Domain separation and Document Management
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Summary of Domain separation and Document Management
Domain separation in Document Management allows ServiceNow customers to logically segregate data, processes, and administrative tasks by domains (tenants). This separation controls user access and visibility, enhancing security and governance in multi-tenant environments. It supports standard domain separation features, including domain-aware application properties and configurable business logic tailored to each tenant's needs.
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How Domain Separation Works in Document Management
- Users can only view and manage documents within their own domain.
- Parent domain users have access to documents in child domains, while non-global domain users access documents only within their domain and the global domain when granted access.
- When a document is created, it inherits the creator’s domain; changes in document ownership update the domain of related versions, references, and permission records accordingly.
Key Use Cases
- Documents: Editing and access are domain-restricted, preventing users from other domains from accessing documents unless granted explicit read access (for global domain users).
- Versions, References, and Permissions: Access is granted only if users have access to the parent document. Inherited access can allow access to parent documents if the user can access referenced records within the same domain.
- Lists and List Entries: These are domain-specific and accessible to users with document admin rights in the user’s domain.
Known Considerations
If a document owner changes domains and the new owner lacks access to referenced records, those references may become invisible to the new owner. This can affect visibility and management of documents with inter-domain references.
Practical Implications for ServiceNow Customers
- Enables secure multi-tenant document management within a single ServiceNow instance.
- Allows tenant-specific customization of business logic and access controls, supporting scenarios such as requiring comments on record closure for some tenants but not others.
- Requires careful configuration of domain-aware roles and permissions to ensure appropriate access, especially when changing document ownership across domains.
Domain separation is supported for Document Management. Domain separation enables you to separate data, processes, and administrative tasks into logical groupings called domains. You can control several aspects of this separation, including which users can see and access data.
Support level: Standard
- Includes all aspects of Basic level support.
- Application properties are domain-aware as needed.
- Business logic: The service provider (SP) creates or modifies processes per customer. The use cases reflect proper use of the application by multiple SP customers in a single instance.
- The instance owner must configure the minimum viable product (MVP) business logic and data parameters per tenant as expected for the specific application.
Sample use case: An admin must be able to make comments required when a record closes for one tenant, but not for another.
For more information on support levels, see Application support for domain separation.
Overview of domain separation and Document Management
Document Management provides an access level approach to controlling the document access and providing security to the users.
How domain separation works in Document Management
When domains are separated in Document Management, users can see and manage documents and give access privileges only in their own (tenant) domain.
A user in the parent domain has access to documents in the child domain.
When a user creates a document, document list or document entries, then their domain is the same as the user's domain.
When the owner of the document changes then the related versions, references, and permission record's domain is updated with the domain of the parent document.
Use cases
- Documents
Documents can be edited or accessed only within their domain. Access to a document can become void if a user belongs to a different domain from the document's domain.
- Users in the global domain can access documents in all domains when the read access is granted to the user.
- Users in a non-global domain can access documents only in the same domain and global domain when document access is granted to the user.
- Versions, References and Permissions table
- Users can access the versions, references, and, permissions table records only if they have access to the parent document.
- If a user has access to the target record in the references table, access to the parent document is granted only if inherited access is enabled for the document and the user is in the same domain as the parent document.
- List and List Entries
List and List Entries have domain pointing to the current user domain and can be accessed by the users with document admin rights.
Known issues
If a document contains references and if the owner of the document is changed and does not have access to the target record of one of the references, then the reference record might not be visible to the new owner.
For example, if the document owner, User A (Domain: D1) is changed to User B (Domain: D2) and User B does not have access to the target record of the reference table, User B might not be able to see the reference record.