Fall 10 Webinar Customer Q & A and Video Link

[wallymarx]

Prior to our Fall 10 Release we held a webinar that was attended by nearly 500 SNC users. Out of that session came a few questions, answers to which have relevance for all Service-now users. Here's an informative list of Q&As plus a link to the recording of the session.

http://www.service-now.com/community/video

Questions from Fall10 Customer Webinar
9-23-10

Platform

508 - You mentioned automated testing software. Is this available to customers? No. It has not currently been productized.

Security - Can I set the default deny ACL on an existing instance without enabling the full high security plugin? Yes, but you will likely find you have to go back and enable a bunch of things that currently work.

Security - Does the high security plugin include CI_admin and discovery_admin roles? These are not specific to that plugin e.g. discovery_admin is included in the discovery plugin.

CMS - With the news item option in the portal, can this be specific by user location for instance? (e.g. different outage messages based on the location) The out of box one is a single category, but you could modify the query on that block to include a term based on user's location.

CMS - will options on the Self Service Portal be able to be limited by group vs. role (i.e. could different self service users see different portals without granting roles)? The menu options can be controlled by roles.

CMS - Is the content manager still going to be based on iframes to embed various modules within other pages on service now or elsewhere like company intranets? Iframes are still used extensively.

CMS - Do we have to use the new ESS portal or can we keep the old one? If you mean the normal frame based interface with just the Self Service module then, yes you can continue to use that. You have no obligation to change to the new ESS portal.

CMS - With the new content management functionality to modify and edit portal pages, does it mean now client can modify and edit pages live survey question and so on? You can add a survey to the CMS portal, but there's nothing specific to the CMS system to make surveys any easier or harder than our existing
survey module.

Wiki - Is there true wiki functionality built in, or is it just formatting? Inline image insertion and linking between pages is supported, but there are other feature of media wiki like templates we don't support.

Wiki - Does the wiki support similar templating features to what MediaWiki offers? Not currently.

Wiki - can you link wiki articles together? Yes.

Wiki - Are you able to import other KB Articles from other systems to Service now? In theory, yes. In practice its usually a chore since its rare for any two systems to have the exact same knowledge base format.

Wiki - Will this Wiki functionality make it possible to import Wiki pages from other sites into SN? If the pages are straightforward, then, yes. We actually migrated one of our development wiki's into the product (and kept it there) as part of our testing.

Wiki - I can see how linking via wiki to other articles would work in standard installations, but does it really work in MSP environments where there may be multiple articles with the same name in different domains? This would likely not work as expected. The expectation is that the article name is unique. You could change it to use article numbers instead (which are unique), but that'd be a slightly less useful link.

If a user has a problem and use KB and still can find the help needed will ServiceNow capture that information and recorded in the incident of what they were searching for on Service now KB? We track every knowledge search made by every user in the system for data mining purposes.

Have there been any improvements with the latency for Microsoft Internet Explorer? Nothing was done specifically for the Internet Explorer browser, although the sprite improvements half significantly on "first visits" by IE users and/or users who have flushed their browser caches.

Can we have a copy of the slides and general minutes from this so that I can review with my teams? Absolutely. These are available at http://www.servicenow.com/community/video.

Fall Release is scheduled for Oct. 1. When will detailed documentation be available on the Wiki for these new and enhanced functionalities? Also on Oct. 1 Customer Support - Will the suggestions from the forums and wiki come up prior to the ticket submission? Not at this stage. The suggestions will come up after
the incident has been logged.

Is it planned for downtime while upgrading instances? There will be a brief outage while the server is restarted, followed by a short period of degraded performance while configurations are migrated

How can we as customers be more in the loop of your future intentions so we do not waste time/effort/money on creating functionality only to find when we near launch you come out with a new release that addresses exactly the issue we spent our efforts resolving? We will continue to provide forward-looking information so that you can plan future work. A great place to access this information is
through the annual Knowledge conference — or you can request alternatives through you account manager.

Will you make the customer service portal available to customer as a plugin?There are no plans to do this at this stage — the new portal has not been built in such a way that it can be exported to a plugin. However, the whole interface is built from OOB functionality - including the Google Custom Search Integration plugin and catalog UI policies.

