Dealing with External Contacts in ServiceNow

Community Alums · ‎02-18-2015

We recently rolled out ServiceNow and it's been fine so far but one of the issues we're dealing with is how to work incidents from external contacts who are not in the system. Anyone not in the system gets put under the Guest account and it makes notifications difficult as by default no notifications go out to that account and the email is guest@example.com.

We've been told by our consultants not to use the create users automatically in the email properties and to use watch lists instead. Workers have to manually add the email to the watch list in order for the external contacts to get notified and I'm working on automatically adding it in the inbound email action but not sure if this is the correct way to approach it.

I'm curious to see how others have dealt with this issue and if some have activated the create users automatically function. If you did, what were the pros and cons in doing so? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Aryanos

sgrison · ‎02-20-2015

Really your only options have already been mentioned:

1) Create the user. You can add an additional field to flag them as external users (if needed)

2) Set the caller to 'guest' and use another field for communications.

Are there many users who will email SNC?

I've worked with 2 companies in this situation - both decided to create a new field on the incident table to capture the email address of the end user. The incident was logged with a caller of 'guest', the email address field was auto populated. We used a UI Policy to show the email address field if the callers name was 'guest'. Then created/updated the email notifications to only use the new email field on the incident table when the caller was guest.

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Slava Savitsky · ‎02-18-2015

Automatic creation of user records from inbound emails is likely to solve your issue. Just make sure you only allow it for emails from trusted domains. This can be done using "glide.user.trusted_domain" system property.

Blog: https://sys.properties | Telegram: https://t.me/sys_properties | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slava-savitsky/

Community Alums · ‎02-18-2015

Hi Slava,

Is this what your company has done? If we turn that feature on then my issue is that they will appear in the user search list unless we can tag them as external and filter them out everywhere we have that user field.

Slava Savitsky · ‎02-18-2015

You are right. You would need to use some attribute to draw that distinction and set up reference qualifiers throughout the system accordingly. Alternatively, you could use a 'before query' business rule to hide external user records from all lists.

My company is not using this feature as we only use ServiceNow internally.

Blog: https://sys.properties | Telegram: https://t.me/sys_properties | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slava-savitsky/

bammar · ‎02-19-2015

You could add a field called User type and define a business rule that anyone that doesn't have an email address ending in @yourcompany.com will be assigned the usertype of External Contact. Then on the Users Application make another module called "External Contacts" that uses a filter that shows only that user type alongside another that shows Internal users only.