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.
The Road to Kingston: Order Guides (Part 3 of 3)
This is a 3 part series that will take a deeper look at the new Service Portal features found in the Kingston release. In case you missed part 1 or 2, checkout the link below. Part 1 - Announcements Part 2 - Route Maps Part 3 - Order Guides Link to official ServiceNow documentation Order Guides The new order guide widget provides a greatly improved user experience over the prior versions of the widget. Features Along with an improved UI, it also adds some new capabilities: Wizard like interface Support for attachments Removing catalog items from the request Installation The new order guide widget is enabled by default Instance Options Title This does not appear to do anything Bootstrap color This does not appear to do anything Compact Mode Displays only one tab at a time for better rendering on lower resolution devices Enable Show More/Less for Order Guide description on Mobile Enables the Show More or Show Less options for the description of the order guide or the associated catalog items in the mobile view. This enabled by default.
SpaceRocket 404 Page for Service Portal
I'm always been a fan of creative 404 pages, especially when they include something interactive, like a game (hence the reason I developed the OOB breakout game). So when I saw ServiceNow post a 404 Page challenge, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to create a space/rocket themed 404 game. Given that I don't have a lot of free time, I pulled some of the game logic from a Github tutorial, and then spent the rest of the day integrating it into a Service Portal widget, and adding new functionality such as High Score tracking, and presenting it with some cool graphics. I think it turned out pretty cool for a quick weekend project. The game is live on our demo instance if you want to check it out: https://newrocketdemo1.service-now.com/$sp.do?id=spacerocket It's only been tested on Chrome, Safari, and iOS Safari... so if you find any bugs let me know. To submit your own 404 Page, or see some of the other submissions, head on over to the community: https://community.servicenow.com/message/1261738 Screenshots:
New Features of Istanbul
Istanbul is the next release of ServiceNow and with it many new fixes and additions are being included for ServicePortal, including more than 200 bug fixes, localization improvements, and widget editor improvements. But the most exciting thing in Istanbul are some of the new Service Portal features: Search Sources The search has been greatly improved with the new "search sources" feature which adds greater flexibility and extensibility to the search widgets. A search source will describe the behavior and source data Ability to configure the behavior of search in portals without having to write, edit or clone any widgets SC Shopping Cart The shopping cart has been one of the most highly anticipated new features, and greatly enhances the shopping capabilities of the Service Catalog in Service Portal. Support for ordering quantities of items (where permitted) Adding ordered items to a cart (stored in the sc_cart table) Setting "Requested For" field and order details Ability to edit the variables of a cart item after it has been added to the cart Support for saved carts with the ability for later use Respects most Service Catalog properties Omit cart Omit quantity Catalog variable 2-column layouts This is another huge improvement over Helsinki, adding support for 2-column layouts for variables in Service Catalog. Improvements to the Widget Editor New hotkey bindings Dependencies are able to be viewed and edited alongside a widget Localization Improvements All strings have been translated Extended translation to the widget client script Use of ${My key} Widget Options Schema Improvements Declare parameters for widget Users can now have hints Default values are able to be provided Bug Fixes Istanbul also includes some notable bug fixes, including: The variables max_length being inconsistent with normal Catalog UI Certain $sp api's don't work in scoped applications Order guide variables don't cascade Cannot redirect to the correct location after login Help and Tooltips don't appear on forms Branding editor unable to load without a default portal specified Unable to hide "Label" variables in Service Catalog using UI Policy Actions Service catalog doesn't nest categories - page takes long time to show when there are a lot of categories Forms not displaying -- NONE -- in dependent choice list field Simple support for catalog item variable 2-column layouts
Create custom action buttons in Service Portal
A common feature request for Service Portal is to be able to add custom buttons to the sc_request or ticket page similar to the way you could add UI actions to a form. This functionality is not available out-of-box, but here is a quick example on how you could create a custom widget to display some buttons to mimic the UI Actions on a form. In this example, we will create a "Resolve Incident" button to place on the incident "ticket" page. HTML: [crayon-69f8e9b778efe571848646/] Client Script: [crayon-69f8e9b778f05487891437/] Server Script: [crayon-69f8e9b778f07373830408/] The resulting widget should look something like this: This is far from the complete solution, but will hopefully provide a good example to work off of.
Topics at Knowledge17
We’re working on some ideas for Service Portal related talks at Knowledge17. We have some good ideas for topics, but would love to hear from you: What are some topics or questions that you would love to see presented at K17? Here are some of the ideas we came up with: Developing custom apps in Service Portal Creating a custom theme Facilitate a great portal user experience Integrating your portal with an external service Creating a single portal serving multiple business units Advanced widget creation with Angular.js What are we missing? Please send us some of your ideas. We would love to hear from you. To submit your ideas, leave a comment below or email us at: info@newrocket.com
Helsinki Service Portal Documentation Released!
Finally... the documentation for the Helsiki release of Service Portal has been released!!! I know many of you have been asking about this for a long time. Check it out: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/helsinki-servicenow-platform/page/build/service-portal/concept/c_ServicePortal.html
Service Portal Update
I’ve been getting a lot of inquiries about the release of Service Portal so I wanted to send out a quick update. Service Portal is being released in Geneva only as an opt-in technology preview. What that means is, it can be enabled only by ServiceNow, is for evaluation purposes only, and not for production use. Service Portal is scheduled to be fully available in Helsinki. To partake in the Geneva technology preview of Service Portal, please contact your ServiceNow support representative. For an inside look at the technology behind Service Portal, Dwight Gunning has put together a Google Doc.
AngularJS: Developing Modern User Interfaces
For those of you who did not attend K15, you missed out on a killer lab on AngularJS by Tyler Jones and Will Leingang. If you missed it and would like to check it out, it's now available through the community. Lab Overview: You have probably noticed that many new ServiceNow applications are built using AngularJS. In this lab, you'll create your own app and see how AngularJS and ServiceNow can work together to create incredible things. Prerequisites: ServiceNow administration; Scripting in ServiceNow, Basic HTML, JavaScript and AngularJS. AngularJS_Lab_Guide.pdf 1.4 MB AngularJS_Slides.pdf 1.2 MB AngularJS_Update_Set.xml 9.8 K
Founder & CEO of 