In the project I’m currently working are multiple reports scheduled. Some of my colleagues receive more than 20 of those mails daily. Most of them on a periodical basis. Also on the weekend and in the night, where they weren’t required or even necessary, they only flood the mailbox. Some of them then asked me, how this can be adjusted so the reports will only be sent on the weekdays. I’ve therefore searched and adjusted a condition script to exclude the weekends. However, the script was sometimes working and sometimes not (it was correct though).
I’ve then searched more in detail and found something even better – a condition script to only send mails in a schedule AND in a specific time zone, since most of my colleagues are located all over the world and only a hand full in Germany.
The best on this solution: it’s suggested from ServiceNow! Not a script from the community or even developed on my own.
In the below list there’s the procedure how to use the condition script: 1. Create a Schedule (System Scheduler > Schedules), or use an existing Schedule in your system 2. Add the ‘Conditional’ and ‘Condition’ fields to your Scheduled Reports form 3. Check the ‘Conditional’ checkbox 4. Set ‘Run’ to Periodically, then set an hour interval you wish to have the report sent out with 5. In the ‘Condition’ field, use the following script (replace the timezone with your timezone, replace the 32-character sys_id with the sys_id of the Schedule you created – you can get that by right-clicking it in the Schedules list and selecting Copy sys_id
Script:
var s = new GlideSchedule("<sys_id of the scheudle>");
var gdt = new GlideDateTime();
s.isInSchedule(gdt, "<the target time zone>");
Example:
var s = new GlideSchedule("08fcd0830a0a0b2600079f56b1adb9ae");
var gdt = new GlideDateTime();
s.isInSchedule(gdt, "US/Pacific");
To get the list of schedules, you can use the below link (simply set your instance suffix) or use the application menu method: https://<instance>.service-now.com/cmn_schedule_list.do System Scheduler > Schedules > Schedules
Time zones are not available in a central table. They’re stored as choice list options. There are several ways how to access the available tables. You can use the below link (adjust the ServiceNow instance name): https://<instance>.service-now.com/slushbucket_choice.do?sysparm_ref=sys_user.time_zone&sysparm_form=sys_choice&sysparm_dependent=&sysparm_stack=no
I hope this solution helps you and your colleagues as it helps me and my colleagues.
Generation Z. Most people associate it with a ‘lazy’, ‘difficult’ or simply ‘another’ generation. They are considered disinterested and addicted to smartphones. What happens to the world of working when this generation enters?
Let’s take a closer look at the Generation Z. It extends mainly between the years 1997 to 2012, in which they were born. The first ones have already entered into the world of working, while the others will not enter the working world for a few years.
But: what is important to the Generation Z?
For most of them, it’s not work, a steep career or financial wealth that is important, but time for the family, personal freedom, self-fulfillment and, of course, having fun in life is.
They don’t want to spend a lot of time at work with manual processes, and they don’t want to rack their brains over open tasks. They want to live a relaxed life and experience many exciting things – and all this without the stress of work.
The first ‘digital natives’ – that describes it quite well. Almost everyone in the Generation Z has been involved with digital media since childhood and has been influenced by it – whether through television, the Internet, smartphones, etc. – so they are ‘fit’ in the new technologies.
They are more than familiar with the media. They know how to work efficiently with notebooks, smartphones, apps and co. Most of them ask themselves very early on when they start something ‘can’t this be done by smartphone?’. And it is exactly this thought that makes them masters of digitalization!
What does this have to do with ServiceNow? Very simple: ServiceNow wants to make working life easier in many areas due to the motto ‘make work, work better for people’. Who, if not Generation Z, would be best suited for this? ServiceNow offers a modern platform with extensive functionalities. Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Flows, Workflows, Mobile Apps and numerous integrations are only a small list of the platform capabilities.
Working life is becoming more and more mobile. Everything has to be done on the go. An unbelievable amount has to be done in an unbelievably short time. By touching digital media at an early age, Generation Z fits perfectly with ServiceNow because both share the same passion.
I’m very excited to see how Generation Z makes working life easier with ServiceNow.
Last Thursday the latest ServiceNow version Orlando was officially launched. Here you will find the most important information in case you were not able to attend or want to read the content again.
In the latest release Orlando, ServiceNow introduced more than 800 new features. The most important ones I would like to introduce you briefly:
Now Intelligence
Analytics Q&A
Mobile Branding
Mobile Analytics
Now Experience
ServiceNow Extension for VS Code
Now Intelligence
In the new release, everything is about intelligence. AI is still an unfulfilled promise. Everyone is talking about it but nobody knows how to address the topic. So ServiceNow has fulfilled that promise. True to the motto ‘Intelligence done right: Making work better for you’. Now Intelligence is now behind most applications.
