Changes to Service Portal in Jakarta

serviceportal Service Portal

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).

sp_knowledge_base

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.

screen-shot-2017-07-18-at-5-51-09-pm

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”.

page_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

5 comments

  1. thanks , is there a way we can add additional fields in the checkout page. I have added additional fields in the SC Shopping cart Widget but unable to pass those values into Request table.
    please suggest here ..thanks in advance

    1. Certainly, but will require tweaking the widget controller and server script. Since the cart widget calls into the Angular.do processor prior to reaching the Script Include, if you’re not able to include the values initially, you may need to just update the REQ in the server script once the REQ has been created.

    1. I no longer work at ServiceNow so I cannot make any such changes, but at NewRocket we’re constantly enhancing Service Portal to improve the UX and UI… but won’t make it in to the main product. If you need a specific feature or widget, don’t hesitate to reach out as we offer design and development services.

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