3rd party support desk integration

[jdavid]

My company has some remote offices for which we have contracts with 3rd party vendors for certain services. We are looking to in essence integrate the 2 different ITSM systems so that when they update their incident the email that is generated will update the incident in ServiceNow, likewise when we create an incident for the contracted company, it would update their system, and the "incident has been opened on your behalf" email from them would inject into the SN incident. Has anyone faced a similar situation and if so, how did you handle it?

[danielbilling]

Hi JD,

You need to start out with defining a integration strategy. Why? You can end up in massive administration and unnecessary complexity.

Create a integrations doc similar to a process doc that describes the procedures and triggers. there is plenty of info on WIKI

Then decide what type of integrations you want to support, web service,Email, FTP...??

My experience with Email integration is that it's a simple communication method. Eg. Create specific "vendor" notification based on for example Assignment group. in addition create inbound email actions based on a vendor email address. so no heavy customisations here.

The challange is that for every vendor you add you need to start verifying all inbound email actions and add another exclude/include condition on these. Also updates can become tricky if the vendor do include the watermark or other mandatory info.

i will see if i can find template that I can share

[jdavid]

That would be most appreciated.

[SJ9]

Hi Daniel,

We are looking to do something very similar between 2 Service
Now instances (in separate companies) who will need to be able to pass tickets
between themselves that will create / update each others tickets but without
the end user receiving multiple notifications.

The end user should only be communicating with the Service
Desk that they originally raise the ticket with — it's up to the Service Desks to
complete the work seamlessly to the end user.

Any template that you have & are happy to share is
appreciated.

Thanks

[poyntzj]

I would suggest seeing if you can use WSDL/SOAP instead as it is a little easier and you can guarantee if the message was sent or failed.

We do have integrations with 3rd parties via email though.

I took some time on this and in the end I created

• A generic script include which is used to do ticket updates etc
• a script include for each 3rd party.   This is used to locate their ticket reference, our reference, watermarks, email addresses, resevered words, and where to split to cut off our outbound message

Inbound actions are updated to look for specific email addresses or domains and call the relevant script include as needed.

For outbound, there is a Business Rule for each.   this determines if the update is for the 3rd party or not.

If it is, it will fire a specific event

Existing notifications are renamed to have a "Not 3P" prefix and the conditions updated to exclude specific addresses

New notifications are created for each 3rd Party (prefixed 3P)- most use the same messages and templates as the internal notifications, but we have some where the messages are tailored a specific way, and another where they use a specific email address for each ticket.

Most of our 3rd party notifications come in and are processed as work_notes, so the end users do not see those, only the work_notes watchlist or assignee.

we do have some where the updates are in as additional comments so the standard end user notification is fired.