The need to address Alumni use cases perfectly matches with ServiceNow. This requirement may be raised soon or later by the Customer, who will probably want to provide a better and more modern solution to their alumni community while being able to decommission legacy technology and achieve net cost savings. This is what happened with one of my previous customers.
As of today, there are not many guidelines on how to do it. The purpose of this article is to summarise the most important design decisions that need to be covered. If you have other lessons learned or advice, please feel free to comment.
If you need more information about alumni portal (see here)
1) Public vs Private Alumni portal
This topic is well covered under“Employee Experience Pack: Alumni Experience” which I recommend reading. You will see the benefits of a solution designed for authenticated users. For me, there is no doubt; ideally, we should mix public content to inform anyone and provide advanced capabilities for logged-in users.
2) How to register the Alumni ?
Multiple scenarios need to be covered:
Existing employee
These should be managed through off-boarding to collect personal emails from employees and promote the benefits of being part of the alumni community before they leave the company. You will be able to create the alumni user and provide access even before they leave the company.
Prerequisite: Off-boarding needs to be managed. You have some employee off-boarding experience packs available in the store that could help you achieve that.
Recorded alumni
The Customer will probably have an existing solution with recorded alumni people. This scenario is simple; we have a mechanism to easily import them into ServiceNow, and it's documented here.
Unknown Alumni employee
The real problem is what should we do with unknown alumni?
The customer probably did not get the personal email addresses of all their previous employees, and personal email addresses may have changed. The alumni portal could be promoted on the customer's brand website. Ideally, ex-employees want something simple; they need an easy way to register themselves on the alumni portal.
Unfortunately, this use case is not covered by the out-of-the-box alumni portal.
To cover this use case, I strongly advise leveraging External User Self-Registration (com.snc.external_user_self_registration). It's very flexible with the possibility to have your own flow. We can easily create the alumni user with the right role and have a process to validate the user if needed. Security is managed (Google Captcha + Expiry link). This solution will be easy to set up and maintain.
Prerequisite: Security needs to be considered, especially for user registration. Captcha should be leveraged to limit the risks. We only support Google Captcha, and a Google key will be required.
3) User / Hr profil / Alumni
When creating an alumni record, you might wonder what to do with the existing user record and HR profile used by the previous employee. We have guidelines about it here; see the section "Ensure alumni aren't included in your UU licensing counts." To keep it simple, if you are using the ASC portal, you need to disable the old user record.
What happens to the HR profile? You should already have a process to update the "Employee end date" on the old HR profile when a user is leaving the company. When we create an alumni record, no HR profile will be automatically created. In the out-of-the-box setup, the HR profile will be created when the user logs in for the first time in the ASC portal.
See here:
You may want to register additional information on this new HR profile, like the employee number, to be able to do some automation later on. Be extremely careful; any registered data may be saved forever, which may conflict with the customer's internal data policy.
4) Authentication
By default, we manage local alumni user accounts with login and password (no SSO), similar to what we have with onboarding. This is the simplest way to move forward.
Managing this scenario through SSO is possible, but most probably, this use case is not currently managed by the customer and will require some effort on their side.
If no particular security requirement local user could be used
5) HR services & Knowledge & ASC portal content itself
Nothing to say; it needs to be defined. Business as usual.
6) Community and Alumni portal
Unfortunately, we don't have any pre-configured forums OOTB when you install the ASC portal. Creating communities for alumni is probably something that will be helpful. You have all the material under nowcreate in order to scope it and deploy it.
- Workshop
- Guidance: Skill & Training to operate the process
