Email script for approval in service portal

[Nicholas Hromya]

Hello all,

As an approver, I want to get an email that directs me to the Service Portal (not the ESC) to show me the details of a requested item to give approval or rejection.

I am not very good at scriptiing...

I did find the email script request_item_approval.  This seems to send approvers to the ESC.  My task is make this in the service portal as we have not introduced our teams to the ESC yet.

Thank you in advance.

Nick

[KPNow]

It is completely understandable to want to avoid sending users to the Employee Center (ESC) if your organization hasn't rolled it out yet. By default, many baseline ServiceNow approval notifications point straight to ESC or the standard platform layout because of how their underlying email scripts construct URLs. To fix this without needing to write complex code from scratch, you can modify or replace the link target inside your email script to explicitly direct approvers to your standard Service Portal (sp) page instead.

To make this happen, navigate to System Notification > Email Scripts in your filter navigator, search for the request_item_approval script (or the specific email script referenced in your approval notification), and update its target URL logic. You can swap out the portal suffix in the script so that instead of generating an ESC link, it builds a clean link pointing to your standard portal view (for example, using sp?id=approval&sys_id= followed by the record's sys_id). Once you save that minor adjustment, any future approval emails will safely route your approvers right into the standard Service Portal environment they are already familiar with.