Watchlist, Customer Comments, and Intended Use Cases

[benitsm]

Hi All,

I realize this is somewhat of a broad question, but we're trying to discern how ServiceNow expects large organizations to handle incidents. The out-of-the-box watchlist allows users to simply view the original caller's task ticket, but not comment on it. However, in any multi-national company, work generally is accomplished in a follow-the-sun model. This scenario would seem to require that a user on the watchlist be able to comment on, not just view, the incident. For example:

• I am located in the US (with team members located across the world) and I file an incident ticket with the corporate Active Directory Administrators who are located in Bangalore.
• The AD administrators respond to the ticket during their workday which is in the middle of the night in US.
• The AD administrators need additional information from our team to resolve the incident.
• My colleague who works in Bangalore needs to be able to provide the information that the AD administrators require.

How are your organizations handling this type of arrangement? In my mind, this isn't a corner case, but would happen in almost any large enterprise. Having my team on the watchlist with only view rights to the incident would seem to be an incredible impediment to operational agility.

I'd value any perspectives from the community, as I'm having difficulty understanding how the platform was intended to work at scale. Thanks for your help with this question!

[Deepak Ingale1]

Hi Ben,

Watchlist person also receive the emails along with caller whenever additional comments are updated.

Replying to these emails will update the incident as well.

I have not logged on to system to check if watchlist user have rights to uodate comment field. I think OOB they do have those rights but I may be wrong.

[benitsm]

Hi Deepak,

In my personal Dev instance, it appears that users with no roles who are on the watchlist cannot add comments on the incident form. From what we have been told regarding licensing, allowing non-rolled users to update the customer comments field effectively transforms them in to users who should have a role (and thus a license). The whole situation seems very odd to me. It's hard to imagine any multi-national enterprise where the platform would be usable if updates are only allowed via email for those on the watchlist.

I guess my question is, are we an edge case? If so, how do large multi-national organizations typically handle this situation? Do they simply pay role licenses for every user in the company via ELA?

[Deepak Ingale1]

Hi Ben,

If watchlist users with no role can not add comments into incident comment field, then this can be easily achieved by modiying ACL on incident.comment field or creating new ACL on same field which will allow watchlist users also to update the incident.

This will not cost you licensing

[mitzaka]

deepak.ingale - I am a colleague of Ben and we share this issue. As for your last comment, We also we thinking that a simple modification of the ACL for the non-roles users on the watch list would do the job, meaning enable them to add comments. However, we were told by our sales representative that if any non-roled user wishes to add a comment to a ticket which is not created by him/her, then this means he/she requires a license.

Personally I am having extremely hard time believing this as it does not make sense to me - adding comments is allowed via reply to an email without the cost of a license, then what is the difference if you do it via the tool?! Just don't think this is accurate.

How have you solved this issue in your instance? Would appreciate you sharing your experience with us in our effort to clarify this.

Btw - I am also running a thread on this here, you might find some of that helpful as a background context.

Re: Clarifying end user roles, access and licenses