Integrating two servicenow instances

[sLuintel]

Hello

Has anyone integrated two different service now instances?

We now have an external help desk system for a certain department who also use servicenow. The idea is that users from our organisation raise a call in our system and this gets pushed through to theirs'. The integration would be both ways. Updates made on their side is puuled in to ours and updates made on our side is pulled into theirs.

I tried using this thourgh inbound emails, but not sure how effective that is. I am wary because in our trusted domians we would have to include service-now.com and this could mean we would get emails from all and any service now instances.

Any advice please.

Many Thanks.

[sLuintel]

Hi all

Thank you for your response, I have read through and see that they are all web services based. However, they do not want web services. This is to be performed solely on emails.

Any advice regarding that?

I am aware of normal email going in and out, but bi-directional through emails?

[JC Moller]

Hi,

Here is a HI article to read:

Email loop: ServiceNow instance ignores email sent by another instance

https://hi.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0551482

"Implement a Web Service Integration — recommended

Customers implementing instance-to-instance integrations should use web service calls between the instances, which avoids the ambiguity inherent in trying to distinguish human-generated and system-generated inbound email to drive an appropriate system response.

Implement an Email-based Integration

Using email between automated systems must be considered with care, and can be fragile. ServiceNow does not recommend integrations between instances via email notifications without adequate testing."

- Jan

[sLuintel]

Hi Jan,

yes I have read that before, and we decided that their email will come out from service-now.com and go into anotheremail.com and then it will be fwd to our service-now.com.

However, a bi-directional and 'ability to change and update any fields' integration based on emails? Do you know anything on that. There would be a lot of data mapping and scripting, but where would you script this? I am aware that a transform map can be used for mapping but, I hevent done one where both parties would be able to edit via email. If I am making any sense.... :S

Regards.

[david_loo]

Hi Sweeda,

I was the developer that created the email, web service and import set facilities in ServiceNow so here is my answer.   The disadvantages of using email for integrations are:

1. there is no guaranteed response to a request, therefore you have no way to "correlate" 2 records in different systems, synchronously or asynchronously.   This will result in duplicates.

2. the email body does not enforce format or encoding so you will not be guaranteed to have data that is predictably parseable to update a record.

3. there is no authentication or authorization on the receiver to ensure that the data is from a reliable source and well meaning.

Hope this helps,

David

Perspectium

[sLuintel]

Thank you, yes I thought so. We have now talked them into the use of web services, so hopefully we will be going down that route.

Thanks so much for all your help and advice!