Hi Alex,
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.
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Thanks,
Sandeep
