Inbound Email Actions - able to match an existing incident based on a ticket number from previous ticketing system being migrated over to SN?

[bcronrath]

We are migrating over to SN from a previous ticketing system.   Part of the migration will involve tickets that are already open in the old system, and clients will be expecting to still be able to reply to the old ticket subject lines for those tickets and get a response.   I can get emails to update existing incidents in our service now dev instance if I include the SN incident number format in the subject line, so moving forward it should be fine, however for those other tickets that we will be importing in that include the old format of ticket numbers (does not have "INC" in the ticket format) is there a way we can script our inbound email actions for incident updates to check on a different style of ticket number format?

Best regards,

Brian

[Michael Ritchie]

Here is the flow on how inbound emails are matched:

http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Inbound_Email_Actions#Matching_Incoming_Email_to_an_Inbou...

How are you handling the email reply redirect?   I would expect that by default they click reply and it currently goes to some internal email alias.   If that is the case you set emails to this email address redirect to ServiceNow.   Then create a new inbound email action for this particular email alias that then has script to match based on the old ticket number - assuming you are storing that somewhere in the imported tickets.

[bcronrath]

Thank you for the reply Michael!

You have got it nailed pretty much in how the redirect is handled, however the main thing I am hung up on is how to script the action to match based on that old ticket number.   For instance, in your documentation there is a property "glide.email.reply_subject_prefix", however I am unsure how to set this prefix for recognizing the ticket number (or if there is even such a property, I might just be going about it the wrong way).

For instance, a SN ticket has the format INC#### and if I send an email into our SN email alias with that in the subject it will recognize it properly and update a SN incident with a ticket in that format.   However, for the old/currently open tickets in our old ticketing system, I was thinking of importing them into SN and using the incident number in that different format to differentiate them from any new tickets.   So for instance I have imported those into our dev instance with a format like 1111-#### (just using 1111 as an example prefix).   Does this implementation seem a bit wrong to you?   It almost sounds like from your reply we should import and have SN automatically generate a INC number for those, and perhaps use a custom field to identify and coalesce the old ticket IDs, and then write the inbound email script logic to look at the custom field as well as the INC number.

Best regards,

Brian

[Michael Ritchie · Accepted solution]

Many organizations choose not to import ticket data from the old system, but obviously in some cases that may be required.   If you need to do this, you could create a custom field with the old ticket number, or even prefix the short description with it.   Then your inbound email script could do a query in whatever field you choose to match that ticket number.   First you could need to parse the email subject for the old ticket number, then use that in your query to find the existing incident created.   I hope this makes sense.

[ewanh]

Hi Michael,

Do you have an example script you could send once that custom field is created.   I am not a scriptor but would love to modify yours if you will allow it.

In my example, our old system includes ##<number>## in the email subject line.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Regards,

Ewan