What is the best practice for customizing applications provided by ServiceNow?

[bbarber9]

I would like to know what the best practices are for customizing applications that are provided by ServiceNow, such as Policy and Compliance. I normally work on a dev instance and make changes and test them before pushing up to production. However, because I don't own the application I can't publish updates to it. What is the best way to modify an application provided by ServiceNow and push those changes from one instance to another?

[Chuck Tomasi · Accepted solution]

Hi Breyton,

The best practice is to create a new application scope and capture your changes there. This enables the use of Studio, source control, and publishing   your app rather than the legacy update sets. I have a colleague who is mere days away from publishing a blog article on this with great details (and caveats). I will socialize it when it becomes available.

[bbarber9]

Ok I'm looking forward to that article. I can see how that would enable me to add things to an application, but if I were to want to change elements of the application itself how would I go about that? For example, what would I do if I wanted to make a field mandatory on a form or tweak a workflow slightly?

[Chuck Tomasi]

Hi Breyton,

Sorry for the delay in responding. For a mandatory field, you can use a dictionary override for your extended table. For the workflow, I would use an update set in the global space to disable the top level workflow and create a new version in your scope to do what you need. E.g. Disable the (global) Emergency Change workflow, and make a new one in the Facilities Change scope to follow the facilities emergency change process.

Update sets would still be required if you need to disable/modify anything the global space, but it will turn out to be less likely than you think. Once done, your continued changes would happen on the extended app's scope.

[dmaze531]

Hey Chuck,

Good info as always. Thanks a million for taking the time every day to respond to all these requests.

Question: Do you have a link to the Blog Post regarding the Best Practice of Extending Scoped Applications to customize out-of-the-box apps (and thus preserve OOB for future upgrades) mentioned? I am researching the other links in this thread as well as other searches but want to make sure I do not miss out on a Chuck Tomasi Sanctioned Golden Nugget of Knowledge (tm).

Thanks,

Dan