ServiceNow Portal Best Practice: One main portal vs Multiple Portals per Department

[bartonj32]

Hello

We are having a bit of debate as to if we should have one main ServiceNow Portal or individual ones for specific departments. I see the values of having everything one single portal, but I also like the value of having an interface dedicated to a limited set of tools/applications for a specific business (i.e. engineering, finance, etc). In addition, the ability to communicate the status, downtime and major incidents. On a single main portal these status messages can get lost among tools not relevant to everyone. 

I was curious what others are doing? Are you customizing a single portal based on user assignments? Do you use multiple portals within your organization? What are the recommendations for those doing implementations?

[Allen Andreas]

Hi,

I've seen it both ways, honestly. It depends on the structure of the company/organization. If it's rather large, then it may be beneficial to break it out so that different departments/sub-agencies, etc. have their own portal otherwise a single portal should be used.

You would want to review the future plans for the platform. If it looks like everyone is going to be on board for their own portal, then that may be the best route. If it just looks like one department really wants their own portal, but the others don't need it or don't want it, then...it wouldn't be advisable to create a separate portal just for the one department.

Having announcements/banners on one main portal for a department specific issue I can see that being a problem. You can uncheck the "public" checkbox on the announcement and set it to per role. So perhaps if you have roles for these different departments, you can take the announcements that way so that maybe only those users + admin see it. Just throwing that piece out there.

To recap: I've seen it both ways, both have their pros and cons. It really depends on the company/organization structure, maturity of the environment, future plans, etc.

Otherwise, one main portal seems to work best and SN has feature/abilities baked in already to hide catalog items per conditions, etc. Widgets can have user conditions so only 'x' people see it, etc. So you can sort of create "mini" portals within just the one main portal.

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[Shailesh Gupta]

Thanks Allen for your insight. 

From your experience having implemented the Sevice Now ESM solution for many clients, have you seen many large clients with multiple departments using multiple portals (or individual dept portals) feeding into a light weight User interface -typically a single point of entry for all co-workers and multi-dept portals behind it. 

Are their any known architectural overheads, performance challenges that we need to be aware of if we implement multiple dept portals converging to a Light weight User interface linking these portals and providing notifications, alerts, etc. ?

Look forward to your response.