New Instance - Where to start, what to do

[pauladams]

Hello Community,

We are a new customer of ServiceNow and very soon we will be transitioning to ServiceNow from another popular ITSM tool (I think you can guess what it is ).

I will be getting some formal training in the first quarter of this year. However, I have already started learning by following the documentation and developer community.

I get lot of questions and try to find answers in the community or in the documentation.

I was wondering, what should we do immediately when we have a new instance? Is there a checklist for things to configure and check on the new system?

Name instance? Setup access/security, roles? etc.

Thanks

Paul

[RajNow]

Hi Paul,

Welcome . Are the new instances already provisioned for your company? If yes then an automated email is sent out from HI (The Service Portal on HI enables ServiceNow customers and partners to centrally manage their instances, upgrades, and users from one location ) to 'Customer admin' along with instance user details. That email does have certain links to go over. Also during the initial days, there would be help from ServiceNow team to help with necessary configurations as per your company requirements. In the mean time, links mentioned by Aditya and others should be helpful. If you have access to HI then you can go through following link to understand how easily you can manage your new instance ServiceNow KB: HI Service Portal for Customers (KB0547203)

Thanks

[pauladams]

Thanks Raj raj@now

[pauladams]

Also, how do I determine the plugins that I need?

What plugins will the out of the box instance have?

[RajNow]

Hi Paul, you can see this here - https://wiki.servicenow.com/?title=List_of_Plugins#gsc.tab=0

Since you are experimenting on your own instance, you may want to choose which module to explore (e.g. PPM or HR) and then specifically enable plugins for that. The list of plugins for each module can be checked via wiki/doc site.

Hope this helps.

[simpatico]

Hello Paul,

For a purely technical guide, the ITSM Guided Setup is the best place to start, as referred to by adityamallik.

If you are looking for more guidance from a managerial perspective I recommend a book I wrote with goranlundqvist. It talks about the go-live stage, making it very easy to use through email integration and LDAP integration, and then guidance on managing development and stakeholders after the Go-live once ServiceNow is used in production.

The book is published by Apress, and you can use thankyou1702 to get with a $10 discount and free shipping. The book is also available on Amazon.

I hope this was helpful (not just marketing!).