Learning ServiceNow

Learning ServiceNow

by Tim Woodruff
Released March 2017
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781785883323

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Book description

IT Service management at your fingertips

About This Book

  • Leverage ServiceNow’s capabilities to achieve improved service management and excellent results in your IT operations by following step-by-step, practical instructions

  • Build core administration, management, and maintenance skills with IT service management and IT operations management

  • Improve your workflow efficiency by designing and creating responsive and automated workflows

    • Who This Book Is For

    This book is for IT professionals and administrators who are planning to or are already trying to implement ServiceNow in their organization for Enterprise IT service management tasks.

    Some familiarity with web technologies (JavaScript) would be helpful. System administration experience is necessary.

    What You Will Learn

  • Acquire and configure your own free personal developer instance of ServiceNow

  • Read (and write!) clear, effective requirements for ServiceNow development

  • Avoid common pitfalls and missteps that could seriously impact future progress and upgradeability

  • Know how to troubleshoot when things go wrong using debugging tools

  • Discover developer “tips and tricks”

  • Pick up great tips from top ServiceNow development and administration professionals, and find out what they wish they knew when they were starting out

    • In Detail

    This book shows you how to put important ServiceNow features to work in the real world. We will introduce key concepts and examples on managing and automating IT services, and help you build a solid foundation towards this new approach. We’ll demonstrate how to effectively implement various system configurations within ServiceNow. We’ll show you how to configure and administer your instance, and then move on to building strong user interfaces and creating powerful workflows.

    We also cover other key elements of ServiceNow, such as alerts and notifications, security, reporting, and custom development. You will learn how to improve your business’ workflow, processes, and operational efficiency. By the end of this book, you will be able to successfully configure and manage ServiceNow within your organization.

    Style and approach

    This book is a step-by-step practical tutorial to help you quickly deploy and configure ServiceNow in your organization.

