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!

[Birhanu]

EC is typically for employees, staff, faculty! It is meant to accommodate delivery of all enterprise services to them, not just IT services. 

CSM is meant for the consumers / customers, the students. You can of course use any of the portals for any use case with modifications. But you’ll benefit from the data models availed by CSM when you are looking to serve customers. 

Let me know if you need further guidance. 

[Joe1]

This is my understanding as well.

With my instance, we are just using the old Service Portal. It works well for us, but I am sure there are disadvantages. Currently we have a lot of stuff visible to students that they really don't need, but we're working on it. I'm pretty sure our long-ish term goal is to move to the current portals.

[drusnak]

Just to clarify, Service Portal (OOB sp portal) becoming a legacy application and/or deprecated still allows you to utilize it from what I understand. It is available and allowed to be used, but it is not recommended to continue to use as it will not be getting continual updates/patches.

We at the University of Chicago use Service Portal (https://uchicago.service-now.com/it), which is for IT Services – central and some department IT as well). We also utilize Employee Service Center (https://uchicago.service-now.com/services) for everything else. Note, you can see all your requests in our Employee Service Center portal and we have the ability for non-authenticated users (EX: prospective students, prospective employees, parents, alum without a login, vendors, etc.) to make specific requests currently.

Feel free to poke around both portals because they do not require authentication to see our knowledgebases or catalog content – you just cannot submit anything since it will prompted you to authenticate. We are also working to move IT Services to the Services portal and upgrading it to Employee Center pro.

When we move to Employee Center Pro (upgrade our current Employee Service Center), we have been told we will lose the ability to allow non-authenticated users to utilize our new Employee Center Pro portal. We utilize custom logic currently to allow non-authenticated users to get to certain forms. We have also been told that the best way to handle non-authenticated user requests is to implement the separate Customer Service portal, which we probably will be doing.

When we implement our upgraded Employee Center Pro portal, we will hopefully be able to share our experience of moving two portal iterations (SP and ESC) to the newer enhanced ECP experience.

Here are some further answers to questions that were posed…

Is it useless to use Employee Center if we don’t have an employee portal case, but a customer one? Employee Center can be used for any authenticated user Tasks (ITSM, Cases, etc.)

IF EC is only for employees, we’re forced to maintain the service portal, anyway? You can utilize the Customer Service portal for non-authenticated users from what we have been told.

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? We did not configure different levels of ‘employees’, yet, but we do store user affiliations (faculty, staff, student, former student, alum, etc.) and we do utilize that information in some logic. Employee Center Pro is great for creating content-driven based on your ‘affiliation’.

As confirmed above, Service Portal and Employee Center are the same underlying technology – but people do refer to them as separate things because the OOB portals do give you newer, better ‘pages’ as you move to newer portals (EX: pages for tasks that allow for adding individuals to the Watch List, showing all content in tabs at the top of the page, Universal Request usage, etc.). Basically all the stuff that Liz Fassone explained in her post.

[sbh]

Thank you for providing the links to your portals!

[Ryan S]

This is a wonderful thread and very timely for my scenario. We're implementing for a school district and figuring out how to best set up the various portals for different user groups, as well as what roles each user group would need. Would @drusnak or @MaxScales be able to go into a little more detail on how you structured the user groups? A school district is going to have the same groups as universities, so would appreciate learning your approach for structuring groups of users. (For example, we're thinking we have support staff like IT, HR, Finance, etc; other employees like teachers, admins, specialists, etc; students; and the public like parents or community members. Did you point these groups to /esc, /sp, /cs and how'd you separate internal vs external roles?)