Complete overview of Servicenow service portal

Service Portal is one of the most appreciated and amazing parts of the ServiceNow platform. It was added to the platform about 3 years ago, adopted extremely quickly and introduced some concepts of modern web development to the platform.

Service Portal is the first thing to pop into your mind when you think about a custom front-end or a catalog for end-users. And it does it pretty well — you can start building web pages quickly and get valuable results in a matter of hours or even minutes.

I’ve been working on multiple Service Portal projects for the last 3 years and I want to share some good and bad parts of it. I’ll start with the good parts, which should give you an idea about the cases when Service Portal works best.

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1. End-user Portal and Service Catalog

When you need to provide users with a self-service portal and a Service Catalog, and you are OK with out-of-the-box portal styling and functionality, then I would say commit to OOB portal with as fewer modifications as possible.

ServiceNow has heavily invested in OOB version of the portal and it does an incredible job.

I strongly recommend working on OOB version at least for some time to fully understand what exactly does not fit well, needs to be changed, replaced etc.

2. Documentation

This is often an overseen gem of the Service Portal — you can build static websites and pages in a matter of minutes and then host them as Service Portal pages inside of ServiceNow.

It provides great user experience and full capacity of HTML/CSS styles for your documentation and static content.

3. Dashboards and interactive pages

In the same way that you can use Service Portal pages for documentation, you can build dashboards and interactive pages, which include custom controls, logic etc.

Some knowledge of Service Portal API may be required, but in general, if a dashboard is not complex, this can be done fairly easily using the standard HTML/CSS/JS means.

4. Custom web applications

This may be the most exciting and the most challenging part. Service Portal is a featured AnguarJS environment. When building an app you’re working with AngualrJS concepts and Service Portal proprietary API. This allows you to build simple web applications quickly, with less code and with a fairly low amount of efforts.

It is actually a reason why Service Portal adoption skyrocketed — getting a simple web app for a very short amount of time is a great value.

And here comes the challenging part — at some point in your development, when you go beyond a simple web app, you may face a situation when every next step (or just a small piece of a new functionality) requires a significant amount of time and efforts. And it’s not just about implementation efforts, but also about further maintenance and support.

The more advanced you want your web application to be, the harder Service Portal may push back.

There is a number of reasons for that, and I’ll discuss some of them in the next article.

A Service Portal page is a group of one or more widgets. Each widget performs a particular function which may include listing active maintenance requests or details about a single task, provides a way to add or remove attachments, or display one’s location on a map and so on. Service Portal is available in ServiceNow from the Helsinki version. While using the Content Management System (CMS), one can use Service Portal. As a web- based platform, Service Portal allows connecting with one another. Information from different sources is combined into a single user interface. Countless companies from various industries are paying for a Portal platform. It is quite easy to implement. Most of the organizations use OOTB (Out of the Box) functionalities however for different requirements, one can customise the Service Portal too. Service Portal binds a much more user-friendly cover over the logic & data already in the instance, making what one already have, much more striking and convenient.

1. Make it visual, but keep it simple

Make things as frictionless for the user as possible. One of the best ways is to avoid anything which is not necessary. Block frames and wireframes make design changes well organized.

Advantages of Block frames and Wireframes:

It lowers the beam of design, so everyone can participate.

It is not based on anything in particular, so one can concentrate on the movement and ranking.

It inspires co-operation and easy duplication.

Block frame:

A block frame is an easier representation of a Portal which consists of a big, coloured slab (it represents content areas).

Fast & simple way to achieve goals without getting involved in the details.

It can be provided as an addition to the requirements gathered at the initial stage as a visual extension.

Wireframe:

A wireframe is a low constancy visual representation of a portal’s layout. Sometimes, it is referred to a skeleton or a blueprint.

Represents the basic page layout.

Shows more detail than a block frame.

It is easy to modify & change.

2. Focus on UI & UX

One has to mainly focus on providing the best User Interface (UI) & User Experience (UX) of the Portal.

The graphical layout of an application is nothing but the User Interface. It consists of the buttons, the text, the images, sliders, text entry fields, and all the rest of the items the user can interact with. This include screen layouts, transitions, interface animations and every single small interaction.

3. Use best practices from web

Prevent common widget classes in global CSS styles.

Use global styles to a minimum.

Specify vital CSS classes for widgets.

Prevent hardcoding colours in widgets.

Don’t use ID’s. ID’s are valueless because an ID should appear only once in the HTML document.

Refer some websites related to service Portal for best practises.