Request Approval not requiring a Business Stakeholder Licence

[Amanda Pharaoh]

I am looking for some information on how approving a request directly from an email does not require the use of a Business Stakeholder Licence. We are new to ServiceNow but i was told that this can be done which would be a large cost saving to us.

Any Help, Advice or Guidance would be gratefully accepted  

[Andi Cline]

Same here.  We have many supervisors and managers that are in charge of requests and giving a license to each one will be costly.

[Jamesk]

Hi Andi (And rwalford),

Just to clarify, I would recommend speaking to your account managers before going ahead with any of this.

In my old place, we used assignment groups for approvals, but did not assign roles to these assignment groups, they were just for approval assignments. 

When an approval was requested, it would sent the approval email to each person in the group (whether they had a license or not), and from the approval, you can click the OOTB approval link on the email, which prompts you to send a reply.

Once you reply to this email (the body of the email copies to the additional comments field on the approval), it will approval the record. 

This also works for rejecting.

The one downside to this, particularly for changes is that it can be difficult to include all the necessary information for a change in an email, Requests however is easier to put the variables/information in to.

Hope this helps!

[lkirby]

This used to be a thing in servicenow but no longer is.  Since Geneva release all approvals require a license.  Please review your Ts&Cs with your use authorization.

[C_N-L]

Hi @Amanda Pharaoh,

I'd be keen to know how you got on with this and how it is built in to your workflow?

Our workflow will send emails to Budget Holders at the appropriate stage of the process and their reply will be linked back to and recorded within the RITM, however there is an approval task generated which needs to be approved or rejected accordingly by my team on behalf of the Budget Holder. I feel there has to be a better way of achieving this.

[Matt102]

Off the top of my head I go for a flow behind the request (untested).
request > sc_req_item > sc_task is generated that sends an email to (user/group/role).
On email return the flow identifies approve/reject (text in subject/body).
if (approve) {

generate next sc_task for request progress;

}

//justathought

If proof of concept works for you, you may want to check this accords with correct licence usage.

R,Matt