Ways to migrate all references of a group to a new group

AshutoshB · ‎08-18-2025

Hi Community,

I need to deactivate an existing group in ServiceNow and make sure all future tickets get assigned to a new group instead. The challenge is:

There are a large number of old tasks assigned to the current group.
The group is referenced in multiple business rules, client scripts, and assignment logic.
It also appears in hundreds of report filters.

I want to ensure that all future work routes to the new group, while also handling existing references.

👉 Is there any short or OOTB method in ServiceNow to replace all references of a group with a new one?
👉 If not, what would be the best process to safely migrate (e.g., handling open tasks, scripts, and reports) without breaking historical data?

Any guidance, best practices, or scripts would be really helpful.

Thanks in advance!

GlideFather · ‎08-18-2025

Hi @AshutoshB,

it could be done by Update job:

select a table (e.g. Incident)
set conditions (e.g. state is not closed or cancelled to avoid updating old records)
- click preview to see what and how many records would be touched
then select the new value in the assignment group

I recommend you uncheck the two fields as per shown in the below part - as keeping it true might trigger notifications upon assignment etc, and the other would mark the updated on and updated by values so it could lose some important data.

This example is for Incident but you can do it on Task table for more records, or do one update job for incidents, one for RITMs, one for Problems etc...

This update jobs have rollback record if something goes wrong 🙂 then you can select when to execute it.

Let me know if this helped you or what would it take to consider this as solution?

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/* If my response wasn’t a total disaster ↙️ ⭐ drop a Kudos or Accept as Solution ✅ ↘️ Cheers! */

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precious1 · 3 weeks ago

Hi this is a helpful feature. I guess where more logic is required, running background script would be the best option!

Thanks again

GlideFather · 3 weeks ago

@precious1 you are absolutely right, this has only limited usability and is more suitable for less technical staff.

It's great when you want to do one update for all the records - e.g. to add one and the same comment, assign to one specific group/user.

If you want for example assign the records to the manager of caller or location manager (examples), then you will need to script it

———
/* If my response wasn’t a total disaster ↙️ ⭐ drop a Kudos or Accept as Solution ✅ ↘️ Cheers! */