Visual Task Board labels in New York

[Gareth Davies]

Yesterday I reported to our admin that I'd lost the ability to edit or create labels on Visual Task Boards (something I use extensively). Apparently in New York the revamp of labels was actually a move to get rid of them as a discrete thing and merge them with tags. Someone must have thought they were very clever for that one...

The old VTB labels were stored in their own table (vtb_board_label) and visible only to members of the associated VTB. Great, not a problem, worked fine.

In the new world VTB labels are actually tags (stored in the label table with all the other tags) set to "Everyone" visibility and applied to the VTB card record rather than the underlying task record. So now any label I create is a tag visible to and usable by the entire userbase. If I create a label on a VTB with the same name as someone else's then it doesn't create a new tag for me to use, instead it uses the existing tag. 

Problems with this

1. If I create a VTB label with the same name as one that already exists it'll be linked to the existing tag. If the owner deletes the tag, all my records are suddenly no longer tagged. The owner of any heavily used tag is going to be particularly popular when they leave...
2. Reporting on tasks that have my tags on will now potentially be polluted by other people using them for purposes I never intended. This is not desirable.
3. The global_tags_creator role isn't granted by default for good reason. The last thing we want is global tags all over the place - the ability to have 20 tags all with the same name and all independent of one another is a GOOD thing! Now for VTBs to be properly usable that role needs to widely available.
4. I don't really want my "Going Nowhere Fast" tag to be publicly visible - that's a private opinion between me and the relevant team thank you very much.

I get that someone saw a simplification opportunity and leaped at it but did they really think it through? The lack of a "Members of the VTB" ACL for tags is what we're missing here and it's a pretty big thing to be missing.

Are there any plans to fix this?

[Priyanka Gupta]

For anyone still looking for a solution, this is what we ended up doing - https://hi.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0780808

We have done initial testing and we see no visible issues so far.

[Mark Roethof]

Hi there,

Did this solve your question? Or do we need to follow-up on this?

Please mark this answer as correct if it solves your question. This will help others who are looking for a similar solution. Also marking this answer as correct takes the post of the unsolved list.
Thanks.

Kind regards,
Mark

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[Jace Benson]

Well, this stinks.

How can we solve this.  Could making a business rule on label_entry after insert/update work.

Have the rule look if the label is part of a VTB (not sure how that would work)

Have the rule look at the members of the VTB and add the members to the label.

I'm not sure how VTB knows to include a label though so it might all be for nothing.

[JonathanGreer]

Found a workaround here, create a new property that ignores the role check when creating a VTB label. 

However, downside is these new labels will still be global tags. 

[chuckn]

Just wanted to connect the Idea to this post: https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=view_idea&sysparm_idea_id=00d61985db960c501cd8a345ca96...