K19 Pre-Con May 5 & 6 - ServicePortal Fundamentals - Sean McClean

[seanpmcclean]

Welcome to the ServiceNow Knowledge19 Pre-Conference - ServicePortal Fundamentals Class!

This is a dedicated Community Article for class communication, collaboration, and fun!!

[seanpmcclean]

#Introductions: 

Hi and welcome - This comment and thread is an introduction of your instructors and TA’s.  Peer a bit deeper to see:  Background / Geo Location, and something interesting about themselves or some bit of Web Trivia (or maybe both!)

    Sean McClean - 25+ years teaching everything from IT to Marine Mammal Cognition, 8 + years SN, 6+ years principal small consultancy / Based in Central Florida / Trivia: 

1. According to a report from Latitude, 60 per cent of people admit that they have a better opinion about a brand depending on the website experience they offer.
2. The term 'surfing the Internet' was coined by Jean Armour Polly in 1992.

 

[seanpmcclean]

#CoolTools #References #NeverForgetToCheckYourRefereneces

Comment below with your favorite development tools, and references...

[Linda S]

Hello all, I love trivia and random facts!  

I'm Linda Shinkel - 25+ years experience with IT Service Management applications, ITIL and ITSM Process Consulting, and Call Center/Customer Service Management, 4+ years SN / Based in Denver Colorado / I love to music, to cook and play pool / Trivia:

• The song Blinded By The Light was written and performed by Bruce Springsteen and later covered by Manfred Mann's Earth Band
• Perfect scrambled eggs are achieved by beating the eggs with salt 10+ minutes prior to cooking
• Billiards was originally an outdoor (lawn) game - reason why the table fabric is traditionally green

[Anisa Chaudry]

Hi there!

I'm Anisa Chaudry. My background is in Non-Profit and Finance. I've been at SN for over 3 years working in both Finance and Custom Training. I'm SN System Administrator and ITIL certified.

I'm based in San Diego, CA but I can't surf and I can hardly swim! Haha. I enjoy traveling, hiking, and family time. I'm a little obsessed with The Office (US) and also my Yorkshire terrier named Theodore!

I don't know much trivia, but I will say that I placed 5/250 groups for The Office trivia recently! 😉

I'm pleased to work with you all!

[justin_ciemiewi]

Hey Everyone,

My name is Justin Ciemiewicz and I've been a web application developer for 12+ years.  The last 4 of which I have been with Servicenow as an ITSM Technical Consultant. I live in Reading PA where I also am a founding member of a local art collective, Hydra Artist Studios.  Myself along with 6 friends founded this non-profit with the mission of providing affordable creative space for local musicians, artists, photographers and fellow creatives.

• Fun Fact: Reading PA is home of the Reading Railroad which made it's way onto the Monopoly board!
  
  
• The Iron Butterfly song "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" was originally written as "In the Garden of Eden" but author Doug Ingle was so intoxicated when he played it for his band members all they heard was In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"!
  
  
• The codebase for Netscape, the dominant web browser of the '90s which was relegated to obscurity by Internet Explorer in 2002, became the foundation of the Open Source Mozilla Firefox browser that was able to overtake IE in usage by 2009! 

[staceybailey]

Hi, everyone.  I'm looking forward to meeting you this weekend.  

Stacey Bailey - ~24 years in IT with the past 10 focused on ServiceNow -- first as a customer, then partner, and now employee.  I grew up in a mom & pop computer store, so my fate was sealed. 🙂

• Orville Wright lived to see the first practical helicopter, the first jet-powered flight, regular trans-atlantic passenger services, and the first super-sonic flight. His last airplane ride was in a Lockheed Constellation, which had a wingspan longer than the first flight of the Wright Flyer.
  
  
• Every other planet in our solar system can fit between the Earth and the moon.
  
  
• The best type of music to listen to to boost your concentration is… video game soundtracks. This is because their purpose is to keep you focused on the task at hand, providing some atmosphere for the game without being overpowering or distracting. (I often listen to Minecraft music while working.)

