Employee Center in Higher Ed context?

[JP-ODU]

Has any higher ed org made the switch to using Employee Center? I have some questions...

1. I was watching this 

https://www.servicenow.com/community/employee-center-events/employee-center-academy-migrating-from-s... and noticed two statements seem to be contradictory: both "Service Portal will become a legacy application" and "EC is an employee-facing portal, for employee use cases. Will still have the customer service portals, intended for external." So which is it? In our case, SP is exclusively for our "customers" - employees, faculty, and staff with ITSM incidents and requests. Is it useless to use Employee Center if we don't have an employee portal case, but a customer one? If EC is only for employees, we're forced to maintain the service portal, anyway?

2. I presume you found you needed to configure different levels of "Employee" to reflect student, faculty, general university staff, and ITSM staff? How did you approach it?

Thanks!

[sbh]

Thanks very much for bringing this up! I haven't even looked at using the Employee Center because we use the Service Portal for everything. If it's going to be deprecated, we're going to need a fair amount of notice. As you noted, all of our customers are internal, though not all are employees.

We've looked at using ServiceNow for some HR things in the past but we set it aside then and haven't picked it up since. So I have no ideas on how we'd keep that separate from other internal requests or access in general.

[Liz Fassone]

Just to be clear, Service Portal and Employee Centre are the same underlying technology. 

Why do we refer to them as separate things? 

In the past, ServiceNow released separate service portal experiences for IT, HR etc. Which means end users had an inconsistent experience depending on the department they needed help from. The Employee Centre is the out-of-the-box UNIFIED self-service experience for IT, HR, Workplace Services, Legal and Procurement service management. Employee Centre has out of the box support for Universal Request and standard ticket pages to ensure a consistent experience. There are also enhanced UX capabilities such as the mega menu and topic pages. Plus lots of other neat stuff... see the docs site - https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/washingtondc-employee-service-management/page/product/employee-ce... 

[Michael Searle]

According to a post in the Community dated 07-25-2023, Service Portal is not being deprecated. 

I'm planning to move off of Service Portal and move to Employee Center for the enhanced user experience. But part of my rational for doing so involves the limits of my resources. As a single person ServiceNow administration and development team I'm looking for ways to make a big impact with my customers that take a small amount of effort. My first and only version of our Service Portal offers a poor user experience. I believe I can improve it by using Employee Center instead.

We treat our students as internal users in ServiceNow. They have the ability to self-submit incidents and cases.

[MaxScales]

Hi Guys, 

i'm a servicenow SC working with our UK based universities. worth noting over here most of our universities have 2 portals. 

First is employee centre, and is used for employees to reach all those internal facing dept (HR, IT, Legal, Procurement etc)
Second is the ServicePortal in CSM, this is used for Students (and some use cases essentially anyone not on the university payrol, but this varies) and students then interact with their relevant departments (IT again, case into incident, sport centres, student administration, enrolment, academic services, library etc etc). 

so staff/employees as users internally, and students as externals/consumers in csm. 

Hope that helps slightly from how universities are using EC over here.