You've probably spiffed up your production instance with your organization's logo, color scheme or other identifying features to make it your own. In this 14th installment of our best practices series, we look at why you should also set unique visual cues for your sub-production instances.
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Clyde Calamity likes to multi-task. He opens multiple tabs on his browser and switches back and forth between them, slicing through tasks in his company's instances like a ninja. But something went wrong today. After he clicked Submit on the Email Properties form, he realized he activated email on the wrong instance, causing a flood of thousands of queued up emails and confusing the heck out of the users.
But could anyone blame him? These instances look virtually identical—the only difference is the URL!
Best practice for customizing sub-production instances
It's common to have multiple ServiceNow sub-production instances. For example, you may have sub-development, development, and test instances. To make sure users don't confuse one ServiceNow instance for another and carry out tasks in the wrong one, use visual elements to clearly distinguish all your instances from one another.
A simple way to accomplish this is to give each instance a different header background (banner) color. In UI16, set the css.$navpage-header-bg property by navigating to System Properties > Basic Configuration UI16, and selecting the Header background color:
In UI15, the property to set is css.base.color. Navigate to System Properties > Basic Configuration, and select the Banner and list caption background color:
There are many other screen elements you can change to vary the appearance of your instances. Here are just a few examples that would be obvious to users:
- Banner image (logo)
- Page header caption (text that appears next to the logo)
- Banner text color
These and more user interface elements can be set on properties pages by navigating to:
- System Properties > CSS
- System Properties > Basic Configuration (for UI15)
or System Properties > Basic Configuration UI16
For more information, see:
- Configure logo, colors, and system defaults (UI15)
- Configure logo, colors, and system defaults for UI16
- CSS properties
- HTML Color Names
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Behind the scenes here at ServiceNow, the Knowledge Management and Multimedia teams work closely with subject matter experts to disseminate critical information to our customers. We've found that certain topics come up frequently, in the form of best practices that can help you keep your ServiceNow instances running smoothly. This series aims to target those topics so that you and your organization can benefit from our collective expertise. If you have a best practices topic you'd like us to cover in this series, please let us know in the comments below.
To access all of the blog posts in this series, search for "nowsupport best practices series."
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