How Is Employee Center Different Than SharePoint?

[Spencer S]

We are planning on migrating to Employee Center from the Service Portal at some point next year. Based on what I've seen in demos, forum posts, and other resources available on the ServiceNow site, I'm not entirely sure I understand what the difference is between how many companies use the Employee Center from how they would also use SharePoint. Obviously, the Employee Center functions as the service portal, giving employees/users access to various portals within the SNOW platform. But other than that, I don't really see much of a difference. Many functional departments in the company use SharePoint for company wide announcements and updates. Our IT department has the ability to, but hasn't taken advantage of communicating initiatives, projects, or other major announcements on SharePoint for whatever reason.

I imagine utilizing Employee Center as a way for various teams in IT to do exactly that when we go live. Am I thinking too small?

[Mark Manders]

It all depends on how things are being used. If you are currently only using SP for IT and everything else is done through Sharepoint, you will probably get the same as SP, just on ESC. But your question should be: what do we do in ServiceNow (please, don't use SNOW, because that's a completely different platform that has nothing to do with ServiceNow!), that we aren't doing in Sharepoint. Because the advantages of moving to ESC from SP is just enabling using more functionality on ServiceNow.

If it's just the service catalog and IT tickets, you will be providing your end users with a different (and, in my opinion, better) look and feel, but if it's not including moving things from Sharepoint to ServiceNow, you will just keep on doing the same, but on a different UI. 

You should really get everything aligned within the company. Why use 2 systems for the same? Announcements should be in one place. So get IT to use Sharepoint for that, or move other departments to ServiceNow. 

You are obviously biased to using Sharepoint, looking at the sentence '.. but hasn't taken advantage of coummunicating [..] on Shartepoint..' but you should ask them why not. I would get every team out of Sharepoint and move to ServiceNow (yes, I am biased myself). You can't put your CMDB or ticketing in Sharepoint, but you can put the Sharepoint functionality into ServiceNow. And I know, you can't share documents in ServiceNow. So both systems have similar functionality and will be used next to each other. The question is: why use both for the same. 

From an end user perspective: move the duplicate functionality (like announcements) to one system and have a link to the other system on both. 

[SMiller7]

We just recently migrated our intranet from SharePoint to SN. Would be happy to talk and share about our experience. 

[Spencer S]

Shawn,

I'd love to have a chat to discuss your experience. Let me know a time that works for you.

spencer.schoate@subzero.com

[eric_hemmer]

@Spencer S  - Many customers have switched from SharePoint to EC Pro as their intranet portal and moved over certain microsites as well.  SharePoint is still used for managing and collaborating on files and documents that  each team maintains.  But ServiceNow can index and search SharePoint with relevancy and permissions intact.

You can give each department leader(s) access to post announcements on their dynamic topic pages via the rich content editor, which designated individuals can access directly through the portal interface.  They can also use the Content Request catalog items to request banner announcements or News Articles for the homepage or News Center pages.  The top post on my Community SIG page summarizes a panel interview I did in November with three customers who did this and you can read about their justifications, approaches, and advice.  

https://www.servicenow.com/community/ex-platform-for-the-modern/gh-p/sig-modern-intranet