K19 ITSM Fundamentals Class - Cassanova 505

[ChristinaMiller]

If you are in the K19 ITSM Fundamentals class in room Cassanova 505, please post your comments and questions here using the COMMENT link. Classroom staff will be monitoring this conversation during class on May 5-6, 2019 and will answer to the best of their ability.

[ChristinaMiller]

There have been a few questions relating to Agent Intelligence and Virtual Agent. There are a couple of free eLearning courses that you may find of interest on our Learning Portal: https://servicenow.sabacloud.com/

Your Community credentials should work here. When you login, search for Agent Intelligence and / or Virtual Agent.

[Jason Nichols]

Rolland, the possibilities for configuring contextual search are somewhat limited. Essentially, you are restricted to results based on the Short Description. Although you can add other field values to base search results on, these values cannot be combined (e.g., Short Description + Location) – search results can only be based on one field at a time. However, as I see it there are two possibilities:

1. Restrict what articles and catalog items users can see via user criteria (see documentation for details).
2. Add an encoded query string to the search.
   See:
   https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/madrid-platform-administration/page/administer/contextual-search/...
   
   You could add a encoded query string, and include Javascript to express your variables.
   See:
   https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/madrid-platform-user-interface/page/use/using-lists/concept/c_Enc...

[Kelly Pillars]

I am Kelly Pillars, I work for Spectrum Health, a large hospital system in West Michigan. We are very new to ServiceNow, so new that we are in the process of choosing an integration partner and getting started with the platform.

I am Knowledge and Development for the Service Desk and really have the most interest in how our agents on the phone will create, manage, and interact with the program. How the knowledge base works and how it works with incidents and the capabilities there.  

[Chuck Pierce]

Signed up and received my first instance, thanks for the information.

[Jason Nichols]

Excellent! Dev instances are a great way to experiment and learn.

[ScottRobinson]

Reposting as it seems my post yesterday didn't actually post. 

Name: Scott Robinson
Company: Insight
Role: Enterprise Solutions Architect
Experience: Mainly Microsoft to the point but working on transitioning
Reason: Looking to improve our ability to give our clients an amazing service experience
Fun fact: Traveled to nearly every state and 30 other countries. 

[Michael Lee1]

Curious to know what others are doing in the way of notifying fulfillers that the caller of a request has commented the RITM? When you assign SCTASKs to fulfillers as opposed to RITMs, there is no specific fulfiller to notify on the RITM. Is there a best practice way of handling this? 

[Jolene]

What role is required to use Global Search? one of my teammates/fulfillers lost the ability. I haven't figured out why.

[Jason Nichols]

Global search – who can use it?

Not all users have access to global search. By default, only the admin and itil roles have access. You can add further roles to the glide.ui.can_search system property.

[Jason Nichols]

Not all users have access to global search. By default, only the admin and itil roles have access. You can add further roles to the glide.ui.can_search system property.

[ScottRobinson]

Link to the community question on global search options. 

You can turn it on or off globally and assign which roles can use it. 

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=9c2ab51fdbaa9f008e7c2926ca96...

[Christian Henni]

Running the Module 4.1 exercises, a few questions came up:

What is the minimum search text length in the Global Search?
Searching for REQ* in global search does not show any results, searching for REQ0* does bring up results

Is there a difference between Approve / Reject Buttons vs. Deny / Accept inline Hpyerlinks?

Is there a way that customer can cancel an ongoing order request (trigger Comes from the Service Portal), at least as long it is in an Approval step?

Thanks

[Suzanne Davis]

Our largest issue with Request is the ebonding with our vendors.  We currently do not ebond to a task level as the tasks are assigned in the vendor system.  They then work at a task level which puts us in the dark as to what is going on with the REQ and RITM as the only status we get is Fulfillment. Is there a best practice to the level of ebond mapping we should do with vendors to ensure that the fulfillment and updates to the records happens appropriately?  Or a process requirement we can request with our Vendors to ensure we get all the proper information. Also, does ServiceNow have best practice or reporting for integrations like this to be pro-actively monitored?

[Jason Nichols]

Hi Christian,

• I believe, just from testing, that the minimum string length in global search is 3 characters. Not sure how this relates to wildcards.
• Approve/Reject – the entire request
  Approve/Deny – individual items in the request (i.e., I can approve some items and reject others. In this case, the entire request remains open, and the approved RITMs proceed, the denied RITMs are cancelled.)
• There is no Cancel button in the SP in baseline. However, it would be no problem to add one. All we are doing is changing the state of record. You can do it in the form in the backend – you just need to add a button to do the same thing in the Service Portal.

[Jason Nichols]

That's an excellent question, Michael. On the one hand we allow requesters to add comments to their requested items on the Service Portal, but on the other we do not have any baseline notification that is triggered, and no one/group is assigned to the requested item (or request), only the catalog task(s).

I think the easiest way is to have an assignment rule to assign the RITM records (perhaps the procurement team, or whatever team is responsible for the provisioning of the service), and then create a notification that is triggered for new RITM comments and sent to the Assignment Group for the RITM. 

Alternatively, you could copy the comment to the individual SCTASK records. 

Both solutions have pluses and minuses, that should be discussed before a decision is made.

[Jolene]

My email notifications at work for Customer Visible comments are different from INC and RITM. Where would be a good place for me to start investigating this behavior?

For example, when an end-user submits an INC and my team responds via additional comment (customer visible) to ask for details, I see an Activity entry "System emailed user" for that notification.

