Preface

The genesis of this book owes to the fact that several students who attended my training programs in the last few years have been struggling with ITSM implementations or application support upon their initial assignments. They keep on texting and calling me to seek guidance and often solutions to roadblock which though unforeseen yet are very natural to any project. This paved way for the thinking that a concise yet comprehensive literature dealing with the practical and real life problems during implantation is needed. This book is my humble attempt to the goal. It provides step by step approach to ITSM implementation or resolving development or support using Service-Now, common pitfalls, impediments and errors and their possible solutions. Apart from the general framework for a Service-Now implementation to facilitate a robust design, it also provides general guidelines for planning implementation in such a way as to avoid most of the situations which may result in a not-so-clean design later on.

This book provides insights into the various stages from planning through implementation and maintenance with specific focus on what to expect at inpidual stages and how to be prepared or counter the common as well as rarely occurring pitfalls that arise from time to time by following best practices recommended by Service-Now.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with Service-Now, covers Service-Now basic modules and is focused on inpiduals who have never been associated with any ITSM applications and want to shift their career path in ITSM/Service-Now application.

Chapter 2, Performing Core Configuration and Management Tasks, deals with common issues, administration, database, contract configuration and other topics useful for deployments. It is focused on professionals who are working on ITSM applications or Service-Now already and want to enhance knowledge of Service-Now platform administration.

Chapter 3, Building Data-Driven Application, deals with development, enhancement and maintenance of  new and existing custom applications. This includes server side, client side and web service side scripting with specific focus on best practices. On many occasions professionals struggle deciding the structure of the application. This chapter provides a general guideline for that.

Chapter 4, Configuring Alerts and Notification, deals with development and configuration of inbound and outbound alerts and notifications, dynamic and static content and watermarking.

Chapter 5, Building and Configuring Reports, explains how to develop and deploy reports for specific support group or team and developing relevant dashboards.

Chapter 6, Creating and Configuring Workflow Activities, this chapter covers development and configuration of application workflow activities, triggers, approval groups and usage of components like timer, switch and so on. This chapter is important for the entire audience of this book as this part is the heart and soul of Service-Now.

Chapter 7, Auditing and Diagnosing Service-Now, focus of this chapter hovers upon the troubleshooting capability in Service-Now. It deals with auditing, debugging and version control.

What you need for this book

Service-Now is cloud hosted enterprise level application so you require standard browser (Internet Explorer/Firefox/Safari/Google Chrome) only to access it. Apart of your organization Service-Now instance, you can claim your personal Service-Now instance by registering on at this link https://developer.servicenow.com.

Who this book is for

This book targets IT professionals and administrators who have some experience of working with ITSM or Service-Now already and are looking to solve regular or unique problems that surface when using Service-Now. It’s advisable to have a basic level of administration experience with Service-Now. Familiarity with JavaScript is assumed.

Sections

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

Getting ready

This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.

How to do it…

This section contains the steps required to follow the recipe.

How it works…

This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.

There's more…

This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.

See also

This section provides helpful links to other useful information for the recipe.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: If you want to open a new record of the table, then you can type table name.do in the search box, and if you want to open see all available records in the table, then you can type tablename.list.

A block of code is set as follows:

action.setRedirectURL(current);
current.assigned_to = gs.getUserID();
current.setForceUpdate(true);
current.update();

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "If there are any errors then resolve the errors, and click on Commit Update Set to deploy your code in the target instance such as the testing or production instance."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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