Issues with Homepage Deprecation tool

Luiz Lucena · ‎08-15-2022

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?

Philip Scutt · ‎08-18-2022

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:

Communicated that the change is coming.
Review if an existing Dashboard is suitable for personal use to replace a personal homepage.
Where no Dashboard is suitable, users convert the personal homepages themselves by a date in September.
Users delete personal homepages after conversion or if they no longer use.
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.

View solution in original post

Luiz Lucena · ‎08-19-2022

Hi Philip,

Yes, exactly the point, very poor documentation, unfortunately.

We weren't so lucky, the testers we got didn't have personal homepages, they were using the ootb ITIL Homepage, which was the only one we converted.

Anyway, I'll mark your reply as the correct answer as it contains a good plan that should work nice to anyone else as a future reference.

Thanks,

froehre31 · ‎02-21-2023

Hello! I'm seeing Dashboard tabs showing up in the Homepage depreciation migration table. Is there a concern about retiring these items? For the dashboard tabs, I see they have information on the homepage.view column and actual homepages have the "view" column blank. (I've attached a screenshot)
@Thomas_Davis

froehre31 · ‎02-21-2023

Note, I do see some of these dashboard tabs going to the "All Converted homepages from add and other actions" report, but not all.