Members of the Service Management team, alongside the App Ops ServiceNow developers, frequently make small improvements to ServiceNow. These include adding functions that have been released in recent versions, improving navigation and the way information is presented – or just fixing the little things that bug you!
Here are a few things we’ve been working on recently; if you have a suggestion for a minor change that you think everyone could benefit from, let us know.
Recently released
Knowledge Base improvements
- Our users can now rate KB articles. They can say if they were useful – or if not, they can raise feedback. Any comments left will go straight to the knowledge base owner for action.
- Links to articles will now always redirect users to the newest version of an article – even if they have an out of date link.
- We can now edit articles directly from the Service Portal view
Add something new to the Service Catalogue
Do you receive lots of incident tickets with users asking for the same thing? Do you have to ask multiple users for the same information over and over again? The Service Catalogue can help with this.
The Service Catalogue appears to users as the Make a Request section of the Service Portal. It helps make IT Services more efficient by allowing users to trigger automated self-service solutions, or routing standard requests to the right teams first time.
If you’re a Service Owner, there may be tasks that you have to complete for users on a regular basis that could be better delivered by creating an item in the Service Catalogue. These can range from as simple as directing users to an appropriate external page, through to complex workflows with approval steps and automatic delivery – and everything in between.
Not sure where to start? You can now log a request to the Service Portal team using the New service catalogue request item in the Technical Requests catalogue. We can help you to map the delivery process and suggest ways in which ServiceNow might help streamline the process and improve the customer experience.
Coming soon…
Decluttering the Activity Feed
When viewing an incident in the technical view, you sometimes have to scroll up and down a lengthy activity feed; lots of the updates are system messages informing us that emails have been sent out. It’s possible for users to filter what they see in the activity feed – but until now, each user has to change this setting themselves. We’re going to update the default view, so that those email notification messages are automatically hidden from view.
We know that sometimes it’s important to check if an email has been sent, so you’ll be able to reverse this yourself if you want to. It you’ve ever set a preference for this in the past, that won’t change.
For more information about how to change this setting, please see KB14945 – ServiceNow: Filtering the incident log.
Getting to the Right Catalogue
- The Technical Requests catalogue is primarily for IT Services internal use.
- The Service Catalogue is for our end users; it appears in the Service Portal as the Make a Request section.
To cut down the number of steps it takes to get to the right catalogue, we’re going to change how you navigate to these options in the technical view – by replacing the single Service Catalogue link with direct links for the Technical Catalogue and the End User Catalogue.
An added advantage of making this change is that we’ll no longer need to develop the end user requests to display correctly in the technical view, as they’ll now always use the Service Portal view.
Find out more
If you’d like to find out more about upcoming developments in ServiceNow, or have any suggestions for improvement, contact Shaun Willetts, Service Delivery Manager.