ServiceNow Integration w/ Liferay Portal

[Jeff41]

Our enterprise 'most favored' portal platform has historically been built within the Liferay portal product.  With ServiceNow being the relatively newcomer portal platform within our enterprise, we find ourselves in the midst of a debate as to how best provide the ServiceNow HR Case and Knowledge Management functionality among the two portal platforms.

Does anyone have experience with the two platforms where they could be conjoined/integrated in a fashion which does not result in a maintenance 'challenge' ?   Our Liferay product is intended to be the single enterprise portal source - however, it's not very clear how to 'embed' the ServiceNow HR functionality within the Liferay product.

[Brad Tilton]

Typically with enterprise portals, I think the best route from a maintenance perspective is to just link them together rather than trying to embed functionality from one to the other, but sometimes that does not lead to the best user experience.

[eric_hemmer]

Attempting to “embed” one portal technology into another creates serious challenges, more maintenance, and a worse employee experience.  We’ll cover specific reasons below, but the best strategy is to style the two portals with the same themes and similar layouts so that when employees traverse from one to the other, they don't know that they've moved from one portal to another, or at least, it feels very familiar. Note that ServiceNow also supports vanity URL's to keep this seamless.

The reasons against embedding one portal technology into another portal technology are fairly universal, but we’ll use the example above with ServiceNow and Liferay.  First of all, if you use iFrame to display ServiceNow Catalog Items, Knowledge Articles, Announcements, Videos, Upcoming Events, Case Status Pages, etc… in another portal, those won’t size correctly when someone is using a mobile device or tablet.  Secondly, all of these items honor entitlements or are considered targeted content in ServiceNow that is based on employee data in ServiceNow.  This creates a personalized experience within the ServiceNow Employee Service Center and employees only see what is applicable to them.  In other words, they are not presented with multiple answers to an inquiry such as, "What are my benefits?" 

Announcements and Upcoming Events honor specific start and end dates as part of a Campaign, so the experience is not only personalized, but also dynamic.  Another portal technology won’t be able to apply the employee data for filtering, nor will it be able to honor the start and end dates; so you’ll expose everything to everyone, which is not good. In addition to these poor employee experience reasons, maintenance with embedding is challenging and would double your testing efforts.

If you simply need to display something that is static from ServiceNow into another portal, that is possible with an integration. However, if the employee needs to take action of interact with that widget (e.g. provide feedback on a knowledge article or chat with someone about an open case), it opens up a lot of issues in terms of testing, upgradability, etc.

It is not difficult to style the Employee Service Center portal within ServiceNow to matches a portal such as Liferay in terms of brand/look/feel, which creates a clean employee experience. That is the best strategy. 

Thanks to @matt.metten for contributing to this response.