Domain separation and Document Management

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Domain separation and Document Management

    Domain separation in Document Management allows ServiceNow customers to logically segment data, processes, and administrative tasks into distinct domains (tenants). This enables precise control over who can view and access documents and related records based on domain membership, enhancing security and data governance in multi-tenant or multi-department environments.

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    Key Features

    • Domain-aware application properties: Document Management supports domain separation at the application level, ensuring properties and configurations respect domain boundaries.
    • Business logic tailored per tenant: Service Providers can configure and modify processes and data parameters specific to each customer or tenant within a single instance.
    • Document ownership and access control: Documents, document lists, and entries created by users inherit the user’s domain, restricting visibility and editing to that domain.
    • Parent-child domain access: Users in a parent (global) domain can access documents in child domains if granted read access, while users in non-global domains can access documents in their domain and the global domain.
    • Access to versions, references, and permissions: Access to these records is contingent on access to the parent document. Inherited access can grant visibility if users are within the same domain.
    • Domain-specific lists and entries: Lists and list entries are domain-bound to the current user’s domain and require document admin rights for access.

    Known Issues

    If a document’s owner is changed to a user in a different domain who lacks access to referenced records, the new owner may not see those references. For example, changing ownership from User A in Domain D1 to User B in Domain D2 can result in User B not seeing references if they lack necessary permissions.

    Practical Impact for ServiceNow Customers

    • Enables secure multi-tenant document management within a single ServiceNow instance.
    • Supports customized process enforcement and data segregation per tenant or domain.
    • Ensures compliance with organizational policies that require strict data access controls.
    • Requires careful configuration of domain permissions, especially when transferring 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

    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.