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SmritiGupta
Table of Contents:
- Generic info on Employee Center Deployment
- Migrating from /sp to Employee Center
- Upgrading from Employee Service Center to Employee Center
- Deployment planning
- Taxonomy configurations
Generic info on Employee Center Deployment
1. What are the guidelines for existing and new customers on Employee Center deployment?
Below are our guidelines:
- For new customers — All new customers should deploy Employee Center or Employee Center Pro from the ServiceNow store. No new customer should deploy Service Portal (/sp). See FAQs on Employee Center Basics for licensing details.
- For organizations currently on Employee Service Center — They will be automatically upgraded to Employee Center Pro as part of their Rome upgrade. They will see the name change as part of the upgrade to Rome and will have to download the Employee Center Pro app from the store to get the latest functionality. With the San Diego upgrade, the November store release applications for Employee Center are automatically installed. This will not affect the current Employee Service Center deployment.
All organizations on Employee Service Center should evaluate what is new with Employee Center and select the functionalities they what to deploy. See FAQs on Employee Center features and functionality for details on what’s new with Employee Center.
- For organizations currently on Service Portal (/sp) — These organizations will need to migrate to Employee Center to take advantage of the new capabilities and align with ServiceNow’s future investment in rich employee experiences. See the Migration section below for guidance on how to do so.
If they have a heavily customized Service Portal, their migration efforts will be increased. In rare cases, such organizations may choose to incorporate specific Employee Center widgets in their existing portal as a bridge towards Employee Center adoption. This guidance is not recommended as a standard practice, as there are some Employee Center capabilities such as Curated Experiences that would not be readily incorporated into an existing customized portal and there are some configurations that are not portal agnostic.
Eventually, all customers on Service Portal (/sp) should migrate to Employee Center to leverage all the latest features.
Note: All organizations must install the latest Employee Center or Employee Center Pro apps from the ServiceNow Store to leverage all new features and updates.
2. Are the Employee Center store apps backward compatible? For example, can organizations download the May 2022 store release on a Rome instance and get all new features?
Yes, in general, the Employee Center store apps are backward compatible with n-2 family releases. For example, the August 2022 Employee Center store release will be compatible with Tokyo, San Diego, and Rome releases.
However, it is important to note that some features are dependent on family releases. For example, to get the Employee Profile capabilities launched in the February 2022 store release, organizations will need to be on the San Diego family release.
3. Are there any considerations to be made while exploring and testing Employee Center? and moving Employee Center configurations from a sub-prod environment to a production environment?
We recommend organizations first try out Employee Center with Demo Data. Follow instructions here. This will help explore all Employee Center capabilities without having to set up it with the organization-specific data and environment.
Once ready, organizations could configure their desired experiences in a sub-production environment and move their configuration to production when ready. Note that the content associations with the taxonomy topics are not captured as upgrade set and will need to be captured as data in an .xml file to move from lower environments to productions. Many organizations choose to create their taxonomy associations with their content in the production instance itself, for the same reason.
4. Do we need to have multi-departments unified in the Employee Center?
No. You can choose to have a single department on Employee Center. Many organizations are starting with a single department on Employee Center and slowly rolling in other departments to create a single, multi-department employee destination site for all their needs.
Organizations must treat their Employee Center deployment as an opportunity to create a better experience for their employees by bringing in all departments under one unified, enterprise portal. Once Employee Center is rolled out adding more departments only requires configuration steps to set up the taxonomy associated with the department. The effort is much less than setting up a new portal.
Migrating from /SP to Employee Center
1. What’s the process for migrating from a Service Portal (/sp) deployment to Employee Center (/esc)?
Below is a high-level view of the steps required to migrate from a Service Portal (/sp) deployment to an Employee Center (/esc):
Step 1: Upgrade to the latest family release (at least Rome) and download the latest Employee Center store app: From Rome onwards, admins of the Service Portal (/sp) portal will see a banner notification on the portal home page directing them to download Employee Center from ServiceNow Store. This banner notification can be dismissed once read.
Step 2: Setup Curated Experiences (unified taxonomy): We recommend organizations invest early in building an employee-centric taxonomy, unified across departments. To do so, use the OOB ‘employee’ taxonomy as a starting point. I.e., instead of creating the taxonomy from scratch, you must clone the ‘employee’ taxonomy and make the required changes to it as you map your content. If you are on the San Diego family release, use the capability to bulk tag knowledge categories and catalog categories to the taxonomy topics.
Some organizations may not be quite ready to tag their content into one unified taxonomy. They can choose to start small by selecting only a few topics and tagging content only for those. These topics should be the ones their employees are most interested in and preferably one of the topics shipped as part of the OOB taxonomy. You would need to update the taxonomy associated with the portal with the topics they choose to enable curated experiences using those topics.
