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Steph Morillo
What is a Service Portal?
Service Portal is a product that enables organizations to provide a visual layer to the content stored within ServiceNow – similar to a web page. It is intended to deliver information to users who may not generally have access to the standard ServiceNow user interface.
The typical use cases enabled for a Service Portal include:
- Search a Knowledge Base for answers.
- Register new products and view a list of currently registered products.
- Contact a live agent about a question or issue.
- Chat with a Virtual Agent to resolve their queries.
- Create cases/incidents/ and view a list of current cases.
- Accept or reject proposed resolutions to requests.
- Access services using the service catalogs.
- Provide a Front-End for a custom application
It is entirely customizable – each component can be configured or customized to your organizations functional and branding requirements.
What technologies is Service Portal built on?
First and foremost, SP allows users to use Web Technologies to build portals: HTML, CSS and JavaScript client. In addition, Service Portal is built on top of a number of open-source web technologies including:
- AngularJS for client logic
- SASS for theming
- Bootstrap3 to provide a responsive grid for content layout
Are there any plans to move away from AngularJS?
ServiceNow maintains its own version of AngularJS, which we plan to continuously maintain and enhance as required for our Service Portal use cases for as long as we have customers using it. There are no plans to migrate from it in the foreseeable future.
If you are interested in how we maintain the security of this language, please review the support guide here.
What is the recommended approach for developing a new Service Portal?
For employee-facing and/or service delivery portals, the current recommendation is to use Employee Center. Employee Center provides you with an interface for employees to interact across multiple departments.
You can learn more about Employee Center here.
For customer facing portals, we recommend the Customer/Consumer Service Portals.
The Customer Service Portal supports your business-to-business (B2B) customers and the Consumer Service Portal supports your business-to-consumer (B2C) customers.
Are there any best practice guides available for Service Portal?
Yes – you can find a guide to best practices relating to the design of your Service Portal here.
What is the relationship between UI Builder/Portal Experience/Next Experience UI Framework and Service Portal?
Portal Experiences and Service Portals are separate products, built on differing technology stacks.
Portal Experiences are designed using UI Builder and are intended for use with fulfiller/internal experiences. It is built on and uses a ServiceNow JavaScript framework named the Next Experience UI Framework built on web components standards, similar to React. As of the Utah release, there is a significant gap in capabilities between Service Portal and Portal Experiences.
Service Portals are designed primarily using the Service Portal Designer tool and are intended for use with requester/external experiences. It is built on and uses AngularJS, Bootstrap, and CSS.
You can learn more about the similarities and differences between products here.
How can I build or edit a Service Portal?
To create a new Service Portal, navigate to Service Portal > Portals from the filter navigator. From this list screen, you can see all portals that arrive out of the box. You can create your own by clicking “New”, however, we recommend using the Employee Center /esc portal as your starting point.
To edit visual components within your Service Portal, navigate to Service Portal > Service Portal Configuration from the filter navigator. From here you can adjust the branding, layouts, or content of your Service Portal.
How does my Service Portal get populated with information?
Content displayed within your Service Portal can sourced from a number of different locations. For example:
- Knowledge articles are created and maintained within the Knowledge Management Application.
- Catalog Items and request forms are managed within Service Catalog.
- Approvals and tasks are sourced from within ServiceNow.
- Content can be pulled from third party sources such as Workday via API.
You have the flexibility to retrieve data from both internal and external to ServiceNow to include within your Service Portal.
Can Service Portals, and the included components be translated?
Yes – everything, including custom text within a Service Portal can be localized to a particular user’s desired language. A guide with more details is available here. The translations are either performed using Dynamic Translation or hardcoded within a table.
How can I measure analytics relating to my Service Portal?
You can track the performance of your Service Portal in a number of key areas using the products below:
What limitations exist when building a Service Portal?
You have a significant amount of flexibility, however, the following use cases are not recommended:
- Compute-intensive processes
- 3D based components
- Page designs without a grid
- Significant amounts of data sharing or state managing between components
Each of the above will result in the degradation of performance for your Service Portal.
Anatomy
What are the different components of a Service Portal?
A Service Portal is a collection of pages. Each page serves as the top level host for layout and content and has a unique URL.