[Markus Wappler]

Hi Everyone,

I'm Markus Wappler, living in the beautiful city of Dresden, Germany. Having done software development for several years, I discovered ServiceNow in 2013. I'm working for the same ServiceNow partner ever since - providing consultancy, architecture, implementation and training. I love to spend my spare time with hiking and deepening my understanding of other cultures.

Trivia: Want to know how to achieve simplicity? Rediscover the forgotten series "Structure and Implementation of Computer Programs": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY&list=PLE18841CABEA24090. The syntax is weird, but the general ideas mind-bending.

[hanshornstein]

Hello everyone! I'm Hans Hornstein, and I'll be serving as secondary instructor for this class.

I have 15+ years of experience in the software training sphere, and have been with ServiceNow for the last 15 months. I normally hang my hat in San Diego, California, where I've resided since 1995. In terms of trivia about myself, I actually have lost on Jeopardy! (the 1992 College Tournament), and won some of Ben Stein's money a few years later.

I'm looking forward to the class!

[tlsimmons]

Hello everyone,

My name is Travis Simmons.  I am a full stack developer for Godaddy and have been working on the ServiceNow Platform for 3+ years as the lead developer of the company CMDB.  I am here to learn and grow my skill set on the platform.  

[Thomas Boyer]

Hey all,

I have been using the ServiceNow Utils plugin for Chrome. Amazing tool for doing work within an instance.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/servicenow-utils/jgaodbdddndbaijmcljdbglhpdhnjobg?hl=en

[kevinthury]

I'm Kevin Thury from Sioux Falls, SD.  Our organization has been on ServiceNow for two years launching with Kingston, and currently running London Patch 5.  

My first few months were harrowing filled with lots of cursing and keyboard pounding.  After a few years, I'm finding the rewards are out weighing the frustrations.

Our next big project will be enhancing our Service Portal functionality by leveraging the Employee Service Center in the Madrid release.

[Ronald15]

Good morning, my name is Ronald van Rikxoort, I'm the Product Owner for the ITSM component of our global ServiceNow instance. I'm working for ING in The Netherlands.

[Shonda2]

Hi Everyone!  I am Shonda Riley, IT Manager and Service Now administrator, for Solera, Inc.  We just launched Service Now globally this past March.  It has been a challenge with over 10,000 employees, but we are excited about expanding beyond Calls, Incidents, and Requests.  

I am looking forward to gaining more knowledge this week as well as meeting other administrators and learning from them.

[Jonathan Willia]

Jonathan Williams

System Administrator at GPD Group Inc.

Company info: 500-1000 employees in the Engineering/Architecture space.

We implemented Service Portal during our original implementation of ServiceNow's ITSM solution a year and a half ago. Since our implementation we have ran into many roadblocks and user experience flaws so we are currently re-building and re-branding our Service Portal for a release by the end of 2019.

We are currently on Madrid release.

[casey4man]

Hi Everyone, 

I'm Casey Forman. I work for Accenture (the federal practice) for the State Dept grants management system as their solutions architect. We currently have a very customized CMS system and are in the process of moving to Service Portal. We are, more or less, rebuilding to try to keep whatever we can OOB for portal. This is set to go live in October! 

Accenture, as a parent company, has about 450,000 employees world wide. The grants system that I work on has about 4,000 active users and 10,000 total users in the system. 

We are currently on the Kingston release but will be upgrading to Madrid in early 2020. 

[Thomas Boyer]

Hey all,

I am from Ottawa, Canada and I have with a history in the operations side of the world (incident management, batch operations, service desk, change manager). We have been using ServiceNow since just before the Aspen release. We have been primarily focused on the ITSM side of the world but are now expanding our scope as we are doing a massive relaunch of the product. 

With our new launch our scope is CMDB, ITSM, ITAM, Integration with ~8 external tools via API's, and a fully functional Service Portal and Service Catalog.

