Service Portal Features in New York

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The New York release of ServiceNow is finally here and includes a number of useful features, enhancements, and bug fixes to the Service Portal. In this article, we will review some of the new features and larger changes.

New Features

Agent Chat
Your users can initiate and maintain an Agent Chat conversation in any portal page. You can now also create a script to pass portal-specific data to Agent Chat. For example, pass the name of your knowledge base to a Virtual Agent conversation. To enable, simply install the “Agent Chat” plugin, and create a configuration through the “Service Portal > Agent Chat” module.

Official documentation

Search Analytics & Suggestions
Generate relevant search suggestions for your users and monitor search analytics to understand what your users are searching for. When you enable Search Suggestions, suggestions appear automatically when users enter text into search fields in the Service Portal.

Official documentation

Text index groups
Configure a text index group to make Service Portal search results more relevant to your end-users. The base system text index group includes the Catalog items, Knowledge, and Social Q&A Questions tables.

Official documentation

Antivirus Scanning support for attachments
View the health status of file attachments in Service PortalAntivirus Scanning scans files in the Attachments [sys_attachments] table by default. When viewed from a Service Portal page, attachments may not be available for download depending on their health status.

Official documentation

Reset Password
Although not much of a feature, you can now enable your users to reset their password from the Login widget using the Password Reset application. When the user clicks “Forgot Password?”, the system redirects the user to the page value specified in the “glide.security.password_reset.uri” system property.

Official documentation


Service Catalog

Related Catalog Items & Knowledge Articles
Configure related items and articles for a catalog item to provide additional information or alternatives. These articles and items are displayed in the catalog item page in Service Portal.

Official documentation


Knowledge Management

Route Map
The “kb_article” page now routes to the “kb_article_view” page which is part of the Knowledge Management Service Portal which includes a number of features such as feedback and versioning.

Multi Knowledge Bases
Configure which knowledge bases to display on the Knowledge Management Service Portal

Article Comments
User can now reply and like comments as well as add links, attachments, or images to comments.

Official documentation


Automated Test Framework

Open Service Portal Page
Open a portal page in the Automated Test Framework. When building automated tests, test designers must first open a page in a portal before testing UI components on the page.

Official documentation


The New York release seems to be very promising with a nice mixture of features, enhancements, and much-needed bug fixes (over 150+ that I’ve counted). I am definitely looking forward to this release and all it entails.

Check out all the New York release notes here.

If you know of some additional features in Service Portal not mentioned here, please let me know in the comments below.

9 comments

  1. Thanks, I always appreciate these summaries. Looking forward to the search enhancements, search is a pain point for many users in the portal.

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