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Let’s Meet at Now Summit Santa Clara!

I'll be attending Now Summit in Santa Clara next week. If anyone is available and would like to talk Service Portal, I'm leaving some time slots open on my calendar. I'll be available in between and after sessions from Wednesday evening to Thursday at 5pm. Please click the button below to access my calendar. Looking forward to meeting you! Nathan Firth – Meet at Now Summit Santa Clara

Service Portal Features of London

By now all of you should have noticed that you can request a personal developer instance of ServiceNow running the latest London release. Also with the new London release comes several new enhancements to the Service Portal. Here's a quick highlight of some of the new features: Faceted Search The Faceted Search widget replaces the Search Page widget and adds support for: Faceted Search Filters Pagination What's awesome: I love that the facets live as part of  the search source so that we can customize the facets as well as add custom facets to our search sources What could be improved: The whole search page is a giant widget including the typeahead search and the breadcrumbs. This makes it difficult to customize. What if we have a theme without breadcrumbs? What if I want to move the search? Having the whole page be one giant widget is just not a good idea. It does not improve the typeahead results which is how the majority of users use the search Virtual Agent Enable your users to interact with a chatbot or live agent through various Virtual Agent interfaces. What's awesome: Nice modern interface Integrates nicely with Connect Chat What could be improved: It's not free (requires additional licensing) Takes a really long time to load Guided Tours Create a guided tour for a Service Portal page to guide users through the content step by step. What's awesome: Supports auto launch Supports (limited) HTML Easy to use designer interface What could be improved: No support for page overlays (darkens the page behind the dialog) Dialogs don't stay fixed when the user scrolls the page Automated Test Framework Write automated tests to validate Service Portal forms. What's awesome: We now have support for automated tests in Service Portal What could be improved: So far it's just limited to forms and service catalog Validation Scripts Validate user input in a specific field type using a validation script. My thoughts: As far as I can tell, this validates field types and not tied to a specific table, also would not affect catalog items or record producers... so honestly, I'm not really sure when this would be useful. If you know of some common use-cases, I'd love to hear them in the comments.   For further reading, please see the official ServiceNow London Release Notes for Service Portal.

Let’s grab a drink at Knowledge18 and talk Service Portal

I'm so excited to be speaking at Knowledge again, and this year I'm bringing the whole NewRocket team with me. I will also be scheduling some appointments to meet with any customers interested in talking about Service Portal. Nothing formal, just looking forward to meeting many of you and learning more about how you're using Service Portal. If you're interested in meeting at Knowledge, please click the button below to access my calendar. Let's Meet at K18

Knowledge18 Service Portal Sessions Available Now

NewRocket will be hosting 3 informative talks geared to help you take your service portal to new heights. These sessions are packed with relatable information and actionable takeaways. Make sure to add these sessions to your agenda today because they are filling up fast To schedule you Knowledge18 sessions, go to: https://www.servicenowevents.com/servicenowknowledge18/myevent_home.php Adding Gamification To Your Service Portal Gamification is a great way to add incentives for users to explore and use the service portal repeatedly. In this session, we will demonstrate how to implement gamification in the Service Portal to introduce users to the portal and encourage them to complete certain tasks. DATE / TIME - May 8, 4:00 pm - 4:30 pm SESSION ID - CCDT0626 SESSION TYPE - CreatorCon Developer Theater TOPIC - CreatorCon Building A Better Service Portal: Lessons From The Field After helping dozens of organizations deliver Service Portals, we want to share what works and what doesn't. If you are starting your service portal journey, this session will help you take the right path. DATE / TIME - May 8, 5:00 pm - 5:50 pm SESSION ID - CCB0442 SESSION TYPE - CreatorCon Breakout TOPIC - CreatorCon Unlocking Service Portal Widgets In this session, you will learn practical techniques to make your controller and server scripts more maintainable, flexible and powerful by embracing good coding practices, encapsulation, and decoupling. DATE / TIME - May 10, 3:50 pm - 4:40 pm SESSION ID - CCB0371 SESSION TYPE - CreatorCon Breakout TOPIC - CreatorCon