Analytics Q&A (limted access)
What do you think when you read this? Q&A to the Analytics Application? That’s wrong. Analytics is a very interesting topic for the high management level, which needs fast reports and has no time to create them.
The trick is, you enter what information you are looking for in a search field and the Analytics Q&A application generates the required report.
Mobile Branding
With the Orlando release ServiceNow has responded to many customer requirements. One if the requirements is to adapt the available mobile applications. Not only the mobile theme colors can be customized, but also the app name, app description, app icon and splash screen image. With the new release, MAM (Mobile App Management) support is available.
Mobile Analytics
With the new release ServiceNow also introduces a possibility to check user data of mobile applications and thus further improve the stability and performance of the applications.
The ServiceNow Mobile Analytics application provides dashboard views to monitor key performance indicators for mobile application users created with the ServiceNow mobile platform. Visualize metrics and interactions to better understand the user experience and create more intuitive trips for your users.
Now Experience
Today the experience of the employees is broken. Employees have to navigate across several departments to do simple things.
The IT department is responsible for things like connecting to the Internet, needing a new device, resetting the password and much more. The HR department provides policies, changes the address and updates contact information. Facilities organizes office moves, books meeting rooms, a new desk. The Legal Department is responsible for providing evidence of compliance, reporting risks to the Board of Directors. The finance department takes care of payment problems, company credit cards, purchase of various utensils.
ServiceNow Employee Workflows transform the employee experience. How? ServiceNow combines everything in one platform – not only via website, but also via smartphone. This makes it easier for all employees to get things done, find information or whatever needs to be done.
ServiceNow Extension for VS Code
ServiceNow already provided an extension for Microsoft Visual Studio Code in the past. With the new release, this extension has been further improved.
From now on you can develop offline. As soon as an internet connection is available, the changes can be applied. The extension also provides a 2-way-sync between VS Code and the ServiceNow instance. Furthermore, the extension provides code suggestions to use the correct syntax.
ServiceNow is an aPaaS (Application Platform as a Service) model and is the fastest growing enterprise cloud platform. It provides the customers a modern platform with extensive functions and several integrations. With the modern platform, workflows can be easily created to automate several business processes to make work easy.
Now Platform®
The Now Platform® delivers a System of Action for the enterprise. Using a single data model, it’s easy to create contextual workflows and automate any business process.
Anyone, from the business user to professional developer, can easily build applications at lightning speed. Any application user on the Now Platform® can make requests through the service catalogues, find information in common knowledge bases, and be notified about the actions and information they care about the most. Departments, work groups, and even devices can assign, prioritize, collaborate, get down to root cause issues, and intelligently orchestrate actions. Now, makes your business move faster.
ServiceNow key products
IT Service Management: With the IT Service Management (ITSM) solution you are able to manage and deliver services to your users through a modern, single cloud-based platform. The ITSM suite offers features used by your IT Service Desk to manage the ITIL processes such as Incident Management, Change and Release Management, Problem Management, Service Level Management, Service Catalog, Knowledge Management, and Configuration and Asset Management along with features like reporting and administration, which are extended across other features as well.
Applications: Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management, Asset Management, Cost Management, CSI Management, Walk Up Management
Customer Service Management: Customer Service Management (CSM) is the pendant to the ITSM application. While ITSM is used for internal purposes, CSM is used for external use. CSM is used to resolve complex issues end-to-end. Problems can be fixed proactively and drive action to solve common requests more quickly and efficiently.
Applications: Customer Service Management, Communities, Field Service Management
Intelligent Applications: Intelligent applications are self developed applications, custom apps. This is now included in the Now Platform®. This solution includes Service Portal Designer, Studio (the developer interface), Delegated Development and Automated Testing.
Applications: Service Portal Designer, Studio, Delegated Development, Automated Testing
HR Service Delivery: HR Service Delivery is one of the key trends of ’20. With HR Service Delivery, ServiceNow wants to improve the employee satisfaction and make work more efficiently. Most of the HR employees are burdened by manual processes. Onboarding and Transition is a important topic as well. In this application all departments of the onboarding process are involved to improve the overall experience.
Applications: Case & Knowledge Management, Onboarding & Transition, Employee Service Center, Employee Document
Security Operations: ServiceNow Security Operation brings incident data from your security tools into a structured response engine that uses intelligent workflows, automation, and a deep connection with IT to prioritize and resolve threats based on the impact they pose to your organization. So it provides your company a solution for security incident response, work through quickly and process all incoming signals onto a heatmap. You can also ask a anonymous community (trusted security circles) of several companies to solve your security issue. You are also able to discover all your systems to get data for current patches, event management and libraries to check whether a new patch is available or not.
