I recently did an internal Lunch-and-Learn for my fellow Professional Services group during which we talked about templates and record producers.
You may scratch your head and wonder what the two have in common, but they are actually more similar than you might think.
First of all, both record producers and templates exist to make your life easier. As an ITIL process user, you have the ability to create templates that pre-fill multiple fields for you. What you may not realize is that record producers have a similar function. Just as you can create templates that pre-fill multiple fields, with record producers you can use explanatory text to aid your end users in filling out more information than they are actually asked to provide.
Take the “Password Reset” record producer as an example. When an end user clicks on the link and fills out the three questions, the incident that gets saved actually has eight fields filled out. The additional fields are populated because the record producer uses explanatory text to reference a template. This works because, when the user fills out the application to reset a password, the remaining fields that the user doesn’t see – such as the Category, Subcategory, Configuration Item, Assignment, Urgency, Short Description and Description – all get filled out based on the assigned template.
Now this brings me to my little-known and underused ServiceNow feature.
Turning the “password reset” example on its head a bit, one of my customers had a requirement to change the password to a number of external systems on a regular basis, which would require initiating a Change Request and scheduling the update on that system.
To meet this requirement, we created a few Change Request templates and scheduled them on the recurrence pattern desired.
Here’s how this works: under the System Definition > Scheduled Jobs module, when you create a new entry, you’re presented with the following list of activities to automate.
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Choose “Automatically generate something from a template,” and you will be directed to a scheduling screen where you can reference a template you’ve already created.
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Simply set the interval, choose the template and wait for the appointed time!
Note: Scheduled Jobs are not captured in update sets, so, if you want to leverage this functionality, you’ll have to set up the scheduled job directly in your production environment.
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