How do you go from hacking a widget together to creating one that is maintainable, easy to understand and performant? You accomplish a lot with Service Portal widgets with a little knowledge of ServiceNow APIs and Angular.js, but too often widget client and server scripts become long and overly complicated. In this session, you will learn practical techniques to make your controller and server scripts more maintainable, flexible and powerful by embracing good coding practices, encapsulation, and decoupling. You can download the widgets used in this video here: https://serviceportal.io/downloads/k18-creatorcon-example-widgets/
Widgets and Demo Portal from our K18 Service Portal Sessions
Due to popular demand, here is a quick video highlighting the portal and some of the widgets we showed during our CreatorCon sessions at Knowledge18. We've made the following widgets and applications available for download: Gamification for Service Portal https://serviceportal.io/gamification-in-service-portal/ Unlocking Service Portal Widgets https://serviceportal.io/downloads/k18-creatorcon-example-widgets/ If you've found this content useful or if you have any special requests for upcoming posts, please let me know in the comments below.
Featured Service Portal: Scripps Networks
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:
Opening Headers in the Widget Editor on Helsinki
A defect in some patches of the Helsinki Service Portal prevents header or footer widgets from opening in the widget editor. This video tutorial will walk you through how to fix this.
Communicating between the Client Script and the Server Script of a widget
We've had a lot of questions about how the client side and server side of a widget can communicate, so this week I thought it would be a good idea to offer a quick demonstration. In this tutorial we will create a widget that allows the user to add or remove items from a list. In this case it's just a simple Array, but it could just as easily be using GlideRecord against a table. Here is the sample code used in the video: HTML: [crayon-69cea5b2888e1545060324/] Server Script: [crayon-69cea5b2888e7932348534/] Client Script: [crayon-69cea5b2888e9248726612/]
Service Portal “Gothenburg” Theme
A quick demo of one of our themes for Service Portal. Features include: Shopping cart Multi-level categories (for both service catalog & knowledge base) Connect chat integration Create incident Contextual search Almost every page and widget has been redesigned to help improve the user experience. Let me know what you guys think.
Real Time To Do App using Service Portal & Record Watchers
One of the powerful features of the new Helsinki Service Portal is the integrated "record watcher" capability. This allows widgets to update in near realtime as the data changes in the database. In this tutorial we will build a sample To Do (task ) app that uses two widgets, one for creating records, and the second for showing the list of tasks.
Founder & CEO of 