⚠️ This article is about the general topic of service portals. I have created a separate article for the Employee Center, which is a special type of service portal.
| Table of Contents |
My library Knowledge Sources To Go is very popular, but it was intended mainly as a thematically grouped guide to standard sources and was provided by me as a PDF file. For certain topics, however, there is so much content that I can no longer include it in that document, as it cannot continue to grow forever.
For this reason, I have decided to handle such topics in individual community articles like this one instead.
What are Service Portals?
A Service Portal is a portal framework that allows administrators to build a mobile-friendly self-service experience for users. It interacts with parts of the ServiceNow platform, so users can access specific platform features using Service Portal.
Entry point to the official product information pages
Entry point to the official product documentation
Foundation & Implementation
Trainings & Courses
During this training course, you learn how to use the Service Portal application to configure, customize, and extend components to create a Service Portal in your own student instance; a safe sandbox.
This course takes attendees on a Service Portal and Widget development deep-dive. Participants learn how to use their existing AngularJS, Bootstrap, CSS, HTML, and ServiceNow API (JavaScript) skills to create custom Widgets.
Configurable Portal Widgets Overview
Attend this course to learn how to implement Configurable Portal Widgets for Customer and Industry Workflow portals. Learn how Customer Service Management (CSM) can leverage Configurable Portal widgets to reduce Implementation and maintenance by configuring vs. customizing portal widgets.
Explore how to update a Service Portal's theme.
In the first part of this course, you will create a portal using baseline widgets and functionality. You will configure widget options, create a page layout, and modify portal branding.
If you want to learn about ServiceNow Service Portal from scratch and want to develop Service Portal in your organization. This is the right place for you. This training will give you deep knowledge of Service Portal and understand the complete framework.
Service Portal Complete Training in ServiceNow
This is a complete ServiceNow, Service Portal training. Mostly I will focus on Backend and Frontend. Both, I will discuss end to end development training in Service Portal.
Articles & Blog Posts
by ServiceNow Support
How to configure redirection for Service Portal
This article will guide through configuring redirection for users after login. Essentially, we are asking: where does this user go after they log in? And then configuring the logic to facilitate that redirection.
by ServiceNow Support
How to Configure Service Portal as your instance login page
This article will show you how to configure the Service Portal as the primary login page for your instance. Once complete, all unauthenticated users will be directed to the service portal to log in.
2019-08-11 by @dylan_lindgren
The ULTIMATE Service Portal CSS Guide
In this article, I’m going to explain some of the fundamental concepts of CSS, the various ways to create that CSS in Service Portal, and best practices when doing so.
2020-02-26 by Divya Balasubr1
Easy steps to make your portals SEO friendly
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the science behind optimizing a website’s content so that the search engines are more likely to show it as a top result for relevant keyword searches. ServiceNow offers OOTB capabilities to support customers in making their portal SEO friendly. So, to help customers setup their portal in a way they can get the relevant help information easier and quicker, some simple configuration and customization steps have been listed in that article.
2023-01-25 by Sarah Toulson
4 Questions to Kickstart your Service Portal Design
As I walk with my clients through the various pieces and parts of Service Portal to gather requirements and figure out what solution will ultimately solve their problems, the questions regarding design will come up, and here you have the opportunity to really shape and define a unique experience for your clients or organization.
2023-02-13 by @Eliza
Service Portal Design Guidelines
Service Portal serves as a primary touchpoint for many users of ServiceNow – unless one is a fulfilller or an admin they will typically never leave the Service Portal user interface. In order to satisfy these users, it is vital to provide them with a Service Portal that services their needs with ease and clarity.
2023-03-06 by @Eliza
What's new in Utah for Service Portal 🌄
We have a bundle of new and exciting features available for those users of Service Portal who upgrade to Utah - be it a CSM or Employee Center implementation, or an entirely custom portal!
2023-03-06 by @Luis Estefano
Service Portal is intended to give a great user experience to our employees or customers, allowing them to access their services on a quick and easy way. But, what if we want to go one step forward and give them the best possible experience, we can align the portal with their corporative branding. In this way, the employees from different sub-companies, or the customers from different accounts could enjoy a better experience when accessing the Service Portal.
2023-03-06 by @Earl Duque
Understanding the data/input object in Service Portal widgets
Hi everyone, I’m Earl, one of your developer advocates here at ServiceNow, and today we’ll explore the dance between the server script and the client script, and how the data and input objects enable our widgets to communicate back and forth.
Videos & Podcasts
2020-06-24 by GlideFast Consulting
Designing ServiceNow Service Portals
In this session, we will tackle some common Service Portal design challenges and explore principles and methods you can use to set your portal designs apart as beautiful, engaging experiences your users will love. We will address pain points that can inhibit user adoption and explore methods of changing out-of-box styles to reflect an organization's unique brand and culture.
