Service-Now Navigation Instructions

Service-Now Navigation Instructions

Logging In To Service-Now

Overview of the Service-Now Screen

Introduction to Lists and Forms

Form buttons and right-click menus

All About Lists

The Features of the New UI

Logging In To Service-Now

Click the link below or copy and paste the link in your browser to access our Service-Now instance; if you need to type the address manually, please note the "https" at the start.

Log in using your network (Windows, email, Portal) user ID and Password.

Overview of the Service-Now Screen

Once you have logged in, you will see a screen similar to the one shown below. The Service-Now page is broken up into three sections:

• Banner (top section)
• Navigator (left section), and
• Content Pane (most of the screen)

Upon login to Service-Now, the Content Pane will show your homepage. This page is based on your user role within Service-Now; most IS employees will be setup with the ITIL User Role eventually; if you have that Role, your homepage should look similar to the one above. The homepage contains different sections which reflect items such as “My Groups Work”, “My Work”, “Priority 1 Incidents”, etc. (For the future: you can customize your homepage by clicking the Add Content link in the upper left corner of the Content Pane). The Content Pane is used as the main working screen and will show Incidents, Problems, Changes, Projects, etc. in a detailed view.

The Navigator organizes the applications and modules that you have access to. The navigator can be turned on or off by clicking the toggle button as shown below.

By using the “Type filter text” area located at the top of the Navigator, you can quickly locate specific applications and modules. In the example below, I have typed “Incident” in the “Type filter text” area. All modules in the "Incident" application and also all "Incident" modules in other applications now show in the Navigator. (Tip: a few letters of the word may be all you need to type).

Applications are the items in the navigator that contain bold text and are inside a grey box. The items below the Application headers are known as modules. Applications are not expanded by default, but can be expanded by clicking on the application name. This can be seen in the screen shot below.

The Banner is the top section of the Service-Now page:

At the right-hand side of the banner section are some useful controls:

• The Search box lets you to find Incidents and KB articles, by Number or by Summary.
• The Collapse Banner button minimizes the space taken by the banner.
• If the UI Changer refers to the “old UI” instead of the “new UI”, use it to switch back to the old UI; the new UI has some bugs in this version of ServiceNow.

Introduction to Lists and Forms

The fundamental user interface elements within a Service-Now module are Lists and Forms. In the screen shot below, I have clicked All under Projects in the Navigator, and the complete List of projects is shown in the Content Pane.

If I click on the link in the left-most column (a project number) or on the tiny icon just to the left of that column, that project’s Form will open in the content pane, replacing the List:

Form buttons and right-click menus

Towards the right of the blue bar at the top of the form is a row of buttons which you can use to save updates to the form or change the form's state (similar to "Status" in GEMS; for example, the "Set Pending" and “Resolve Incident” buttons shown above).

There are also additional form actions available (as well as alternate access to the form button actions) by right-clicking any of the unused space in the blue bar which contains the buttons. Right-clicking in Service-Now is usually worth a try; the right-click menus in Service-Now often contain some useful actions which may not be available to you in the form of a button or link.

Finally, there are two very useful little mini-icons at the far right of that bar: a paperclip which you use to upload file attachments and a paper-like button on the far right which lets you switch the form to and from Tabbed mode. Many forms are quite long and would require a lot of scrolling if laid out vertically on screen; Tabbed mode makes the form much more manageable.

The buttons from the top of the form are also generally repeated near the bottom of the form, right above the "related lists" section which appears on some forms; however, the "bottom of the form buttons" do not include the Attachments paperclip or the Tabbed mode toggle.

Not all forms have this type of functionality. A quick way to tell the difference between a "real" form which has buttons and a right-click menu and the other type of form is to look at the far left side of the form's header bar: . If you see the green box with the "back" arrow, then it's a form of the type which has a header you can right-click to access functions.

All About Lists

When working with lists, there are many functions you can perform in order to personalize your selected list. In the screen shot below, I have selected the “All” under “Projects”. This has given me the list of all projects in Service-Now.

If you would like to add or remove columns from your list, simple click the brass-colored “gear” icon located on the first column’s header. This will open up another window that will allow you to add and remove columns from the list. (note: this per-user preference is persistent but not permanent; it may be deleted if we do an upgrade whichadds new fields to the default list layout for that type of form)

You can also sort columns by right-clicking any column header and choosing either of the sort options. You can also “Group By” each value in a chosen column if desired. In the example below, I have right-clicked the “State” column to show the various options.

You can readily filter your list by right-clicking in a cell and selecting either "Filter Out" or "Show Matching", to limit the rows shown to only ones which don’t contain or only ones which do contain that value. For example, below I have selected to filter out all items in the list that contain the “State” value of “Closed Complete”, by right-clicking on a "Closed Complete" cell to Filter Out.

This action has removed all items that are “Closed Complete” from the list. Now I would like to only show Items which have “On Hold” as the “State” value. In the screen shot below, I have right-clicked one of the “On Hold” values and selected “Show Matching”. This has narrowed my list down to only show projects with the “On Hold” state.

These list actions can be performed on any lists in Service-Now.

The Features of the New UI

All of the previous screen shots have shown Service-Now in the old UI layout. Notice the “Switch to new UI” link on the right side of the banner. This will change Service-Now to be in the New UI layout.

The new UI is similar to the older UI, but offers a task bar on the left side of the screen as shown below.

The buttons at the top of the new UI task bar will expand and collapse different sections of the Service-Now page (important note: if a button is dark, it’s been “pushed”; the screen you’re looking at is no longer the normal one). I will explain each of these buttons’ functionality below.

This button will expand or collapse the Navigator.

This button will expand or collapse the Banner.

The two buttons shown below create a second pane within the Content Pane. This second pane is used to show links from forms and lists. The first button creates this pane on the right side of the screen, and the second button creates this pane on the bottom of the page. This pane can be toggled on or off by clicking these buttons. Unless you have an incredibly large monitor, we recommend that you leave these 2 “pane” buttons “unpushed”.

An important feature of the new UI is the ability to drag modules to the bar on the left. This will create a Bookmark that will take you directly to that module when clicked. This is similar to a Favorites list in your web browser. In the screen shot below, I have dragged the “Create New” module under Incident to the bar on the left. This has created a new Bookmark on the bar.

I can see what this new Bookmark is linked to by holding my cursor over the button.

If you have multiple bookmarks on the bar and you want to quickly see what each references, then simply click the button with the star icon. This will list what each bookmark represents, as shown below.