After reviewing the rather excellent Innovation lab created Service Operations Workspace Express List, I decided to take a look at some of the other Innovation Lab capabilities on the Store: Collaboration Calendar
A caveat before I go any further. Innovation Lab offerings, as is made clear on the store too, are unsupported by ServiceNow, so they don't carry any warranties.
Installing the app was really straightforward. I simply requested it for my demo instance from the store, here.
Once that was done, from my instance, I looked for the collaboration calendar application in the plugins list and installed it.
A minute later, it's installed. There is a PDF on the store page with installation details that is important to read and to follow to get started quickly. I won't reproduce its guidance in this post - but it's only 5 minutes or so of extra setup and in most cases is simply about assigning appropriate roles to users.
I did notice, when hitting the ESC that the promised menu item to launch the calendar dashboard was not showing. I'm not quite sure why that is, but it was trivial to add it to the Employee Center's taxonomy as a quick link in the IT topic (where I wanted it personally, anyway).
Creating a new calendar was then incredible easy. It can be done directly from the employee center widget.
A three step guided process then supports you to get the calendar set up. You first select the name and basic details…
Then create a number of categories for events in the calendar…
Finally, you create any new custom event fields required to support the events. I chose to add three fields called release version, instance name, and Application. A mix of choice lists and simple string options.
It was then trivial to create new entries in the calendar for both one off and recurring events:
There are a few things that I then ran into that needed changing as an admin, before could proceed with the last step. I'll cover those at the end. Once done though, I could share my new calendar with other members of my ServiceNow platform admin team.
Now, impersonating one of the direct reports of my normal logged in user and navigating to the employee center, I can see the same quick link and the new shared calendar:-
And the calendar contents, which I can modify.
Different sets of users could be given access to read the calendar but not write to it, if I so wished.
Ok, now to those pesky admin changes I needed to make to get to this point.
First, sharing is done via User Criteria. So before I could share the calendar with the members of my ServiceNow development and systems support groups, I had to create a user criteria.
Second, the sharing options in the employee center directs you as a calendar owner to a new browser tab and the UI16 backend. There are no options in the related list of calendar entries to add anything. I modified the list control on this related list to add the New button.
Then, I was able to create the new user criteria against this calendar, from the new button.
All in all, quite an interesting application and one that might just fill a gap you have today as well as having some real potential in the future.
I would love to have had the time to spin up integrations with exchange to test rest of the applications capabilities in more depth, but that will have to wait for another day.
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