How to Remove Unwanted Service Operations Workspace Banners

[Kristen Dettman]

Have you upgraded to Xanadu, and now you're seeing this banner or a similar one driving your users to Service Operations Workspace?

We caught this when opening an Application Service record in sub-production when testing our upgrade. It wasn't desirable for us, because we haven't configured Service Operations Workspace yet and don't want to push our users in that direction. Luckily, after a bunch of digging around, I discovered it was incredibly easy to disable. 🙌

If you're in the same boat and don't want these SOW banners, all you need to do is set the "show_sow_enhanced_experience_message" system property to false.

If you want to know the inner workings, there's a UI Action on the em_alert table called "Use SOW-Express List module" that checks to see if this property is true and, if so, pops up the info message. It tailors the message content based on a script include called "SOWEnhancedExperienceUsersDriver" that contains helper functions to drive users to the SOW and its modules.

I haven't found this documented anywhere, so hopefully this will help someone else avoid the rabbit hole I fell down looking into this! 🐇

[E_R]

This was super helpful. Thanks for sharing. The error showed up for me, when creating an incident in a lower environment as well. The fix worked. 

[Kristen Dettman]

@E_R I'm glad this worked for you! You're very welcome.

Kristen

[Michael Baker]

Thank you. We caught this in our sub-prod today and I was thinking that it will drive our end users nuts as we are not using express list yet and I couldn't find out how to turn it off. 

Regards,

Michael 

[Kristen Dettman]

@Michael Baker you're welcome!

[Sally7]

We found a similar message having to do with on-call calendar.  

This wouldn't work for us.  We found a system property "com.snc.on_call.announcement_message".  Once it was set to false we no longer received the message for on-call.

[Kristen Dettman]

Another one, oh boy!! Thanks for sharing, @Sally7 .

[Michael Baker]

@Sally7 Thanks for sharing, we haven't seen this yet but will look out for it. At least this one is not buried in a UI action which makes no sense. It's also a big concerning that ServiceNow is pushing out these banners without knowing if the customer has configured and is using these features. 

[nebula]

It would be nice if the banners don't reappear after Xing it. It's fine to advertise, but allow the users the ability to stop if if they wish.

[jenniemiller]

Thanks! (And additional thanks to Sally7!) These banner messages have been annoying; so helpful to find how to turn them off! I agree with Nebula - if there's a way to allow users to acknowledge the message and have it not recur.