The Communicate tab in the Major Incident workbench

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of The Communicate tab in the Major Incident workbench

    The Communicate tab in the Major Incident workbench provides a centralized view to monitor and manage communication plans and their associated tasks during a major incident. It enables ServiceNow customers to track progress, perform communication actions, and manage recipients efficiently, ensuring timely and organized communication throughout incident resolution.

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    Key Features

    • Communication Task Management: View all, active, or completed communication tasks linked to communication plans, with filtering options for easy navigation.
    • Adding Plans and Tasks: Add new communication plans or create communication tasks within existing plans directly from the workbench.
    • Recipient Management: Modify recipients of communication plans post-creation by adding or removing users, groups, or email addresses. Recipient lists improve system performance by dynamically calculating users during email processing.
    • Email Client Recipient List Support: Activate via a property toggle to support recipient lists in communication tasks, allowing scripted or predefined user lists.
    • Task Actions: Close tasks (mark as Complete or Skipped), snooze recurring tasks (postpone and refresh timers), view detailed task forms, and access activity history to add work notes or comments.
    • Task Status Indicators: Visual icons indicate task states such as completed, skipped, or active. Recurring tasks update status to Sent with execution count.
    • Notification Sending: Compose and send notifications for tasks, automatically updating task status based on whether the task is one-time or recurring.
    • Work Notes & Activity: Initiate chats and view activity streams at both the incident and communication plan levels for collaborative tracking.
    • Slack Integration: When Collaboration Services are installed, Slack can be added as a communication channel. Messages can be sent through Slack bots directly to predefined contacts, with task actions supported similarly to email communications.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    This feature enhances the coordination and transparency of communication efforts during major incidents, helping teams to:

    • Efficiently manage multiple communication tasks within a plan.
    • Ensure the right recipients receive timely updates through optimized recipient lists.
    • Maintain clear visibility into the status and history of communication tasks.
    • Leverage popular messaging platforms like Slack for direct and immediate contact.
    • Streamline communication workflows, reducing manual overhead and improving incident resolution times.

    The Communicate tab helps you understand the progress of a communication plan and its related tasks.

    If there are multiple communication tasks associated with a communication plan, all the tasks appear under the respective communication plan.

    Figure 1. Communication task filter
    communication task filter

    You can filter the communication task to view all tasks, active tasks, or completed tasks. You can also add a new communication plan by clicking Add. You can create a communication task for an existing plan by clicking Add Task. For more information, see Add communication plan from the major incident workbench. If you want to add or remove recipients from a particular plan after the plan is saved, click Manage Recipients.

    Note:
    When you create a communication task for sending an email on the Major Incident Management Workbench and select a recipient list, the recipient list is added instead of individual users. The list of users in the recipient list is calculated by the system while processing the email request, thus improving the system performance. Also, you can add users, groups, and email addresses as required in the Recipients section. Activate this feature by selecting the Property to toggle support for Recipient List on Email Client, on Communication Tasks (sn_comm_management.email_client_recipient_items_enabled) option in the Major Incident Management Properties. You can create a recipient list using a script to retrieve a custom list of users or include a pre-defined list of users.
    Figure 2. Manage recipients
    Manage recipients
    The following actions can be performed on a given communication task:
    • Close Task: If the task is performed at least once, closes the communication task and changes the state to Complete. Otherwise, the state changes the state to Skipped.
    • Snooze: Available only for recurring communication task. Enables the user to skip the communication task once and the due-in timer is refreshed.
    • View Form: For each task in the plan, you can navigate back to the form.
    • View Activity: Enables you to view activity history and post your work notes or additional comments for a communication task.
    Figure 3. Communication task actions
    communication task actions

    You can also view the due time of upcoming tasks and the overdue time in case the task isn’t completed within the expected time.

    To send a notification, click Compose. If the notification has to be send only once, then after sending the notification, the status of the task changes to Complete. If the task is recurring, the status of the task changes to Open. After a recurring communication task is performed, the status of the communication task changes to Sent followed by the number of times the recurring communication task is performed until that time. For example, Sent(2x) means that the communication task is performed twice.

    Figure 4. Communication task state
    Communication task state

    Icons to the left of the Communication Task name represent the state of the communication task such as completed, skipped, or active.

    Under the Work Notes & Activity section, you can initiate a chat at the incident or incident communication plan level. You can also view the activity stream for that record.

    Messaging users through Slack

    For Slack functionality, install Collaboration services from the ServiceNow Store.

    When you add Slack as a communication channel, you can select Compose to convey the Slack message to the contacts that you’ve already mentioned in the communication contact while defining the communication plan. The selected contacts will receive a direct message from the Slack bot. You can perform the communication task actions such as Closed Task, Snooze, View Form, and View Activity.