How to modify assignment groups?

[sgenge]

We have reorganized our IS team and have some questions with regards to how this will change in ServiceNow.  

Currently we can assign our incidents and requests to several assignment groups, two of those being Desktop & Service Desk. We have restructured these groups so they are one group: Client Services.

We use AD to pull these groups into both our instances - dev and prod, so I'm a little concerned about making changes. Currently the Desktop and Service Desk groups are a member of the Client Services group in AD. Desktop and Service Desk gets pulled into the instances, Client Services does not. I know how to make the instances "see" the Client Services group but I am unsure what will happen with the current incidents and requests in our system under Desktop and Service Desk. Will they still show the assignment group and assigned to person, as they do today? Will they appear blank?

How would you suggest we go about this change?

[swilson]

Hi, Sheri. Nothing should happen to the existing assignment group and assigned to values on your incidents and requests after you make this change. Those fields point to specific group and user records and those records should not be altered. What will likely happen is that the Client Services group will be created in your instance and then all members of the Desktop and Service Desk groups will be added as members to that group. They should remain members of the   Desktop and Service Desk groups as well as long as your AD still has them as members of those groups. But I believe the ServiceNow process, when it finds that a group is a member of another group, will simply add the members from the child group to the parent group. Of course, you should test this out in a sub-prod instance first.

I hope this helps.

Thanks.

- Steve

[sgenge]

Steve thank you for your quick response.

If we removed the members from the Desktop and Service Desk groups and removed the groups from AD completely, do you think this would cause issues?   This is the part I can't really test since our dev and prod instances both pull the groups and members.

[swilson]

That shouldn't cause any issues unless you have some custom code in your LDAP import that removes groups no longer coming across from AD. Thats highly unlikely. So the groups and group membership should remain as is in your instance after the change. They just won't be updated any longer.

[sgenge]

That makes sense.   Thanks Steve.

We actually chatted about some other options and I don't think we'll be doing it this way now, but the information is definitely useful.