Interesting Fact:

Did you know that somewhere between 10 - 20% of the worlds internet traffic is encrypted via Lava Lamps? Check out Cloudflare + Lavarand.

Looking forward to the course! Feel free to say hi and geek out with me on the platform!

[Asif14]

Hi all, I'm Asif Razvi, Senior Developer in HR IT at United Airlines. I've been a .NET Developer for the last 10 years with various experience in other technologies as well. I'm very new to ServiceNow and interested in learning about the HR Delivery space as well as the overall ServiceNow Portal and the capabilities we could utilize. Looking forward to being part of this community and bugging y'all for help. 

[Andrew Potter]

Hey everyone,

I'm Andrew Potter from Calgary, Alberta Canada.  Happy to be here in Las Vegas and not being in Calgary right now (where it is currently -1 C and snowing).  I work as Application Developer for Horizon North, we are the 3rd largest modular manufacturer, with around 200 active desktop users in ServiceNow and around 8000 kiosk users.  I have 8 years coding experience, mostly in SharePoint and web based applications and recently just took over ServiceNow in our organization.

We currently have a service portal deployed but we are looking to give it a refresh to improve the user experience and increase the adoption rate

[Johanna Eriksso]

Morning everyone,

Johanna Eriksson, system administrator at Schibsted in Stockholm, Sweden. 

We are currently on the London release and just implemented the service portal. 

[hanshornstein]

#quoteables thread:

This comment thread is to share any notable quotes or fragments we know or heard in class this week.

For example: "Well-stolen is half done."

[gibson_tr]

Hello.  Tammy Gibson from Procter & Gamble located in Cincinnati Ohio.  I am the Operations Manager for our Engineering Services organization and owner, designer, developer, admin, jack of all trades for our ServiceNow instance (one of multiple instances at P&G). 

Our organization has been using ServiceNow for ops, dev and a bit of project management for about 6 years now.  Last year my summer intern created our first Service Portal so I am here to learn so I can continue developing and maintaining it.  We recently upgraded to Madrid and I am looking forward to incorporating new functionality.

Since i'm a fountain pen nerd, did you know...  The earliest form of fountain pen was used by the Ancient Egyptians, in 3,000BC. They used a reed straw to write with ink made from vegetable gum and soot.

Looking forward to learning lots this week!

[brawlinson]

Hello All -

I'm Bobby Rawlinson, from Houston, Texans. I am the Service Desk manager for the Houston Texans, NFL, organization. We have less than 250 people in our customer base, but our application footprint is closer to that of a mid-sized company.

We started with ServiceNow Express and have been upgraded to the ITSM platform. The Service Portal is still based on the Express version, but we are looking forward to the tools available in the ITSM platform.

Trivia: President Martin Van Buren is credited with the creation of the term "OK." His nickname was "Old Kinderhook" based on his hometown in New York. During his presidential campaign, clubs for "Old Kinderhook" or "O.K. Clubs" were formed. That led to the press of the day using the term O.K. when referring to other things in support of something. And the rest is history.

[douggarrett]

Good morning,

Doug Garrett from Logan Utah working at Utah State University as a ServiceNow developer. 

[casey4man]

Service Portal is 3 things: Portal > Page > Widget

[jeff43]

Good Morning,

Jeff Kucaj from Children's Hospital of Wisconsin.  We are starting to build our customer portal this next several months, and had a home grown system before.

Current release is Kingston, and currently upgrading to Madrid over the next few weeks.

[john_davidson]

this article made it simple to convert the knowledge search to search all knowledge bases. make sure you apply appropriate security to your articles and knowledge bases

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/london-servicenow-platform/page/product/knowledge-management/conc...

[Vasavi Kotha1]

We had 2 service portals and 2 knowledge bases until end of march. Early April we implemented HR portal, so there is more complexity to search knowledge articles. So, we implemented a one stop shop page which has links to all there portals with widgets along with a search functionality similar to one on Amazon to search items and knowledge. 