Governance, Risk & Compliance: With this suite, automation of policies and live cycles of several services is possible. You can respond to business risks in real time, connect security and IT with an integrated risk program offering continuous monitoring, prioritization, and automation. Vendor management is possible as well to manage live cycles of the vendors and weight up how reliable a vendor is.
Software Asset Management: ServiceNow started in this area three years ago and it’s the only solution which really saves costs. With Software Distribution, License Change Projections and Software Asset Management, every installed and licensed software can be identified on every client or server. With this information, companies are able to identify how many licenses are used, used to much or not exhausted at all. Unused licenses can be returned to the vendor to save those costs.
IT Business Management: ITBM is the most flexible/agile solution of ServiceNow. This suite will soon be renamed to Enterprise Portfolio Management. EPM is a more suitable term since it better describes the functions. Project Management isn’t only relevant for IT but for the entire company, for this, ITBM or soon EPM is used. All important parts of the classic project management is included and is strongly oriented towards agile project management.
IT Operations Management: The ITOM suite is the heart of ServiceNow, right after the Now Platform. With this suite, you are able to discover every system in your network environment and map services. Now you are able to understand processes, the correlation between assets and the whole infrastructure. This is the base for event management. So if for example outlook doesn’t work anymore on a device, you can identify all systems involved to detect the error and resolve it. Also with Cloud Management you can for example provision Microsoft Azure resources or identify cost factors.
Now Platform: The Now platform is the real heart of ServiceNow. ServiceNow is based on a CMDB. The CMDB is filled by discovery. With this CMDB you have a single source of truth where all CI’s are managed. But the Now Platform offers out-of-the-box several features as well. Some of them are Virtual Agent, Notifications, Push-notifications, mobile Apps, Visual task boards, Flow Designer, Workflows and much more.
Applications: Service Portal, Virtual Agent, Knowledge Management, Notify, Push, Mobile, Guided Tours, Supervised Machine Learning, Anomaly Detection, Actionable Analytics, Time Series Database, Peer Benchmarking, Connect, Visual Task Board, Service Catalog, CMDB, Orchestration, Integration Hub, Flow Designer, Workflow
Capabilities
Authentication: Single sign-on (SSO) feature is the essence of any tool and ServiceNow is no different. This tool has multiple provider SSO features. An organization can use several SSO IDPs (Identity Providers) to manage authentication. SSO enables a user to login into the application without providing any UserID or password. Hence it uses the Windows ID and password.
LDAP: Companies can use Active Directory for various purposes. Be it providing access to applications or maintaining Outlook Distribution list; there are many. The LDAP integration is a piece of cake for ServiceNow tool, and the part is that you do not have to code anything. Everything is a simple configuration.
Orchestration: ServiceNow provides the capability of orchestrating or automating simple or complex tasks on remote servers. One Orchestration is implemented in an IT company, the entire work requires less skill and labor. It can automate systems which are listed in the Integrations section.
Web Services: The Platform provides the capability of publishing or consuming API at the same time. SOAP, WSDL or REST API are protocols supported. You can either create codeless API or scripted ones.
Enterprise Portal: One of the most important requirements for any organization is to have a web portal where users can request for access, service or support. ServicePortal has the capability of giving wings to different organizations. Today Enterprises are developing their ServicePortal to showcase their ServiceNow capabilities. ServicePortal also replaces CMS site which was the old version of portal but it does not have a capability like a Service Portal.
Mobile Ready: Today most of the people would want an enterprise application/service/solution to be mobile enabled. They need the ability to make changes on the go. ServiceNow makes it possible. ServiceNow forms and applications are mobile friendly and can be published directly to the mobile without specific development done for mobile. ServiceNow provides the web-based application for the mobile and a mobile native app for iOS and Android.
Integrations
Integrations are licensed by different packets.
API
REST
SOAP
SSH
PowerShell
JDBC
XML
JSON
Microsoft Teams
Workplace by Facebook
Azure DevOps
Docker
Jira
Kubernetes
Twitter
Google Cloud translator
Microsoft AD
Microsoft Azure AD
Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Microsoft Exchange
Adobe Experience Platform
Microsoft SCCM
Salesforce
…
Q2’20 SAP:
Ariba
Business Suite
Fieldglass
S4/Hana
Concur
…
Hosting
The customer instances are hosted in ServiceNow’s own datacenters which are shown in the image below. Two datacenters are combined to a datacenter pair for reliability. For a small number of customers with special requirements, an onsite implementation is possible.
The German datacenters are located in Dusseldorf and Frankfurt Main.
Fix IT - today. 