Best way to handle other instances - 3rd parties

[Rshear]

All,

As more and more companies are adopting ServiceNow (SN) as their ITSM tool set a lot of our 3rd party suppliers & partners are using SN.

In our instance we currently have it set so that if a caller replies to an email with the INC number in the subject the original incident will be updated as opposed to creating a new (seems logical enough). If the INC number has been closed SN will reply to essentially say "open a new incident".

The issue we are facing is that as our 3rd parties are also using SN with the INC prefix for incidents when they send in an email to our centralized email add, our instance will look to see if that INC exists...in some cases it does not (as we havent reached the number) or it does however has been closed..result being no ticket created or wrong inc updated our end.

I am sure this is not uncommon and their maybe a better way for us to set up our inbound actions to cater. Does anyone have any experience with this and logical solutions that may assist.

Looking forward to any comments.

Thanks

[poyntzj]

Could try to develop along these lines.

Make a list of known email addresses that also use Servicenow so you scan for them coming in

When you make the link between yours and their systems, in the correlation_id field, add

company : reference

        ABCompany : INC001234567

This way, when a ticket comes in, you can find the company and then search on the correlation ID

If there is a match, update that record

If not, update the ticket you have

I do similarish now for 3rd party ebonding, but they are on different systems so do not have this issue, but worth thinking about.

I do have a seperate Script Include for each company where I scan for our record numbers, their numbers, reservered phrases / keywords, possible watermark and in one case, the email address we have to send all their updates to (to update a record on their system we send to <ticketnumber>@somedomain)

I would also look at changing the message watermark.

where it is most probably MSGxxxxx, try adding a prefix so that the watermarks are not going to get in the way and update the wrong ticket too. so ABCMSGxxxxx

[pennieturner]

HI, im not sure how that would work if the 3rd party company emailed us about their ticket example 'inc123' and we already had that as an existing ticket in our system which was nothing to do with them? The incorrect ticket would be updated with that email, or if it was closed, our system would email them back to say its closed, and then their system might email us back to say the 'INC123' has been updated, then we generate another mail back to them saying its closed again and so on and so forth

My first thoughts is to change the prefix going forward from INC to something more unique to our business, but that would only help going forward, and not with all the historic tickets.

Maybe the best way would be to remove the inbound action we have on the create incident script to say if there is an INC number in the subject, see if that's existing and if so update it, and just rely solely on the watermark and people using the emails created from the system to update the correct record?   But they we would have problems where other people email in about an existing ticket from a fresh email?

[poyntzj]

The 3rd party still use their own numbers. The processing done on the message to find any reference numbers would automatically add the prefix

It makes or easier as if a ticket is linked to more than one 3rd party you week see things like

Companya : inc022356; companyb : 6654

You can change the search to look at the number and correlation fields so of you search for inc12346 would find any tickets that match

[sumeet_n]

Hello Russell,

Two things: Practice and some modifications in inbound actions to make it more strict.

May be you can initiate a practise in your own organisation saying, if anyone wants to update an incident ticket in SNow, send and email / reply an email with a particular rule. eg: the rule may be - the incident number you want to update should be at the start of the subject line immediately followed by a special character like '#'. So if someone replies to your instance with Subject: "INC9786428# blah blah blah....", then only the Incident will be updated. Else the update will be skipped. This is just an example. As far as your inbound action is concerned, you can modify that by adding more conditions to check the format of subject line to determine if it needs to process the email and update the incident record.

This will give you a chance to make sure, 3rd parties do not have similarity in such cases.