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.
Thanks for sharing this. Great info on the up coming release.
Good overview….
Good info, thank you.
Thanks Nathan
Thanks Nathan. Although VA is only useable in a single domain atm, be good to have choices of look and feel when they do get it sorted
I was looking for this. Thanks!
One of the big features is the ability to proxy your Service Portal site to yoursite.yourdomain.com
It’s huge from a marketing perspective to have your site appear as if your domain hosts it rather than yourcompany.service-now.com/yoursite
Wow really…. that’s huge! Link to docs?
https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/london-platform-administration/page/integrate/authentication/concept/custom-url.html
They had a london release webinar with Chuck and went through the feature briefly.
Great didn’ t check before… Thank you!
Finally! This is great news. Round of applause to ServiceNow, the enforced service-now url has irked me since I started with servicenow. So pleased to see this.
Thanks Nathan!
Hello Nathan, while working on personal instance I realized that all the alerts(data mandatory alerts) in service portal have changed to trivial error message. Any idea about it ?
I wish I could try ATF on SP some day 🙂 thanks for the article
Thanks a lot for this usefull information 😊
Hello Nathan,
We have noticed that decimal fields are now automatically formatted in London Service Portal.
e.g : 10000 becomes 10,000.
As this behavior did not exist on previous release, We would like to keep to same formatting.
Is there any property to disable the formatting in Service Portal.
In the platform there is a field attribute which does the same thing (format=none), but it is not working for Service portal.
Thank You in advance
I would open an Incident with ServiceNow.
Thank you for your precious help .
Hello Nathan,
Do you think that the issue will be fixed in upcoming patch?
Thank you in advance !