Step 3: Decide on customizations you may want to bring over to Employee Center: Since Employee Center is built on the Service Portal tech stack, just as the /sp portal, you can easily apply the customizations made in the /sp to the Employee center portal. You can use the portal analyzer tool to identify what widgets or pages you have customized in your existing portal implementation.
Step 4: Setup Employee Profile: With the San Diego release, organizations can opt-in to a new Employee profile page that drives employee engagement. This comes with a new Employee profile table that can be used to drive ML algorithms for content recommendations and AI search.
Step 5: Configure the Employee Center Widgets and branding: Once the taxonomy is ready, the main thing left to do is to configure all the various widgets to include the content you require. At this stage, organizations would need to work with their UX team to ensure their branding and styling guidelines are met across the portal.
Step 6 and Step 7: Redirect the page URLs: These are to ensure you have the right Organizational change management steps taken to users are able easily get to the new portal. Consider using the page route maps functionality to redirect specific portal pages.
2. Is the process of migrating from Service Portal (/sp) different for Employee Center vs Employee Center Pro?
The process is not different as Employee Center Pro is an expanded version of Employee Center. You will simply have some added steps to configure additional capabilities that come with Employee Center Pro. These include Content Experiences and App launcher, along with others. See FAQs on Employee Center (EC) vs EC Pro Features for more details on the differences.
3. Are there any migration scripts available?
No, there are no scripts available to automate the migration.
4. Can we redirect the old /sp URL to the new employee Center portal? What are the alternatives available?
Yes, follow the process here to redirect /sp URL to the new Employee Center portal URL.
An alternative option may be to associate the new Employee Center portal with the old URL and the old /sp portal with some other URL like /sp_legacy. See the Screenshot below. This approach might not work for all organizations that may already have existing users on their /esc portal, which they are now upgrading to Employee Center pro.
Upgrading from Employee Service Center to Employee Center Pro
1. What’s the process for upgrading from Employee Service Center to Employee Center Pro?
Below is a high-level view of the steps required to upgrade from Employee Service Center to Employee Center Pro.
Step 1: Upgrade to the latest family release (at least Rome) and download the latest Employee Center Pro store app: This will not change your current portal pages. Note that once you are on Rome release or beyond, you are technically on Employee Center Pro, and have just not started using the new capabilities now available to you. This is because Employee Center Pro is essentially renamed and enhanced Employee Service Center, both are the /esc portal.
Step 2: Setup Curated Experiences (unified taxonomy): We recommend organizations to invest early in building an employee-centric taxonomy, unified across departments. To do so, use the OOB ‘employee’ taxonomy as a starting point. I.e., instead of creating the taxonomy from scratch, you must clone the ‘employee’ taxonomy and make the required changes to it as you map your content. If you are on the San Diego family release, use the capability to bulk tag knowledge categories and catalog categories to the taxonomy topics.
Some organizations may not be quite ready to tag their content into one unified taxonomy. They can choose to start small by selecting only a few topics and tagging content only for those. These topics should be the ones their employees are most interested in and preferably one of the topics shipped as part of the OOB taxonomy. You would need to update the taxonomy associated with the portal with the topics they choose to enable curated experiences using those topics.
Step 3: Decide on customizations you may want to bring over to the Employee Center experience: We have made some significant improvements in the experience with Employee Center. Before deciding to retain any customizations, you must evaluate the need for them. It is possible, that a now out-of-box experience fulfills the need, making the customization redundant. We recommend sticking with the out-pf-box functionality as much as possible to avoid technical debt and ensure easy upgrades in the future. You can use the portal analyzer tool to identify what widgets or pages you have customized in your existing portal implementation.
Step 4: Setup App Launcher: Organizations can leverage pre-built integrations with Azure AD and Okta to setup app launcher. Ensure to include applications that are outside SSO so users can access them all in one place.
Step 5: Decide on your home page experience: There are two options on how to approach your Employee Center Pro deployment.
Option 1 (recommended): Adopt the new Employee Center Pro home page design and make changes (add widgets, move them around, etc.) to better suit your needs. The advantage of deploying the new portal home page is that they stay OOB and are better positioned to leverage future enhancements shipped by ServiceNow.
Option 2 (may suit organizations who are heavily invested in their current Employee Service Center experience): Continue with their existing portal home page and deploy the new widgets as applicable. They can choose to deploy the OOB Employee Center portal home page sometime in future based on their business needs.
Step 6: Setup Employee Profile : With the San Diego release, organizations can opt-in to a new Employee profile page that drives employee engagement. This comes with a new Employee profile table that can be used to drive ML algorithms for content recommendations and AI search.
Step 7: Configure the Employee Center Widgets and branding: Once the taxonomy is ready, the main thing left to do is to configure all the various widgets to include the content you require. At this stage, organizations would need to work with their UX team to ensure their branding and styling guidelines are met across the portal.
Note: We haven’t captured the steps above, but you may want to use the page route maps functionality to redirect any custom page that you decommissioned as part of this upgrade.