At the spring conference there was quite a bit of talk about improving your available training; has anything been accomplished to that means? Yes. Our new training team will be in place by the end of October. We are currently working on Curriculum Development and a revision of our Admin 101 course. We expect to be fully up and running with a selection of courses by 1/1/11.



Portfolio


Can PPM export to Microsoft Project? Not currently

Can you schedule project portfolio baselines to be 'refreshed' or baselined on a schedule? This is not provided out of the box, but the application could be configured to do this.

Can you turn off the portfolio option to arbitrary set colors or data? Yes.

Can you import MS project into service now Yes

In addition to importing...is there capability to update the project in Microsoft and sync with the Project in Service-Now? Not Currently

Any plans to upgrade the MPP import to support additional dependencies Support of the loading of additional dependencies will be considered in future releases of PPM.

Visual Dispatch

Where does the travel time come from? Travel time is estimated at the creation of the service order in the planned travel time. Actual travel time is calculated from the difference between travel start and agent arrival .

Unassigned could be grouped by location? Yes this can be configured.

How easy can you indicate activities for the same location? This could be achieved by grouping activities by location.

Can you use visual dispatch for Projects, Requests, Incidents, Problems, etc? The dispatch page is currently only used within the Field Service application. The page could be used elsewhere within the platform if required.

How can GPS devices be used with this? GPS could be integrated with the application to track actual agent location.

Can the visual dispatch show Engineer non-availability? Engineer availability can be shown although we currently do not have the concept of a user schedule within the application.

Can a part pickup from a remote location be allied to the work task itself? Yes- The transfer orders for parts are related to the work tasks.

IT Cost Management

Can we distribute a cost unevenly? Yes, this currently requires building a script so you can calculate and distribute based on other data in the system. The plugin comes with an example distribution rule script to distribute a cost across departments based on the number of users in each department.

How do labor and task rate cards relate to Time Cards in the Time Card application? Labor and task rate cards currently use the Task Time Worked entries. We are looking at integrating with time cards in the near future.

Can labor rate cards be done by user rather than group? Yes, a labor rate card can be configured for an individual user.



SDLC


Do you allow for incidents to be related to the defects to allow visibility into the users who have reported it? Yes.

What is the relationship between the new Release Management and the old Release Management? Is it a new set of tables? Are some of the tables shared with the old Release Mgmt? Release management v2 is completely separate from the V1 application.

Since I can use tasks, can I relate problems and changes to a release? Yes



Runbook Automation


When will there be Active directory integration for Runbook automation? This is a potential candidate for a future process pack.

Can RBA be triggered by requests issued from the service catalog? Absolutely - or by a clickable link on a ticket - or by any other trigger you setup.

Will there be a cost for runbook automation? This is still under consideration. More information about this will become available at launch

Will I be able to reboot MID servers remotely via runbook automation? Sure! Sales Force Automation

Can the Sales force automation be used with existing SalesForce apps via plugin? Or is this a replacement? If you are referring to the older SFA plugin we published a while ago the answer is no. The new Sales Force Automation (SFA2) plugin is a complete replacement. We did this because there were only a few customers using the old plugin and most had made major customizations. It would be very hard to
replace their current configuration.

Will there be a list of reports that will be available out of the box for sales force? Yes, there are some commonly used sales reports including; lead status, assignment, conversion and opportunity pipeline status.

How does this impact if we have a current customer Sales Force integration? If you are referring to the older SFA plugin we published a while ago the answer is no. The new Sales Force Automation (SFA2) plugin is a complete replacement. We did this because there were only a few customers using the old plugin and most had made major customizations. It would be very hard to replace their current configuration.
If the question is related to the Salesforce.com integration plugin, then this plugin does not include or impact the existing integration. The integration could be customized to provide addition integration between our Sales Force Automation plugin and Salesforce.com application if you are interested. This may require working withProfessional Services for the customization.

Does this include forecasting integration for after sales with a production
entity? Not currently, but we would be interested in hearing more detail about this
requirement so we could potentially include it in future releases.