ServiceNow integration with external/third-party portal

[Amit Singh4]

Dear all, I have an ask for running ServiceNow Platform in a headless fashion to integrate with an existing Service Portal that my customer is running in their environment. We have developed a workflow for citizen data inputs using ServiceNow Portal but customer do no want to use NOW portal and wish to just integrate and publish workflow, chat capabilities and knowledge base in their portal.

Is this possible to integrate with external portals and what are my options to do so both architectural and integration? Any urgent response will be appreciated.

[Soeren Maucher]

Hello Amit, 

I am currently integrating ServiceNow with an external portal via the out of the box Service Catalog API and have made good experiences with that. We have multiple Requested Items that can be “ordered” by the external portal which will then trigger flows and other logic in ServiceNow. The benefit from my point of view is that if we implement the logic correctly on the requested items the API takes care of the error handling such as enforcing all mandatory fields are filled etc. This way we avoid creating a lot of scripted custom APIs.

Not sure if that is what you meant by “integrating workflows”.

Greetings,
Sören

[Amit Singh4]

Thanks Soren. Very much appreciated. So the use-case we have is that we have build a user-form for a specific use-case using ServiceNow CSM portal which will be integrated  to multiple SOR in customer environment. The customer do no want to use CSM portal but would want to use the use-case we have built/user forms or workflow as I mentioned but integrated with their external portal directly. So effectively using ServiceNow as headless and publish the use-case directly in external portal. I hope that it makes sense.

Have you used REST API for this integration or just out of the box API's?

[Soeren Maucher · Accepted solution]

Ok, so to me this sounds like you could very well leverage the Service Catalog API (https://developer.servicenow.com/dev.do#!/reference/api/rome/rest/c_ServiceCatalogAPI). Each user-form you currently have on the CSM portal could be replicated by the external portal and send a request to the Catalog API. For the ServiceNow backend it doesn’t make a difference if the form was submitted via the CSM portal or via the API, the result will be the same (creating a requested item, request and trigger the corresponding flow/workflow).

In our case we copied the out of the box provided scripted API calls from the Service Catalog API and did some minor adjustments, such as additional error handling.

The Catalog API even offers endpoints where a third party portal could get all settings and variables of a specific request item and could thus automatically replicate them on their portal.