2. Will my current portal suddenly change if I download the Employee Center or Employee Center Pro store apps?
No. Employee Center pro download does not change your /esc home page. Users will still see the same experience as they see before. Once you download Employee Center Pro, you would essentially have more widgets and features such as Curated Experiences and content library available for you.
Deployment Planning
1. What is the best practices approach for Taxonomy design and management?
- As a suggested practice, we recommend our customers to start with the out-of-box taxonomy. We have a completely built out taxonomy structure for IT, HR, Legal, Procurement etc, that has been tested and verified to work across various departments and industries.
- You can use the out-of-box taxonomy in excel format as a starting point. While you are reviewing out of the box taxonomy, identify gaps or topics that may need to be renamed to align with organisational terminology. Using the taxonomy topics available as a guidance, you can map your existing knowledge or catalog categories to these topics as applicable. This will enable you to customise this out-of-box taxonomy as per your organisational needs.
- If updates are needed, clone out of box taxonomy, and create a new one. Associate new taxonomy to Employee Center portal.
- We recommend our customers to avoid creating a sprawl of topics for their employees to navigate since it will increase confusion and difficulty in content discovery. You can start with two or three topics in your taxonomy and map your knowledge and catalog content accordingly.
- As you are doing so, we suggest you review and clean-up your content as part of the implementation. This should be done to avoid mapping any redundant or dated content with the taxonomy topics.
- If out of box taxonomy does not align with your organization, you can consider conducting a card sort and/or tree test to reorganise your list of topics. You can refer to our academy session on design techniques for further details.
- Finally, it would help if you could define appropriate user criteria for accessing and managing content.
2. Since there is no common category between catalog and knowledge base, what would be the ServiceNow guidance to design Taxonomy?
With Employee Center, we are promoting a new way of content discovery which is not based on catalog or knowledge base categories. It is based on the taxonomy topic structure. This is easing the content discovery from employee’s perspective by moving into the taxonomy topic structure. You could still manage multiple catalog or knowledge categories from content creation perspective. These knowledge or catalog categories can then be mapped to taxonomy topics. You can refer to product docs for further details.
3. Should this taxonomy be evolved or remain constant?
Yes, after deploying the taxonomy in your organization, you should keep it updated and look for evolving it every year. As your organisational needs evolve with time, it only makes sense to keep evolving your taxonomy accordingly. Even if you do not utilise the out-of-box taxonomy, you should consider evolving it at least once a year.
4. What are the best practice recommendations for a customer who is about to begin the deployment journey to ensure a successful deployment?
We recommend ensuring these following before you begin your deployment journey with a partner or even independently:
- Vision and value are critical inputs for successful implementation and maintenance of the portal. It is recommended to plan the outcomes that your organization is expecting with this deployment and what metrics would be tracked in line with that vision.
- Stakeholder alignment and getting all your business units aligned is usually the biggest challenge that one must plan to mitigate. Having the shared vision of a unified portal and foreseeing the foundational services that should be operational prior to implementing employee center will help in finalising the planning. The more you’ve publicised the idea of a unified portal and the benefits associated with it, the better coordination you’ll experience in terms of which business unit should adopt first and what implementation path suits everyone the best.
- The next logical step would be to start thinking about the implementation and governance roles that would be owning and driving the implementation process
- The most critical preparation before deploying Employee Center would be to plan the taxonomy that you would want to link to your portal. This taxonomy and all its topics should make sense for your organization. You could adapt from the out of the box Employee taxonomy available with Employee Center or you could create your own taxonomy from scratch. If would help to conduct a card sorting or a tree test to assess the efficacy of a proposed taxonomy. We’ve covered the breadth of this topic in our design techniques academy session.
Taxonomy Configurations
1. What happens if you need a topic that is not in the out of the box configurations?
Out of the box taxonomy has been provided just as a guidance. You can remove topics, edit existing topics, and add new topics during portal configurations.
2. What do you suggest as a best practice when mapping content to topics in non-prod or prod environment?
It is suggested to do this content mapping of catalog or knowledge articles in prod environment as a go-live activity since this content mapping is not captured in update set. Additionally, this content might not be available in non-prod environment, it is recommended to map catalog items or knowledge articles in prod environment.
3. Can the out of the box taxonomy layout be changed to display two levels instead of three?
Yes, the out of the box taxonomy layout can be changed to display two levels instead of three to avoid cluttering the mega menu.
4. What do you suggest as a best practice if you are already live with some departments and want to add additional departments to the portal, should we implement the new changes in non-prod or prod environment?
Let us suppose you are already live with IT department and now you want to add HR topics as well. You could continue working on HR topics in the same prod environment by keeping the topic ‘inactive’. If it is not active, that topic will not be visible on the portal. Once you’ve finalised the changes, then you could activate the topic and the related content will be visible as per user criteria.
Additional FAQs:
FAQs on Employee Center basics
FAQs on Employee Center features and functionality
