Following some customer feedback after the Helsinki update, we’ve made a few changes to the user interface of the Activity Stream on tickets to make text more readable and to better highlight the difference between Public Notes, Private Notes, and system and field changes. Rather than light grey, text in the Activity Stream will […]
About Nicholas Hynes
Posts by Nicholas Hynes:
2017
Incident Management State Changes
iSolutions Service Management, with help from Applications Management, have been working to streamline and consolidate the list of Incident States in ServiceNow both for ease of use and to reduce maintenance overhead and bugs. The full details of the new state list are as follows: New – Only applicable to an Incident that is currently […]
2016
Multiple Minor Improvements
A number of small changes have been implemented in ServiceNow to target minor improvements: Group managers were able to add people to their teams but not remove them. This has now been fixed. A BRM field has been added to Department records where the department is a Faculty or top tier Professional Service. This will eventually […]
Improved Matching on Email Addresses
ServiceNow is set by default to look at someone’s primary email address when the email the system to match it against their user record – for example emails from n.hynes@soton.ac.uk automatically get matched against my Nick Hynes ServiceNow record. Unfortunately, some people have their email clients set up to use an alternate address to the standard […]
Incident Service Categorisation Changes
**The below changes primarily affect iSolutions though other tenants may be impacted if they interact with Incidents where the Logged For is set to IT** The requirements for ticket logging have been changed such that for tickets where the Logged For is IT: Category, Subcategory and Item will become non-mandatory – They will still be visible […]
Delegate Interface Improvements
The Delegate interface in ServiceNow wasn’t satisfactory with no required fields, meaning people could submit blank delegations, a confused layout without clarity on what fields meant and some fields being visible that are not in use. We’ve now reordered the form to make the layout more intuitive, set some fields as mandatory, removed unused fields […]
Application List Clean-Up
The list of available applications in the left-hand menu has been cleaned up and reordered to make it easier to find and access the top used areas. For example, applications not in use by certain tenants (e.g. Change, Configuration etc) have been hidden for them and applications such as Dashboards and Reports have been moved […]
SLA Improvements
SLAs have been adjusted to pause when a ticket is Resolved and restart if the ticket is reopened. This will allow the same SLA to continue rather than creating a duplicate. The SLA will also be on hold while the ticket is Resolved in the same way as the different On Hold states. This will […]
Row Limitation
Following reports of performance issues within the system, it has been recommended by ServiceNow that we limit the amount of rows people can set when looking at lists. The recommended (and default) number of rows is 20 and the maximum out of the box limit is 100. As part of the implementation, our maximum was […]
“On Behalf Of” Field
One issue of using the “My Work” and “My Group’s Work” lists was that the “Caller” for Incidents and the “Requested For” for Requests couldn’t be added as columns on the lists. This has now been addressed through the creation of a new field – “On Behalf Of”. This takes the Caller, Requested For and […]
2015
Assignment Improvements
Utilising features within the new Fuji version of ServiceNow, we’ve now developed a set of improvements focused on quickly assigning tickets others and to yourself. There are new buttons added to the Assignment Group and Assigned To fields which allow you to very easily assign a ticket to yourself and/or your team. The team […]
Fuji Upgrade
The version of ServiceNow we have been using since going live last September, known as Eureka, has been superseded by a new version, Fuji, which was released earlier this year. This new version brings a series of enhancements and new features, as well as an updated interface. In order to keep our tool in step […]
SLA Reporting in Qlikview
Although ServiceNow has a powerful suite of reporting tools, it’s limited in its capability of showing historical and comparative data, particularly in regards to SLAs. To support SLA reporting, an interface has been set up between ServiceNow and Qlikview. Two Qlkiview report sets have been created that show SLA achievement, a high level “Director’s […]
RITM Improvements
Since the eForms first went live earlier in October, a number of small improvements have been made to the forms and the behaviour of these tickets to deliver further efficiencies. RITMs have been added to the global search option so the contents of requests can be searched for by using the search box in the […]
iSolutions CSI Changes
In preparation for the development of a Service Catalogue in ServiceNow, the CSI structure has been adjusted to allow for CSIs to be automatically set by populating the “Configuration Item” field with a service. As well as supporting this mapping, a number of changes have been made to the CSIs to address issues including redundancy and […]
IT & Finance eForms Going Live
One of the main benefits of the ServiceNow system which was not utilised as part of our Phase 1 go-live were eForms for specific requests, with everything instead being processed via the generic “Incident” process. Following a significant amount of design, development and configuration across various teams, we are now in a position to go-live […]
Resourcelink Interface – Line Manager Information
To support the development of a suite of eForms in the HR tenancy for things like Contractual Changes and Absence Requests, an interface has been set up between ServiceNow and Resourcelink. This brings information such as post data, departmental and role hierarchy, and management and direct report information into ServiceNow that is visible to HR members […]
Portal & Call Improvements
A new set of changes have been promoted in ServiceNow that address a number of small issues and feature requests made by customers over the last few months, specifically around the customer portal and the Call function. These include: When Calls are converted into Incidents there are now rules that will auto assign to Service […]
Mailbox Quota Information
In an attempt to improve the process used when granting mailbox increases (a very high volume request), exchange quota information for individual and generic accounts has now been linked into ServiceNow. This allows Service Desk and IRT to see how big someone’s mailbox is and how much of their quota is being used at a […]
Miscellaneous Fixes & Improvements – Short Description Spell Check & Group Management
An update has been promoted into ServiceNow that addresses a number of small issues or feature requests, including: Short Description now has spell check enabled, the same as the Description field. Short Description is now visible again on the portal view of tickets (had been hidden in error in a previous change). Contact Type […]
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