ServiceNow incident outlook integration

[john_duchock]

We are investigating using the Microsoft Outlook plugin to allow users to create incidents from outlook.  The setup is pretty straight forward, but i cannot seem to find any documentation on how to configure it a bit better.  Some obstacles:

• The "out-of-the-box" configuration pre-populates the short description and additional comments with some pretty abstract text that i want to change and standardize, but i cannot figure out where to go in the platform to modify it (is it part of the manifest sent to our office 365 team when we configured it?)
• We have some custom fields (and a few OOTB fields) that i want to populate with standard values when an incident is submitted via outlook.  I am sure i can do this with a business rule (or two) but there might be a better way...

Anyone had any luck configuring the outlook integration capability ...and if so, can you direct me to some better documentation than what exists now? These are all i can really find out there:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/orlando-customer-service-management/page/product/customer-service...

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/orlando-it-service-management/page/product/incident-management/co...

[john_duchock · Accepted solution]

Meh...i think i got it....

portal page "outlook home" > widget "create incident" calls on a system property that defines the catalog item to use when submitting an incident.  I can use that catalog item's client scripts to do my population (i think)....  I can also standardize the outlook form view easily enough...

Its a shame that you have to reverse engineer this to start to understand it...  Also, the manifest is read-only and i do not want to deploy the VTB portion of it, so i will probably just have to edit the manifest.xml file after it is exported so that only "create incident" is available in outlook...

we are doing this in NY for our proof-of-concept... anyone know if Orlando makes this easier ?

[Ryan S]

We've just started looking at this now for Orlando and coming up with the same questions. How'd your implementation go? We haven't gotten the manifest deployed but appear to be able to work around that for the moment by viewing the /sncoutlook page and modifying system settings, but it's still woefully lacking in documentation so it's all trial-and-error. Any advice?

[Sarah Travis]

I'm hoping someone has more insight now on how this thing works.  So far I know the following:

• As John said, the widget is Create Incident on the Outlook Home (outlook_index) portal page.
• You can modify the mappings for subject, body, etc. in the Client controller script of this widget.
• To add/remove fields from the widget, update the Outlook view of an incident record (works for ITIL users only).
• To do the same for non-ITIL users, use a record producer that is set in a system property (sn_outlook_addin.create_incident_cat_item).  I'm not able to test as a non-ITIL user right now, but this is what the docs say.
• You can clone the manifest and give it any name or image you want and test using the sideloading method (web or client).  

What I'm so far unable to do is set the contact_type and impact for the new incident.  I tried using default value in variables on the record producer, but after testing I concluded this RP is not used at all for ITIL users.  I've also tried to modify the widget Server script with no luck, but I suspect this is the place to do it.

Any and all help appreciated!

Sarah

[john_duchock]

Aye, I need to get contact type, impact and urgency populated as well...  i even tried a client script on the record producer, but that did not help either..

I may end up using flow designer to populate missing field data, providing i can find a proper trigger for these records.