Viva Las Vegas! Now Learning IT Service Management Bellini 2103 - 2106

[Micah Russell]

This article will serve for a few different functions, really a one-stop-shop for all things for our course. First and foremost use this link to claim a student instance (https://clabs.link/itsmf-may-340).

Other uses may include:

• introduce yourself and connect with others (see first comment)
• ask questions and get answers (no I do not know the speed of an unladen swallow)
• random translations ('Viva Las Vegas' literal translation is 'Long Live the Meadows')
• and anything else you want (well this is Vegas so I will add, within reason)

Article is public so you don't even need to sign in to read it, but to comment you will need to sign into Community.

[Daniel Choisser]

or maybe that would be more of a scheduled report?

[xianoh]

Dashboards and who you can share them with deal with access and roles. I always say, "Who gets what determines who does or has what?"  

So if they are non-licensed users, then they may not have roles which would allow them to see the dashboard.  

What you could do is run reports to show that kind of information to the Department Chair, based on what you are breaking down.  

[That Phil Guy]

Dashboard visibility is tricky (because it's powerful!). This is off-the-cuff, so there might be some mistakes, here:

You could theoretically even make one public: There is a pseudo-role called "public" (as well as a table called "Public Pages") that might come into play. But even if you set the Dashboard to public...

• Report visibility may come into play (in terms of "shared with") per Dashboard Widget
• ACLs (Access Controls) then come into play, too:
• Is there a "report_view" rule on the table being reported against? It may need to be set "public," too.
• Table read access will need to be solid to make sure non-licensed users don't see stuff they shouldn't!

Take these ideas and remove the "public" role (and Public Pages record) to share things to unlicensed-but-authenticated users.

[That Phil Guy]

If you want an example to look at in these course instances:

• Impersonate Joe Employee
• Go to the "Dashboards" module
• He has one he can see called "My Assets" — could be worth quickly reverse engineering?

[That Phil Guy]

If you want an example to look at in these course instances:

• Impersonate Joe Employee
• Go to the "Dashboards" module
• He has one he can see called "My Assets" — could be worth quickly reverse engineering?

[That Phil Guy]

This eventually generated some great class discussion, and the SCTASK owner submitting an Incident since they aren't able to do the work (and this, I take it, would become a child Incident of the new Problem).

(I'm trying to paraphrase course participant Bri, I think it was, who suggested using child Incidents.)

[xianoh]

https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0549746

Known Errors

[That Phil Guy]

Any KCS (Knowledge Centered Support) folks here? I'm curious to know how today's material resonates with you!

[xianoh]

Good morning!  We are looking for a few enthused and energized attendees to be interviewed on camera for our Video blog, Workplace, etc. 

Please come find me in the back of the room if you are willing and able. 

Christian Oh

[That Phil Guy]

This example of assignment comes from the Problem Task table.

Yeah, you can see here that the Assigned To field is "dependent" on the Assignment Group field—meaning that you can only pick people who're in the chosen Assignment Group. AFAIK, that's true of all Task-derived tables unless changed. Not only that, but a reference qualifier (i.e., a filter) is set to require the problem_task_analyst role.

You can also see that the Assignment Group field has a reference qualifier expecting that the Group type is either null or is ... well, trust me, that's the "ITIL" type.

Personally, I don't think changing some of these things is particularly dangerous or a particularly heavy lift to make it match your process. (But some may disagree?)

Reference qualifiers can be very powerful if you're willing to write scripts, letting you change who's available in the Assigned To field, for example, to a large (and much more dynamic) degree.

Other effects can be achieved through things like Business Rules and Assignment Rules. I appreciate the wisdom of avoiding heavy customization, but I also want to make the point that things like whether a role is needed for a certain assignment can easily be reconfigured!

[Angelica Castil]

I am not in class today because I am under the weather but I am reading the book and I am looking at change and the three types of change, normal, standard and emergency. Curious what you all see as the most used change types?

[That Phil Guy]

Hey there! Sorry you're not feeling well. 😞

Most of the discussion has been around custom or lesser-known change models, and why people would use them. For example, unauthorized changes generated a lot of interest! Keeping track of CIs that have been changed without a proper change record has a lot of potential benefits, like, well, keeping people from doing that, because they'll know that when they do, it's automatically recorded, and the CAB managers can see it plain as day.

Another course participant mentioned that their org has an "expedited" change model for something that's not quite an emergency change, but is on a quicker timeline than a normal change. These can perhaps attracting stakeholder attention since they may have arisen from a breach of planning process. (I'm paraphrasing, so hopefully I got that right.)

Speak up, other folks! 🙂

[Angelica Castil]

Got it, thank you. Our org's biggest struggle is undocumented changes because they make it a harder to identify the cause of outages as a result of those changes because we have no way to track what changes could have caused the outage and people afraid to come forward with the fact that their change may have been the cause of the outage. Also, we have CAB meetings Tuesdays and Thursdays of every week to go over changes for approvals so that it limits our need for emergency changes.

[Chad Cook]

condition_builder=v2

[That Phil Guy]

Did you SEE the way Micah made the Filter Condition Builder on a form update to the nice, new version? GAL DANG!

1. Right-click the condition field
2. Choose "Show Dictionary"
3. Under Attributes, enter: condition_builder=v2

If you don't have an Attributes field, you need to ensure you're on the "Advanced View" of the dictionary record. There's likely to be a Related Link at the bottom to switch to that view if you aren't already there.

[seanpmcclean]

Love this Answer @Jan Spurlin 

[seanpmcclean]

Hey folks - had someone with some knowledge Mgmt questions so I'm "crashing the feed"... one of the great resources I'd share is  April Allen:

April Allen https://twitter.com/knowledgebird is an expert on Knowledge Management, not necessarily ServiceNow specific, but she is considered one of the foremost experts in the ITSM and ITIL space on implementing Knowledge Management:

https://knowledgebird.com/about/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/knowledge-bird/

I'll hunt my archives to see if I can add any other handy tidbits and I'll reply here

[That Phil Guy]

BTW, @Angelica Castillo, please email:

victor.colon@servicenow.com

You might be able to attend "as a robot"! (I'm NOT even kidding! Did you see the robots we had yesterday? You can participate through them!)

[That Phil Guy]

Right, @Victor Colon ?? 🙂

[Angelica Castil]

Thanks! Checking into that!

[That Phil Guy]

UPDATE ALL CONDITION BUILDERS TO V2 WITH ONE SCRIPT?

After Micah blew my mind with that dictionary attribute which updates any filter condition builder to the nicer, newer version, I wondered whether I could make a script that would find all form-based condition builders and update them all. So, here's what I came up with.

WARNING! USE WITH CAUTION! THIS MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR PRODUCTION!

[xianoh]

On behalf of ServiceNow and Micah, Phil, and all the TAs 

Thank you for your attendance, participation, engagement, questions, and attention. 

We hope you learned a lot and will be able to apply them back at your respective companies. 

Stay connected here, on LinkedIn, etc. 

Have a great rest of the conference!!

PEACE!!

[TIMS50]

The new version of the script works great in Dev so far! THANKS PHIL!!!

[That Phil Guy]

*tap tap* Well, it's been two weeks, and apart from tidying up that wacky condition builder script, I'm at a loss for what else to pop in this thread. I hope all is well!