Issues with Homepage Deprecation tool

[Luiz Lucena]

Hello everyone, 

First of all, sorry if this is not the right forum or topics. 

But there it goes our experience with the Homepage Deprecation tool.
First, the documentation is not clear to what will happen.

We tried in DEV, then in our test instance, no one reported any issue. 
Moved to PRD and now people are complaining they cannot find their homepages. 

We thought that enabling the system property to disable the creation of new homepages would do JUST that. Instead, it disabled ALL homepages, actually it didn't "disabled" but there is no other way for an ITIL user to find their homepages.

Anyone had the same issue?

[Mark Manders]

Aren't the users no on the standard 'dashboard' settings and therefor they can't find the homepages? It could be it was triggered separately, but that was what happened at one of the companies I was working for. 

If my answer helped you in any way, please then mark it as helpful. If it resolved the issue, please mark it as correct.

Mark

[Thomas_Davis]

Putting the property to TRUE will disable the creation of new and editing of existing homepages, but also the default start page/landing page will then be set to Dashboards

So if there are menus that connect directly to a Homepage they will be able to reach it, or if they have a direct URL otherwise home.do will always redirect to the last visited PA dashboard.

Check out this Platform Analytics Academy session that discusses Homepage Deprecation.

Hope this helps,

[Luiz Lucena]

Thanks, Thomas. 

The main issue we had was with the documentation that says:
"Disable the creation of new homepages: Set the system property com.glideapp.home.deprecate_homepages to true."

When in fact, what it did was also remove the ability from end users to find their homepages. 

It should have been mentioned anywhere in the documentation what would really happens by enabling that property. 

Thanks, 

[Philip Scutt · Accepted solution]

Yes, we've had exactly the same experience but fortunately found it in our test instance.  Enabling the property forces everyone to use a Dashboard and removes their ability to use a personal Homepage, which is okay if their homepage has been converted but they haven't in the majority of cases.  This is very poorly documented by ServiceNow as they say changing this property only stops the creation of new pages.

As a result, we've had to change our approach to the following:

1. Communicated that the change is coming.
2. Review if an existing Dashboard is suitable for personal use to replace a personal homepage.
3. Where no Dashboard is suitable, users convert the personal homepages themselves by a date in September.
4. Users delete personal homepages after conversion or if they no longer use.
5. We'll then enable the property and convert any remaining homepages that are still actively used.

To me the Homepage Deprecation Tool hasn't been setup with our customers in mind.  It should have solely disabled the creation of new homepages whilst still allowing use and conversion by individuals; given admins the opportunity to populate the tool and convert; then finally had a new system property to fully disable use.