[hanshornstein]

A reminder - when talking about Service Portal and looking up references for the technology, you'll want to focus on "AngularJS" more than the broader "Angular".

[hanshornstein]

Sean; "It's in the running downhill as fast as you can with your eyes closed where you get the problems."

[Jason M_]

What's a "Plugin" and how does it differ from the other components?

[hanshornstein]

Also important to keep in mind is the distinction between "Application Menu" (on the application navigator) and a developed "Application" that can be acquired from the ServiceNow Store.

[hanshornstein]

A Plug-in is a collection of configuration records (tables, forms, scripts, etc.) that support a specific functionality on the platform - e.g. ""Appointment booking" to allow customers to book service appointments through the Customer and Consumer Service Portals. Plugins are activated by administrators - some may be associated with a fee in production or attached to a specific subscription criteria.

Some features are not activated in a simple baseline instance, and may need to have associated Plugins activated in order to be used.

For more information, here is a link to the Plugins article on Docs:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/madrid-platform-administration/page/administer/plugins/concept/c_...

[hanshornstein]

#resources thread

(e.g. portal.io or ExamDiff Pro)

ServiceNow Scripting Resources

•     community.servicenow.com
•     docs.servicenow.com
•     developer.servicenow.com

External Resources

•     angularjs.org
•     getbootstrap.com
•     w3schools.com
•     codecademy.com
•     codeschool.com

[casey4man]

Service Portal is 'Mobile First' - if it doesn't work in mobile, they won't built it for portal 

[Jen Stricklan]

#resources ExamDifPro is a great tool to compare code.  It shows added, deleted and changed lines with in code and can be used to compare code between platforms.

[Asif14]

As a season ticket holder for the last 10+ years, it's pretty cool to see y'all using ServiceNow. 

[marybagleypmp]

Hello !

My name is Mary Bagley and I work for Rich Products in Buffalo, NY.  We are looking to replace our archaic form that is in place for our internal associates to request hardware, software, email, phone, system access to SAP, etc.  We will be working with a vendor to do this so in addition to managing the project I am looking to understand what is happening under the covers.  Prior to project manager I was a programmer and systems analyst.  

[marybagleypmp]

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marybagley

[hanshornstein]

Bad Web Design Examples thread:

(example: www.lingscars.com)

[hanshornstein]

Link to the NPR Marketplace article about the update to the digital version of the Helvetica font (as well as underlying business concerns) mentioned by Sean:

https://www.marketplace.org/2019/04/24/business/business-redesigning-and-rebrandinga-font

[hanshornstein]

From a student question:
"On a Theme, if both the Theme AND a CSS Include declare a certain style, which takes precedence?"

From empirical evidence, it appears the Theme CSS declaration supercedes declarations in any CSS Include records.

[Thomas Boyer]

Could this be due to how the client reads the information? (I am guessing that the client browser loads the page CSS information, then the page tells it to load the theme CSS?)

[brawlinson]

Always great to meet a fan! Go Texans!

[Jonathan Willia]

I've used https://www.servicenowelite.com/blog a few times. There is a lot of reusable code and widgets. One that I "borrowed" was the self-resolve/close incident widget so our end users can resolve their own tickets if they found a solution or just don't have a need for resolution anymore.

[seanpmcclean]

I thought it might be a good idea to build out a thread for lessons learned, mistakes made, things not to do...  

#BadExamples #LearnFromMistakes

[bvloch]

Service Portal Exam Specification link -> https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow/other-documents/training/snmc-blueprint.pdf

[Thomas Boyer]

If a user forgets to to switch will it recommend trying again on the other Options? I like what you have here. It makes it very clean and easy to use.

[Thomas Boyer]

I found the following on the DOCS site..

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/london-servicenow-platform/page/build/service-portal/concept/portal-css.html

Shows the hierarchy of CSS within the instance.

[staceybailey]

Another good source of widgets!

https://sc.service-now.com/snds

[Vasavi Kotha1]

Search is defaulted to All. You can switch and search specific portals if you need else the results from all portals are returned.