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Did you notice, when spinning up a new ServiceNow Australia release instance, Employee Center has a left navigation pane? Where did this come from?! Well I can't tell you exactly with which release/patch the left navigation pane became the default, what I can tell is when left navigation pane became an out-of-the-box feature and how you can turn this on/off.
And no, the left hand nav is not an Australia release feature like some people have mentioned it to be...
Let's have a closer look!
Store version 39.0.8 (December 2025)
Already months before the Australia release, ServiceNow brought a new Employee Center Store version which contains "Added new simplified left navigation experience that is modern, intuitive, mobile-friendly, and easy to configure". Simply update the Employee Center Store version, and the left navigation is also within your reach!
Good to know: updating the Store version won't automatically change the navigation experience. Not every customer will be keen on this. You need to apply this yourself (when requesting a fresh PDI, the default is Left navigation).
Advanced Portal Navigation
Employee Center is highly configurable, even so that you might get a bit lost 😅. So how do we configure the left navigation, as the release notes mention "and easy to configure"?
First up of course, updating the Store version for Employee Center (sn_ex_sp) to at least 39.0.8.
Advanced Portal Navigation
Once the Store version is updated, in short the option to choose the navigation style is added to the "Advanced Portal Navigation" functionality. This was introduced with Store version 28.0.4 (Februari 2023). A new field "Navigation style" [navigation_style] has been added that includes choices "Top" and "Side". This new field is queried within the updated Service Portal Widget "Employee Center Header". This Widget also contains the major code to make the left navigation possible.
Below is a screenshot from an updated Store version, where the newly added "Employee center side navigation" record is inactive.
Cloned Service Portal Widget
If your instance is using a customized version of the Employee Center Header Service Portal Widget, do be sure to revert or merge it after updating the Store version for Employee Center. Since touching the Service Portal Widget causes it not to automatically be updated to the latest version, and you potentially miss out on - in this case - new features. Yes the new field will be available on the Advanced Portal Navigation table, yes the supporting code will be missing...
Usually this would also be noticeable through a Skipped record that needs to be taken care of after updating the Store version.
Result: Employee Center with Side Navigation
When the Store version is updated, the Advanced Portal Navigation is set to Side, and all related components like the Service Portal Widget are updated, the result should be something like this, where "Help center" shows the Taxonomy upon hovering over.
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That's it. Hope you like it. Finally I finished this article, it was already pending a few months 😅. If any questions or remarks, let me know!
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Kind regards,
Mark Roethof
Independent ServiceNow Consultant
11x ServiceNow MVP
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