Customized Version of Employee Center Pro - Bundle related customized files from other scopes?

[Vegard S]

I'm implementing Employee Center Pro for a customer and I'm planning of deploying customized version for it. 
But how does that work when there are so many scopes involved with EC Pro?

Would I need to deploy customized version of each of the involved scopes? Or would it be enough to deploy customized version for Employee Center Pro and then it'll bundle all related customized files along with it?

[Dan O Connor]

@Vegard S What method of deployment are you using? Update sets or source control?

If you are planning to used a Scoped Application to contain and manage your new ESC then yes you will need to likely make numerous Scopes Applications. 

It somewhat depends on what level of customisation you are going to be using. If you just simply create a new Employee Center record (don't use the OOTB one, but use it as the template to start) it's entirely possible you could maintain the customization safely within the ESC existing scopes. 

Employee Center customizations are tricky because it utilizes so many applications, and you will likely hit some cross scope privalage errors. Ideally you should be capturing this all within a Scoped Application, but you might need to just do it through Update sets in the existing scopes.

As always be worth assessing why customisation is happening in the first place and what value it is bringing, compared to the technical debt inherited. 

[Vegard S]

Thank you for the reply Dan ‌‌:)

There won't be much customizations to OOTB stuff. It'll mostly be CSS themes and maybe a few widgets.

But these will be contained within a separate Application Scope.

The changes would be to the EC Portal record itself, some pages, audiences and user criterias as well as topics and possibly connected items. I'm trying to avoid touching any widgets at all. 

I'm still conflicted as to if it's a good idea to edit OOTB pages and move widgets around, add new ones etc. 
Would these produce skipped records?

For my previous customer I created a whole new portal record (clone of OOTB), copies of pages and made Page Route Maps to avoid touching anything OOTB. 

But I was also told by someone on Linkedin that pages are meant to be customized and won't produce skipped records. So I'm a bit conflicted on that part. 

Regarding the customized version, I was hoping I could use customized version of OOTB application scopes. 
And install the customized version via My Company Applications so it's on top of ServiceNow's OOTB versions. But since there's so many scopes involved I might just use batched update sets for this.