Service Portal Features of London

serviceportal

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

screen-shot-2018-08-24-at-5-55-50-pm

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

screen-shot-2018-08-24-at-5-15-27-pm

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

screen-shot-2018-08-24-at-6-27-58-pm

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

screen-shot-2018-08-24-at-6-33-11-pm

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.

screen-shot-2018-08-24-at-6-35-35-pm

 

For further reading, please see the official ServiceNow London Release Notes for Service Portal.

19 comments

  1. 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

  2. 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

    1. 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.

  3. 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 ?

  4. 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

Leave a Reply to Tessy Antony Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *