Updated Employee Center plugin: Old Employee Service Center portal is still shown

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Hi there,

Keen on upgrading Employee Service Center to Employee Center, and starting with the modern, unified employee portal. Though after upgrading Employee Center to the latest store version [22.0.11 R], you are not seeing any changes when accessing the Employee Center portal? Here's some help, which I experienced for one customer and saw multiple Community posts asking for.

Expected behavior

Employee Service Center [old]

The "old" Employee Service Center portal (/esc), before upgrading to the latest store version of Employee Center:

Employee Center [new]

The expected "new" Employee Center portal (/esc), after upgrading to the latest store version of Employee Center:

Incorrect behavior

I've come across two scenario's where after upgrading to the latest store version of Employee Center:
1. An unexpected look and feel was visible for the Employee Center portal;
2. The new Employee Center portal was not visible and still the old Employee Service Center portal was visible.

For the first one, an incorrect look and feel would be visible like:

Portal record

Scenario 1

For the first scenario described, looking at the Employee Center portal record, some fields look to be empty ("Homepage", "Main menu", "Theme"), though actually do contain a value. You can notice this due to the I icon next to the fields. In this case, somehow those fields got updated with a reference to not existing records. For this scenario, re-installing the Employee Center plugin [sn_ex_sp], fixed the issue.

Scenario 2

For the second scenario described, looking at the Employee Center portal record, all fields look the same as before upgrading. This behavior can occur, if in your instance the portal record has been touched before (= customized). If this is the case, the portal record won't be automatically updated. For this scenario, you would need to update the fields yourself.

Looking at the above image, update fields "Homepage", "Main menu", and "Theme" according to the below image.

Result

After re-installing the Employee Center plugin or manually updating the Employee Center portal record, your new updated Employee Center portal should be visible.

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And that's it. Sharing two scenario's where the Employee Center upgrade did not result as expected. Hope this helps. If you come across more scenarios, let me know!

Kind regards,

Mark Roethof

ServiceNow Technical Platform Architect @ Quint Technology

2x ServiceNow Developer MVP

2x ServiceNow Community MVP

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