Provision your PDI or company/customer instances quicker, smarter (01): Setting-up your personal user account

[Mark Roethof]

Hi there,

So you are about to reset your PDI? Or requesting a new PDI? Logging in for the first time on your fresh instance, and… darn, I have to set up all kinds of settings, personal preferences, utilities, etc. all over again! Can we somehow get those settings, personal preferences, utilities back on the fresh PDI? How can we start quicker with a slightly personal provisioned PDI?

I'm writing a few short Community Blogs on this topic. To share with you, how I tend to provision my PDI quicker, smarter.

Some of these ideas could also apply for company/customer instances. For example, if you are working as a consultant you will be faced with several companies, new instances every year. Yes, also on these instances you can get a head start!

The topics which I'm going to share in the upcoming days:
- Setting-up your personal user account
- Recommended System Properties and User Preferences
- Favorite Favorites
- Applying Plugins
- Applying Utilities

Setting-up your personal user account

It's a best practice to work under a personal user account. Not only on company/customer non-production instances, also on your PDI. How often questions on the ServiceNow Community are posted, about having lost the admin role or turned on the Web service access only? This would not be an issue if you were working under a personal user account, instead of the System Administrator.

When working on a company/customer non-production instances, an administrator would probably set up your user record. Though your PDI, you have to set up this yourself. Sure, only a few minutes work. Though can we save this few minutes work, and this few minutes work quickly becomes more than few minutes. I tend to reset my PDI ever 3 months for example, so every 3 months, I have to do this over again. And how can we assure your user record is always exactly the same?

Template user record

What I did, is set up a template user record created through background script, manually set the password and added the user record to an Update Set. Obviously you could also use an XML for this, or a Fix Script. That's up to you. Nothing more actually! Fun fact: you could add a custom sys_created_on date/time. I added my birthday to the sys_created_on, 1983-05-01 14:30:00 🙂

I've created the user record with the below script.

var grUser = new GlideRecord('sys_user');
grUser.initialize();
grUser.setValue('user_name', 'mark.roethof');
grUser.setValue('first_name', 'Mark');
grUser.setValue('last_name', 'Roethof');
grUser.setValue('preferred_language', 'en');
grUser.setValue('time_zone', 'Europe/Amsterdam');
grUser.setValue('date_format', 'dd-MM-yyyy');
grUser.setValue('sys_created_on', '1983-05-01 12:30:00');
grUser.setNewGuidValue('mark.roethof');
grUser.autoSysFields();
grUser.insert();

Recommended System Properties and User Preferences

Oke, this is not shocking yet and would only save one or two minutes every time you would reset your PDI. The next step which would create more time saving (and consistency) would be to add recommended System Properties and User Preferences to the Update Set / XML / Fix Script.

Keep an eye out for the next blog where I'll write about the System Properties and User Preferences affected!

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If any questions or remarks, let me know!

👍

If this post helped you in any way, I would appreciate it if you hit bookmark or mark it as helpful. Interested in more articles, blogs, videos, and Share projects on "Provision your PDI or company/customer instances quicker, smarter" I published? - Setting-up your personal user account - Recommended System Properties and User Preferences - Favorite Favorites - Applying Plugins - Applying Utilities

Kind regards,
Mark
2020 ServiceNow Community MVP
2020 ServiceNow Developer MVP

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