During the summer of 2013 we launched a new blog series to shine light on little-known and/or underutilized features of ServiceNow. Since then, our ServiceNow Tech Tuesdays series has covered everything from creating custom-defined relationships and referencing templates to using list field styles and flagging.
Here are the top 5 most popular posts in the series for 2013:
#1: System Trends
Trend data is critical to managers because it helps them understand the business so they can adjust staffing, skills, processes and other important operational areas as necessary. Given the importance of trend data, making this information visible and usable is beneficial for any business and its decision makers. As it turns out, ServiceNow does a really great job of collecting trend data, though this data is not visible in the base (out of the box) instance of the ServiceNow UI. That being said, this is one of the many areas of the platform that’s easy to understand and customize for your reporting needs.
In this ServiceNow Tech Tuesdays post from December, Global Training Program Manager Jon Nash details how to expose, use and report on system trends in ServiceNow.
#2: 5 Importing #protips
Importing data into ServiceNow is an activity that administrators do often. While many administrators are familiar with the basics of importing data, there are actually a number of capabilities that even the most experienced ServiceNow admins haven’t used yet or don’t know are possible.
In this ServiceNow Tech Tuesdays post from November, I detail five of the top importing #protip techniques, including discovering the “Referenced value field name” option, using source script and ZIP-ing large files for faster transfers.
#3: Tracking and Analyzing Data with Custom Charts
Reports are essential because they help businesses track and analyze data in order to identify issues and improvements that will ultimately improve their bottom line. Report requirements will usually include traditional lists and trends, but can also include more complex charts showing multiple trends together or pulling in data from various sources. These complex requirements are sometimes beyond the capabilities of the standard report engine, but ServiceNow’s Custom Charts plugin is designed to handle these more complex reporting needs.
In this ServiceNow Tech Tuesdays post from July, Implementation Specialist Steve Wilson explains how to use the Custom Charts plugin to build reports that display multiple charts in a single view, pull in data from external sources and merge and display data from separate tables.
#4: Javascript Objects and Dot-Walking
Accessing properties in a Javascript object can often be difficult because you have to remember their exact numerical values. However, ServiceNow’s Dot-Walking capabilities make it simple to introduce a more user-friendly way to access these properties by naming them rather than numbering them.
In this ServiceNow Tech Tuesdays post from September, I explain how to use Dot-Walking to simplify the process of accessing and sorting Javascript objects.
#5: Creating Custom-Defined Relationships
Many administrators find the need to add a “Related List” for items that do not have a direct relationship in ServiceNow. For example, admins may want to show all fields that exist on a given form across all form sections, show a combined list of Incidents and Problems on a Change Request or add a list of notifications from an Event Registry entry. One way to complete these tasks is to create custom-defined relationships.
In this ServiceNow Tech Tuesdays post from June, I detail how to complete tasks like these and create Related Lists using the custom-defined relationships feature of ServiceNow.
I hope you’ve found our ServiceNow Tech Tuesdays blog series helpful so far! Please feel free to leave a comment below with suggestions for future posts in this series.
The post ServiceNow Tech Tuesdays: Top 5 Posts of 2013 appeared first on Cloud Sherpas.