2025-03-06 by Technology Voyage with Ashutosh
In this video i have explained how one can benchmark portal page performance and do analysis of slow queries, business rules, acl, etc.
Development
Trainings & Courses
This course takes attendees on a Service Portal and Widget development deep-dive. Participants learn how to use their existing AngularJS, Bootstrap, CSS, HTML, and ServiceNow API (JavaScript) skills to create custom Widgets. Lab exercises walk students through practicing every technique discussed.
This Crash Course is designed to rapidly develop experience through hands on exercises followed by exploration to cultivate understanding. Become familiar with a wide array of topics such as Service Portal configuration, themes, and even building custom widgets with AngularJS.
In the second part of this course you will use your existing JavaScript, AngularJS, HTML, and ServiceNow development skills to create, test, and debug custom widgets using the Widget API. You will communicate between the widgets by broadcasting AngularJS events. You will create user-settable widget options and define a directive. Also, you will use a Record Watch to listen for record changes outside of Service Portal.
Articles & Blog Posts
2017-07-20 by @jesseadams
Six common performance pitfalls in Service Portal and how to diagnose them
In this post, I will share some of the things I have commonly seen cause performance issues in the Service Portal so that if you run into performance issues, you'll know where to look in order to start diagnosing the problem and figuring out how to deal with it.
2017-07-20 by @Ray44
How to comunicate between widgets
In this article I will be discussing how to comunicate across widgets. I'll be using as an example 4 different widgets. (This is the demo in the attachment)
2021 by @Pranav Bhagat
Tips and Techniques for Service Portal Developers
The goal of this series is to consolidate a list of common challenges which almost every developer will come across when they work on Service Portal.
2022-01-22 by @jrmarkel
How To: Create a Service Portal Tabbed Form Widget - Version 2
This session will explore why, when, and how to use Angular Providers in Service Portal. We’ll take a look at the anatomy of services and directives, analyze some out-of-box examples, and build a few from scratch.
2025-07-30 by serviceportal.io
Creating Reusable Template-Driven Widgets in Service Portal
In Service Portal, it’s common to create widgets that are used in multiple places. But if you need change the HTML, developers often clone the widget — a pattern that quickly becomes hard to maintain and results in lots of additional widgets. Instead, let’s walk through how to build a template-driven, reusable widget that allows you to select and load different HTML templates from the instance options, without cloning the widget or touching the core widget code.
Videos & Podcasts
2020-04-28 ServiceNow Community
Understanding Angular Providers in Service Portal
2020-04-28 by ServiceNow Support
Provides debugging tips for troubleshooting Service Portal configuration issues.
2020-05-12 by CodeCreative
Problems with Making Public Forms
In this episode, I discuss some of the issues with creating public forms on ServiceNow and Service Portal. There's more to it than the issues most are familiar with such as getting UI Policies, Client Scripts, and submission to work correctly. We often overlook the security implications of creating public forms such as denial of service vulnerability and exposure of data. It's the latter issues that I tackle in this episode focusing particularly on denial of service and how improper implementations of Google Recaptcha fail to protect.
2020-08-20 ServiceNow Community
Code Decoded - Service Portal Widgets, Part 1
Watch this video to learn the basics of building a custom Service Portal widget. Chuck covers the fundamentals of server side, client, and HTML code and how to pass information between them.
2020-09-17 ServiceNow Community
Code Decoded - Service Portal Widgets, Part 2
Learn how to create Service Portal widgets that automatically update based on data changes. These are great for dynamic dashboards that don't require a constant refresh. Bonus - this episode will also show you how to make an widget reusable using the option schema.
2020-10-29 ServiceNow Community
Scripted REST APIs and Service Portal Widgets
Discover how to use a scripted REST API to interface with your Service Portal widget and abstract the server processing logic from your widget while gaining a custom API.
2022-05-04 by CodeCreative
A summary and review of CodeCreative's Multi-Page Catalog Item implementation. This solution enables breaking a ServiceNow Service Catalog Item's form into multiple steps in Service Portal. The multi-page capability is useful for Government Applications, Cloud Provisioning Requests, and other step by step processes with longer submission forms.
2022-10-16 by CodeCreative
In this 3-part video series, it is demonstrated how tto implement a solution for exposing unauthenticated public forms on the ServiceNow platform.
2025-02-17 by @Ashutosh Munot1
Widget Performance Details Part 1
In this video i have shown features related to how can we debug widget performance for Xanadu release and Yokohama release.
2025-02-22 by @Ashutosh Munot1
Widget Performance Details Part 2
Welcome to Part 2 of our Widget Performance Details series! In this episode, we delve into the practical aspects of integrating out-of-the-box (OOB) widgets into your custom portals.
Troubleshooting
Frequently Asked Questions on redirection with service portal (KB0747432)