Featured Service Portal: Scripps Networks

NewRocket had the pleasure of collaborating with Scripps Networks Interactive to deliver an IT service portal to support their diverse company. Scripps Networks is a leading developer of lifestyle content for television and the Internet. The company's brands include HGTV, Food Network, Travel Channel, DIY Network, Cooking Channel and Great American Country. The previous Scripps Networks CMS-based portal did not provide the usability they were looking for nor did it align with their new branding guidelines. Improving these key areas was critical for the redesign of the portal. “NewRocket delivered on a portal that not only fit our branding guidelines but packs in functionality with a design aesthetic that is visually inviting.  Our end user experience has greatly improved by making our content and catalog offerings forefront and easily searchable all in an appealing display.  The team was fantastic to work with and their expertise and guidance helped make our portal successful.” - Judy March, IT Service Delivery Manager Portal Features The new portal provides users with quick access to search, the IT service catalog, frequently asked questions and news. NewRocket embraced the extensive, yet flexible branding guidelines to visually identify different sections of the portal. These visual and structural changes help users quickly understand the page contents and complete the desired task. Some other highlights include: Quick access to open requests, incidents and approvals through My Items mega menu in header Direct access to the top level service catalog categories from the home page Consistent access to support options in footer Several custom developed widgets including news, sub-categories, and knowledge base homepage Responsive layout for mobile and tablet users Watch the video for a quick tour and leave us a comment about what you think of the portal.  

New Service Portal Documentation Page

Great news! We just added a new Service Portal documentation section. This material was originally created by the Service Portal development team. However, the original documentation on GitHub has since been removed, so we have decided to pick up where they left off. Our goal is that the maintenance of this documentation will become a community effort. Check it out here: https://serviceportal.io/docs/

Free Widgets for Service Portal

We are excited to announce the launch of the free widget download page on ServicePortal.io. Since day 1, ServicePortal.io has existed to be a resources and source of inspiration for the ServiceNow Community. With the launch of the new widgets page, we can now share some of the most frequently requested widgets with all of our followers. Not all of them will be complex, many of the most frequently used widgets are pretty simple. Our goal is to develop and give away at least one new widget per month. We believe that collaboration is key to success for all of us in the ServiceNow Community. If you have any suggestions or comments about our widgets, please let us know. View Free Widgets Page

Changes to Service Portal in Jakarta

The latest iteration of ServiceNow - Jakarta - has arrived. With this new release, comes new enhancements, additions, and other improvements to the Service Portal. One of the major focuses of Jakarta was improving accessibility within the portal. New Features Knowledge Base Portal A brand new portal that brings all the features of Knowledge Management V3 plugin into Service Portal. Available through plugin: Knowledge Management - Service Portal plugin (com.snc.knowledge_serviceportal). User Criteria You now have more control over who can see pages, widget instances, and search sources. Previously you could only use roles to control access, now you can use powerful user criteria. Condition Builder The "Data table from URL definition" widget can produce an information table very quickly and now it's even more powerful. It now allows you to graphically build the conditions for the table. Contextual Search Use instance options on a search widget to configure search sources. Contextual Search - Inline Results Not to be confused with the above feature, this new widget will render search results inside any of your record producers for incident deflection. New Portal You can now create a new portal from the Service Portal configuration page. Portal System Properties Module added for setting Service Portal system properties. Page Draft Option Restrict page access to admins only by setting a page to "draft". Enhancements Shopping cart enhancements Users have a few additional options with the shopping cart: Clear all items Add a saved bundle to an open cart, or override the existing items in the cart with the saved bundle Catalog Variables All variable types (excluding ones using Jelly) are now supported in Service Portal, although the functionality may not be identical to the platform UI. List, form, and widget improvements TinyMCE HTML editor has been updated Control the number of approvals shown through an instance option Service Catalog related items are now in their own plugin called Service Portal - Service Catalog. This plugin is activated with the Service Portal for Enterprise Management plugin. Accessibility Improvements Many improvements to accessibility were made in congruence with WCAG 2.0 A standards: Many defects fixed High contrast theme to help with those that can't see low contrast colors Define a screen reader title on any container records Server Script API: getCatalogItem() The 'getCatalogItem(String itemID)' method was changed to 'getCatalogItem(String itemID, boolean isOrdering)' Client Script API: server.update() Now sends your URL query parameters automatically to the server