictable way so that the form's structure / skeleton is updated by a specialist but the contents are updated by non-specialists/a small set of specific users.

Is this not a simple/existing functionality for ServiceNow?

[Brendan O_Sulli]

I mean, I'm not looking to have admin access in service now. But I'm just surprised it doesn't really offer a basic functionality where form contents can be updated in real time without the use of a ServiceNow developer/specialist. 

Is this not a simple/existing functionality for ServiceNow?