The layout comprises of rows and columns that are entirely adjustable and used to create a responsive, grid-based spread of information on the page. Within each cell of this grid, you can place a container. Each container serves to host widgets, which make up the functionality of a portal page.
How is branding configured across the Service Portal?
Themes are used to define branding across a Service Portal – this includes determining the header and footer displays, color schemes etc. The styles defined within a theme be overridden by other style configurations.
What is a widget?
Widgets are components found within Service Portals that display content. You can use HTML templates, CSS, client scripts, server scripts, and any JavaScript dependencies to define what a widget does. From an AngularJS standpoint, widgets are essentially a superset of an Angular directive.
- Out of box Service Portal widgets are read-only so you can benefit from future updates, which means you can't update their code. If you need to make major changes, clone the widget and give it another name and ID.
- Widgets consist of HTML, client controllers, server scripts and CSS in a single record.
- Useful resources:
Where can I find a list of all widgets?
You can find them here. If you are looking for a widget that is not on that list, it may be a custom built widget.
What does the “CD” mean on the widgets?
“CD” stands for Content Delivery – this means that it is a widget available for use with the Content Publishing application, which requires an Employee Center Pro license.
Can I customize widgets?
Yes you can. Base system widgets are read-only so you can benefit from future updates. To make changes, you can clone base system widgets. However, cloned widgets are considered custom and don't benefit from future updates to the widgets they were cloned from.
Support
Is Service Portal being deprecated?
No – Service Portal remains highly popular so there are no plans to deprecate it.
However it is recommended that if you transition towards using either the Employee Center (for internal-facing portals) or CSM Portal (for external-facing portals) products if you are not already.
Both the Employee Center and CSM Portals are built upon the current Service Portal technology stack. They will see ongoing investment and maintain robust roadmap with quarterly releases for the foreseeable future.
They are both built upon the Service Portal technology stuck, and thus continue to use AngularJS. ServiceNow is maintaining its own version of AngularJS, and will continue to provide support and security updates for it into the future. It is important to note that we will be making fixes directly within the Service Portal code base, and thus will not be maintaining an open-source version of Angular JS library nor any other 3rd party library within the ecosystem.
See this community article for a FAQ on Employee Center.
What are the licensing requirements for Service Portal?
Service Portal and Employee Center is available for use by all customers with the Standard, Professional, or Enterprise license. Employee Center has a Pro version that requires either a HRSD Pro or separate Employee Center Pro license. The feature differences are documented here.
Can the URL suffix of my Service Portal be updated?
Yes – you can edit the URL on the Portal record. If you are looking to update the URL of your pages, you are able to add a human readable URL starting in the Utah family release.
Can I use source control when developing Service Portals?
We recommend integrating with Github when developing on Service Portal. A guide to source control within the ServiceNow ecosystem is available here, with the GitLab spoke found here.
What should I do if I am using the HR Service Portal and/or the base Service Portal (/sp)?
We recommend upgrading your Service Portal to use the Employee Center application.
The steps to migrate to are available within this community article.
Does Service Portal support federated search?
Service Portal supports federated search using AI Search. AI Search is already incorporated into the following widgets:
- Homepage Search widget
- Typeahead Search widget
- Faceted Search widget
- Catalog Homepage Search widget
- Knowledge Breadcrumbs widget
If these widgets were customized, they can be reclassified following this procedure.
Do you have any tools that can help me whilst configuring widgets?
Yes, Visual Studio Code is the recommended IDE to develop custom widgets, due to the multi-record structure of widgets.
You can learn more about using Visual Studio Code here.
Compliance
Is Service Portal FedRamp compliant?
Yes – the entire ServiceNow platform is able to adhere to FedRamp regulations, including that of Service Portal. Ask your account representative for further information.
Is Service Portal compliant with WCAG 2.1?
Yes- Service Portals are able to become compliant with WCAG 2.1. We release an accessibility conformance report for each release that uses VPAT to review out of the box Service Portal components against the requirements. You can find them here (Service Portal is listed next to “Now Platform”).
We also have design guidelines that assist with accessibility requirements available here.
Learning
Where can I learn more about Service Portal?
- Product Documentation
- Service Portal Fundamentals Course (Now Learning)
- Service Portal Advanced Course (Now Learning)