    Table of contents

    1. The Interface
      1. Frames
        1. Banner frame
          1. System Settings
          2. Help
          3. Connect chat conversations
          4. Global Text Search
          5. Profile
        2. The Application Navigator
      2. Filter text box
      3. Favorites
        1. History
      4. Important application menus and modules
      5. Content frame
      6. UI settings and personalization
      7. Summary
    2. Lists and Forms
      1. List v2 versus List v3
      2. Lists and Tables
        1. Creating a custom table
          1. Creating an update set
          2. Creating the table
          3. Adding a field
        2. List view
        3. Condition builder
          1. Building a filter
          2. Dot-walking
      3. Forms
        1. Form designer
        2. Form layout
        3. Related lists
      4. Summary
    3. UI Customization
      1. UI15 versus UI16
        1. Switching between UI15 and UI16
      2. Branding your instance
      3. Custom themes
      4. UI-Impacting system properties
      5. Configuring service portal UI
      6. Creating a custom homepage
      7. Styling pages and widgets
      8. Styling the CMS
      9. Summary
    4. Understanding Data and Relationships
      1. One-to-many relationships in ServiceNow
      2. Many-to-many relationships in ServiceNow
        1. Creating a M2M table
        2. Other M2M relationships
      3. Enforcing one-to-one relationships
      4. Defining custom relationships
      5. Database table inheritance
      6. Summary
    5. Tasks and Workflows
      1. Important task fields
        1. Active
        2. Additional comments and work notes
          1. Assigned to and Assignment group
          2. Created, Created by, Updated, and Updated by
          3. Description and Short description
          4. Number
          5. State
      2. Journals and the Activity formatter
      3. Extending the task table
      4. Workflows
        1. Important workflow activities
          1. User and Group Approval
          2. Approval Coordinator
          3. If
          4. Switch
          5. Wait for Condition
          6. Create Task and Catalog Task
          7. Branch and Join
          8. Return value
          9. Run Script
          10. Set Values
        2. Workflow Stages
          1. Demo
      5. Approvals
      6. Assignment
      7. Creating Task fields
      8. Summary
    6. UI and Data Policies
      1. UI Policies
        1. Catalog UI Policies
      2. Reverse if False
      3. Scripting in UI Policies
      4. UI Policy Order
        1. Demo
      5. Data Policies
        1. Demo
      6. Converting between Data and UI Policies
        1. Demo
      7. Data Policies versus ACLs
      8. Summary
    7. User Administration and Security
      1. Groups and Roles
        1. Impersonating users for testing
      2. Emails and notifications
        1. Demo
        2. Notification Devices
      3. User preferences
        1. Default preferences
        2. Preferences in update sets
        3. Scripting user preferences
      4. ACLs - security rules
        1. ACL process order
        2. High security plugin
      5. Summary
    8. Introduction to Scripting
      1. To script, or not to script?
      2. Client side versus server side APIs
        1. Client side APIs
        2. Server side APIs
      3. Where scripting is supported
        1. Access controls-executes on: server
        2. Business rules-executes on: server
        3. Client scripts and catalog client scripts-executes on: client
        4. Condition builder (and the URL)-executes on: server
        5. Default value-executes on: server
        6. Script Includes-executes on: server
        7. UI actions-executes on: client and/or server
        8. UI policies and catalog UI policies-executes on: client
        9. UI scripts-runs on: client
        10. Workflow activities-executes on: server
      4. Integrated development environment
        1. Script tree
        2. Script auto-completion
        3. Script editor macros
          1. Documentation macro
          2. For-loop macro
          3. GlideRecord macros
          4. Demo
      5. Summary
    9. The Server-side Glide API
      1. The structure of an API class
      2. Server-side APIs
      3. GlideRecord
        1. Initialize
          1. Example usage
        2. addQuery()
          1. Available query operators
          2. Example usage
        3. addNullQuery() and addNotNullQuery()
          1. Example Usage
        4. canRead(), canWrite(), canCreate(), and canDelete()
          1. Example usage
        5. deleteRecord() and deleteMultiple()
          1. Example usage
        6. get()
          1. Example usage
        7. getDisplayValue()
          1. Example usage
        8. getValue() and getUniqueValue()
          1. Example usage
        9. hasNext()
          1. Example usage
        10. initialize() and insert()
          1. Example usage
        11. next()
          1. Example usage
        12. orderBy() and orderByDesc()
          1. Example usage
        13. query()
          1. Example usage
        14. setAbortAction()
          1. Example usage
        15. setLimit()
          1. Example usage
        16. setValue()
          1. Example usage
        17. setWorkflow()
          1. Example usage
        18. update() and updateMultiple()
          1. Example usage
      4. GlideElement
        1. changes(), changesFrom() and changesTo()
          1. Example usage
        2. getDisplayValue()
          1. Example usage
        3. getED()
          1. Example usage
        4. getReferenceTable() and getRefRecord()
          1. Example usage
        5. nil()
          1. Example usage
        6. toString()
          1. Example usage
      5. GlideDateTime
        1. Adding or removing time
          1. Example usage
        2. getDayOfMonth() and getDayOfWeek()
          1. Example usage
      6. GlideSession
        1. getClientData() and putClientData()
          1. Example usage
        2. getTimeZoneName()
          1. Example Usage
      7. GlideSystem
        1. addErrorMessage() and addInfoMessage()
          1. Example usage
        2. debug()
          1. Example usage
        3. eventQueue()
          1. Example usage
        4. getProperty()
          1. Example usage
        5. getUser()
          1. Example usage
        6. getUserID()
          1. Example usage
        7. hasRole()
          1. Example usage
      8. GlideUser
        1. getPreference() and savePreference()
          1. Example usage
        2. hasRole()
          1. Example usage
        3. isMemberOf()
          1. Example usage
      9. Client-side APIs
      10. GlideAjax
      11. GlideForm (g_form)
        1. Setting/Clearing messages on the form and fields
      12. Summary
    10. The Client-side Glide API
      1. Client-side APIs
      2. GlideAjax
      3. GlideForm (g_form)
        1. Setting/clearing messages on the form and fields
        2. Dealing with drop-down list fields
        3. Getting and setting values on the form
        4. Controlling field visibility
        5. Setting fields mandatory and read-only
        6. Submitting a client-side form
      4. GlideUser (g_user)
        1. Getting user details
        2. Checking user permissions
        3. Getting client data
      5. GlideRecord
        1. Querying for one or more records
        2. Deleting a record asynchronously
      6. Summary
    11. Server-side Scripting
      1. Dot-walking and GlideElement
      2. Script Includes
        1. Server-side GlideAjax
      3. Business rules
        1. After business rules
        2. Asynchronous business rules
        3. Display business rules and g_scratchpad
      4. Summary
    12. Client-side Scripting
      1. Client Scripts
        1. Client Script types
          1. onLoad
          2. onChange
          3. onSubmit
          4. onCellEdit
      2. Security
      3. Compatibility
      4. Build for performance
        1. Reference fields
        2. GlideAjax and asynchronous GlideRecord
        3. g_scratchpad
      5. UI scripts
        1. Running only necessary scripts
      6. Scripts files from the server
      7. Summary
    13. Debugging
      1. Logging
      2. Client-side debugging
        1. Debugging field visibility
      3. Server-side debugging
        1. Reference versus Value
        2. Debugging security
      4. JavaScript debugger (Istanbul)
        1. Debugger interface
        2. Breakpoints
      5. General Debugging
      6. Summary
    14. Pro Tips
      1. Admin Pro Tips
        1. List personalization
        2. Update Set selector
        3. Reference Field background color
        4. List v3 Rendering
        5. List, Form, and New Window shortcuts
        6. Adding the ServiceNow Frame by URL
        7. Impersonation simplification
        8. Derived Field Risks
        9. Finding derived fields and other field data
        10. Dictionary overrides
      2. Scripting Pro Tips
        1. Avoiding Nested Loops
        2. Limit Logging
      3. What the pros wish they knew
        1. Field case
        2. Generating Encoded Query Strings
        3. How to modify OOB scripts
        4. Other technical best practices
      4. Summary

    Product information

    • Title: Learning ServiceNow
    • Author(s): Tim Woodruff
    • Release date: March 2017
    • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
    • ISBN: 9781785883323