Customizing your homepage

Suzanne Smith · ‎09-09-2014

"Home is where one starts from."

T.S. Eliot

To put a twist on T.S. Eliot's words, in ServiceNow you start from your homepage.

When you log in to HI, a homepage based on your role appears. For example, an admin often has a different homepage than an itil user. Some users can customize their own homepage. (ESS users most often cannot edit their homepage.) A custom homepage always takes precedence over the default, role-based homepage.

How to customize your ServiceNow homepage:

To customize your homepage, open the homepage by doing one of the following:
- Click the home icon in the upper-right corner of the user interface
- Navigate to Self-Service > Homepage in the application navigator
Click the words Add Content (in Dublin and earlier releases) or the plus symbol.
In the Add content popup, click items in the left column.

Items include gadgets, live feed, world clocks, and diagnostics. Different options for the selected item appear in the next column to the right. The far right column provides a third level of options if available. In the example, Gauges was selected in the left column, Incident in the middle column, and All Incidents By Location in the right column.

A preview of the selected item appears just below the columns.
To add an item to your homepage, click any of the Add here boxes.

The boxes show approximately where the item will be located on the page: top, bottom, left, or right. The boxes are also called dropzones.

Here are some tips and tricks for customizing your homepage:

Gauges are great. They are visual and give you current information is an easy to use format. They are one of the coolest and most useful items you can add to your homepage. There is one important caveat to keep in mind, though. Every gauge is a report that must run each time your homepage refreshes. If you add a lot of gauges to your homepage and the page loads slowly, try removing a few of those fabulous gauges. For more information about gauges, see Adding Existing Gauges to a Homepage in the product documentation.

Click Refresh to reload your homepage at any time. You can also specify a time interval to automatically refresh. This option is Off by default. To change the refresh setting, click the menu to the right of the Refresh option and select a time such as 5 or 30 minutes.
You can change the layout of your homepage for greater control over where homepage items are placed. Open your homepage and in the Switch to page list on the right side of the header, select Change layout. Click on different options and view a sample at the bottom of the screen. In the example, the 3 columns with 2 wide columns and a narrow right column was selected and the preview shows the different dropzones for that option.
An alternative to customizing your homepage is creating a new personal homepage only you can see. Open your homepage and in the Switch to page list on the right side of the header, select New page. Administrators can create a homepage for users with a specific or create a global homepage accessible to all users. For more information, see Creating Homepages in the product documentation.