How to customise the ServiceNow Service Portal

ServiceNow includes a business-facing portal using Angular JS and Bootstrap, technologies developed by Google and Twitter.

Each Service Portal page is made up of discrete components (called widgets) that are interchangeable and reusable. For example, in the screenshot below, one widget is re-used three times to provide access to knowledge, catalogue, and problems just by changing a few parameters.

ServiceNow ships with over a hundred and fifty of these pre-built widgets covering all aspects of portal design, allowing customers to tailor their Service Portal to suit their specific needs.

Expanding on existing widgets

Sometimes a customer will love the look and feel a pre-built widget but have a different idea on how it could be used.

Take the example of the Current Status widget:

This is the out-of-the-box widget for the current status of services, and it provides a good visual indication of outages, planned maintenance and service degradation, but some customers need a little more detail.

JDS cloned the original widget, leaving it intact, and simply revised the copy to include more detail. The revised widget groups outages and maintenance by business service, allowing complex information to be read easily. It also includes the ability to list multiple affected locations, and notes the duration of the event.

New widgets

Sometimes customers have ideas which require the development of new widgets. In this example, a customer wanted to use Service Portal to access their internal phonebook.

When creating new widgets, JDS still looks to leverage the existing widgets published by ServiceNow in the out-of-the-box instance to shorten the development cycle.

Instead of using old-style, outdated portal designs with complex/advanced search options, JDS re-used an existing “type ahead” widget to provide the same flexibility without any significant development complexity.

The main improvement on the out-of-the-box widget was to implement a search across multiple fields as the user types, streamlining the way users can find contact information.

Entire applications

In addition to expanding on existing widgets and creating new widgets, JDS can develop custom single-page applications (SPAs) on top of the Service Portal. These may integrate with modules in the base platform and can be designed using completely new widgets or as a mix of existing and new components.

Ordinarily, the creation of a custom application requires considerable architectural design to ensure the proposed solution is secure and scalable. But by providing a robust secure platform, ServiceNow allows organisations to build upon the already proven Service Portal to develop their own applications without investing heavily in cloud infrastructure.

In this example, a government agency needed to manage the recording of courtrooms, as well as the annotation of court transcripts in a single-page application that could be operated on a touch-screen device. JDS worked with the agency to develop a design that leveraged existing ServiceNow widgets where possible, and connected these to the core ServiceNow functionality to provide a flexible solution.