Domain separation and Embedded Help

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Domain separation and Embedded Help

    Domain separation in Embedded Help allows organizations using ServiceNow to segregate data, processes, and administration into distinct logical domains. This feature ensures that users access help content and application data relevant only to their assigned domain, supporting multi-tenant environments such as service providers managing multiple customers.

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    Embedded Help leverages domain separation to enable custom help topics tailored to each domain, enhancing user experience by providing context-specific assistance while maintaining access to global help content when domain-specific content is unavailable.

    Key Features

    • Domain Separation Support: Embedded Help supports domain separation at runtime, including separation across user interface elements, cache keys, reporting, rollups, and aggregations.
    • Domain-Specific Help Content: Administrators can configure help content forms to include a Domain field, allowing authors to assign help topics to specific domains.
    • Global Domain Fallback: Users see domain-specific help if available; otherwise, they fall back to global help content. Users in the global domain only see global help content.
    • Testing Domain-Specific Help: Administrators can impersonate users within a domain to verify domain-specific help content visibility.
    • Multi-Tenant Support: Designed for service providers who need to manage help content visibility across multiple tenants while ensuring proper data segregation.

    Key Outcomes

    • Greater control over help content visibility and relevance based on user domain assignment.
    • Improved user experience through customized embedded help aligned with domain-specific needs.
    • Enhanced data and process isolation supporting secure multi-tenant operations within the ServiceNow platform.
    • Ability for service providers to respond effectively to tenant customers with appropriate contextual help and data access.

    Domain separation is supported for Embedded Help. 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: Basic

    • Business logic: Ensure that data goes into the proper domain for the application’s service provider use cases.
    • The application supports domain separation at run time. The domain separation includes separation from the user interface, cache keys, reporting, rollups, and aggregations.
    • The owner of the instance must set up the application to function across multiple tenants.

    Sample use case: When a service provider (SP) uses chat to respond to a tenant-customer’s message, the customer must be able to see the SP's response.

    For more information on support levels, see Application support for domain separation.

    Domain separation overview

    The goal of Embedded Help is to enable your users to benefit from base system help topics, as well as to create your own custom help topics. If your organization uses domain separation, you can create custom embedded help for each domain.

    How domain separation works in Embedded Help

    If your organization uses domain separation, you can create custom embedded help for each domain. To associate help content with a domain, the administrator configures the help content form to include the Domain field. When custom content is created, the author selects the domain to which the content applies.

    Note:
    • Content with no specified domain is in the global domain.
    • If domain-specific content does not exist for a user in a domain, the user sees the global help content.
    • Users in the global domain only see global help content. An administrator who wants to test domain-specific help must impersonate a user in that domain.