Inevitable "Legacy" Service Catalog Deprecation (Desktop/Next Experience/UI16)

[Chris D]

As far as I can tell, all signs point strongly to the inevitable replacement of the "legacy" Service Catalog (catalog_home.do + navigation + catalog item forms) that's available in Next Experience (All > Self-Service > Service Catalog)...

For a few examples, there's numerous configurable features on Catalog Items (sc_cat_item) exclusive to Portals (see the "Portal Settings" form section), Saved Bundles are still exclusive to the Portal, and in Catalog Builder, you can only test items in the Portal, mobile, and Virtual Agent (no Next Experience).

Oh, and not to mention, Homepages - which is what catalog_home is - were deprecated a few years ago.

As far as I've seen, there's been no official deprecation nor even "planned deprecation" for legacy Service Catalog, but for all intents and purposes, I think ServiceNow has effectively deprecated it... but without saying anything. I just don't get it - by not putting any official word out there, we're left here managing two different UIs for doing the same thing - but with occasional conflicting/unsupported functionality and code between the two, not to mention inconsistent user experiences.

And fwiw, some functionality, like List Collectors, are arguably better in the legacy catalog and, understandably so, UI Pages (and likely some other things) only work in the legacy, so it's not a complete write-off, but still - the lack of transparency is killing me...

While we - at least, probably the majority of our catalog users - have been using the Portal for years, this has brought to the front of my mind since I realized this year that Knowledge Management V3 Homepage (basically the Knowledge equivalent of the "legacy" service catalog I'm referring to) was deprecated and we recently enabled the property which was a clean one-step migration that simply embeds the knowledge portal into Next Experience. 

Seeing this, it seems almost to me that the inevitable route of the Service Catalog will be identical: for end users, the Portal (well, Employee Center specifically now) is clear gold standard for customer request management and what would ServiceNow get from maintaining two completely separate code bases and UIs for browsing and requesting catalog items - especially now as they've very clearly set a precedent for embedding Portal technology into Next Experience. 

This isn't as much a question for the community as it is for ServiceNow: even though basically no new features have been added in years - and Portal-exclusive features are the norm - why hasn't this been done for legacy Service Catalog yet?? Deprecate it and make this easy migration happen like you did with Knowledge.

I guess to put out there to the community: have you done any custom "migration" or redirection from legacy Service Catalog to the Portal Service Catalog?? At this point - even though we do rely on the legacy for at least several unique catalog items - I feel like it would be worthwhile to do so for simplification and prep for the inevitable...