Service Catalog UI builder : Implementation and Lessons learnt

[Kasthuri Nagapp]

Catalog Builder feature  in Quebec release solves the business problem of self create and manage services by business owners even if you don’t have programming knowledge or built catalog item before using user friendly interface.

Current challenges faced by customer:

• Time to deploy a service request and takes 4-10 weeks for creation or updating the requests and have to go through development cycle.
• Centralized catalog maintenance is bottleneck that results in slow down of digital transformation
• Managing the services and creation requires Service Now platform and development experience and thus must rely on admins for getting the changes done.

Catalog Builder addresses all these challenges and requests can be created using pre-defined templates.

How to build?

This do not require additional licensing and available with the platform. Please make sure Service Catalog Builder (sn_catalog_builder) plugin is enabled.

1. Identify the pre-defined question sets that can be included in the templates. General tip is to include standard variables like Employee details, Contact Information, Additional comments, etc. It is good to review the existing services build and then identify common questions that can be re used0
2. Catalog admin creates template for business group includes questions to be included, flow designer, category, location and access criteria can also be defined.

 

3. Catalog admins can create Standard catalog and Record producer templates using this feature.
4. Catalog admins can also define user criteria that can enable edit access to certain fields at the time of catalog item creation using templates.
5. Business owner gathers the requirements from the stake holders and make use of the pre-defined templates that has pre defined values and controls to create catalog items.Business owner can edit access information and user criteria for the same.

 

6. Catalog builder can be previewed before it is published both in UI and Now Mobile view before it is published and made available to the users.

 

Lessons learnt:

• If you have made changes to OOB scripts related to catalog, please validate the same as part of Quebec upgrade activity.
• Its technically possible to create catalog items directly in production but the best practices is to create templates in sub prod , test the same and then move the updates to production
• Catalog builder do not have scope selection but incase if you want to create item in specific scope, make sure you select in the Application before you open the catalog builder.
• Please be aware of limitations that comes with this feature such as adding help text, meta tags , advanced reference qualifiers that are not possible and if its business requirement, recommended to go through the development cycle

 Please refer to Product documentation and demo for detailed demonstration.