Related example, when same end-user submits a REQ and my team responds via RITM additional comment (customer visible) to ask for details, no activity entry reports a sent notification.

[Jason Nichols]

Hi Suzanne, I'm not an e-bonding expert but from a general integration point of view, I would definitely have the vendor update the SCTASK records. ServiceNow exposes every table via web services, so technically updating records is not an issue. I would have the State field (a must) updated as well as comments (Work Notes) added to the activity stream, and other fields updated depending on your needs.

@Everyone – please feel free to add your thoughts as well!

[Michael Lee1]

Thank you Jason, 

Yes it is quite the little source of confusion/frustration for my fulfillers.

I have explored those two options and would like to steer away from both as one is not quite enough and the other is a bit too much. However, a new idea just came to mind. What do you think about an after update business rule on the SCTASK table that add's the assigned_to to the corresponding RITM's watchlist? This way only people who assign SCTASKs to themselves will received emails. 

[Chuck Pierce]

Got this done today!

[Jolene]

Matt referred to modifying a Clone of Overview for Change (or other Records) and then sharing out to teammates.

When ServiceNow releases new content or updates, does it update/modify these default Overview views?

Would it be helpful to look back at the default Overview occasionally to recognize new features that I might want to incorporate in my existing board? (maybe through re-cloning?)

[James _J_R__ Mc]

(UI Policies) This process in our current system is terribly painstaking.  This seems quite simple in comparison.  Thank you for that.

[Jason Nichols]

In general it is best practice not to modify baseline objects, but to rather make copies of them, and change these (while deactivating the original). 

Copying homepages however is a special case, because the copy/insert action only copies the page's metadata, and not the actual content of it (such as reports). You must then start adding this content. In this case, it's easier and quicker just to create a new homepage, add content, and link to it.

[Jason Nichols]

Hi Jolene! What I would check are the notifications you have in the platform, and their settings. The baseline notification is called "Request Item commented". In particular, check who the recipients are, and whether the "Send to event creator" setting is true or not. If it is, users who author comments will receive notifications. If false, they will not. (Note that this setting only appears in the Advanced view of the form, under the Who will receive tab.)

[Alessandro M_]

In the Implement the Change lab, we were able to make the change outside of the scheduled start/end date. How would you manage your David Loo's from prematurely making changes because they are so used to working on records assigned to them?

[Jolene]

We have started to implement the practice of adding the Team Lead (Workflow Manager, Scrum Master, Project Manager) to the Watch List on the RITM.

When I am assigned an SCTASK, I also click to the RITM for more details and then add myself to the Watch List.

In all my Dashboards listing SCTASKS, I also add the "Parent" column to make it easy to click into the RITM and review it.

[Jolene]

Good point! Is there a Baseline report or Overview view that would notify the CAB if the work was completed outside the schedule?

[Jason Nichols]

Well, working on a ServiceNow record is not the same as working on the actual change itself. 😉 Do you want to restrict when the user can move the change request to the Implement state? For this, you would need to change the state model for change restrict (possible, but a bit of a pain). Do you want to make the record read only after approval? I would avoid this from the standpoint that it would also prevent minor changes. Perhaps you would like a notification to the CAB when a change request moves to the Implement state x minutes/hours before the scheduled time?

[Michael Lee1]

Hi Jolene, 

Thank you. Those are good ideas and like you I just go add myself to the RITM watch list. I think that is a best case practical approach that doesn't require any system changes. Currently I instruct our fulfillers to add themselves to the watch list on the RITM in the same way, but often times they forget. When that happens they miss communications from the end user which results in unhappy end users and then fulfillers will blame it on being confused about the system.

I'd like to automate this process in a way that makes the most sense and leaves no room for gaps/human error which end up being "ServiceNow problems" if you catch my drift lol. 

[James _J_R__ Mc]

I use the YouTube channel quite a bit, it is really helpful as are the podcasts.  Thank you for having knowledge on modern platforms for my younger admins.  I'm finding most IT technicians prefer a YouTube video/Podcast these days.

[ChristinaMiller]

If you haven't already looked into it, there are also some free eLearning courses that you may find of interest on our Learning Portal. They aren't exactly a Podcast or short video, but most of them contain helpful demos and information!

Use your Community credentials at https://servicenow.sabacloud.com/ 

[rparlett]

I had a few questions regarding the Knowledge Management application:

1. In regards to the automatic version increments that happen when a Knowledge base Article is checked out then published, is there a way to control the version number manually? The use case would be when only a very minor edit was made, it seems excessive to increment the version by a full integer number.
2. Can the WYSIWYG editor, TinyMCE, be replaced with a more up-to-date version?
3. Matt hinted at being able to report on an article that was getting close to reaching the end of it's "Valid To" date. How easy would it be to automatically assign a task to the Author of an article to review the content 30 days before the article ages out of the Knowledge base?

[ChristinaMiller]

Hi! I haven't forgotten about you, just getting caught up from K19 🙂

I am still working on getting more details to answer questions 1 and 3, but I did want to follow up on question 2. Do you know what version of TinyMCE you are using? Take a look at these links and let me know if that helps or if you are still looking for a more advanced option than what is listed in these docs.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/helsinki-platform-administration/page/use/using-forms/concept/c_T...

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/madrid-platform-administration/page/use/using-forms/concept/c_Use...

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/madrid-platform-administration/page/use/using-forms/task/paste-ht...