Support for ServiceNow New York

[a_cutler2]

Does App Broker 2019R1 support ServiceNow New York? If not is there a timeline that can be reported to customers when that can be expected to happen? I can see in App Broker documentation that Kingston, London and Madrid are supported, but can't find anything yet regarding New York.

[CharlesW]

Adam,
     App Portal does not support New York yet, and I know that there are a couple of issues. I know that the engineering team is currently working on support for New York, and also validating against the next ServiceNow release (Orlando I believe). While I don't have an official ETA, I certainly believe support (i.e. a new update set) will be made available in Q1 of this year.

Regards,
Charles

[a_cutler2]

Thanks Charles,

Would it be possible to get some details on what issues engineering is running into? A customer wants/needs to start testing with New York ASAP and they want to know if at least testing at this point is possible, even if it doesn't work 100% yet.

[CharlesW]

Preliminary investigations indicate that the Service Now Update set App Portal provides needs to be modified to avoid a "no sensors defined" error which may occur with outbound calls through the Mid Server. This is detailed at the following location:

https://hi.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0727028

Basically, it looks like we may need to add the following to some/all functions defined in the update set:

sm.setEccParameter("skip_sensor","true");

In the issue requesting support for New York, engineering also mentions that the system table "content_page" can not be found in New York, where it existed in Madrid. If this is true, then I honestly do not know how this would impact the integration between ServiceNow and App Portal. I'd say that you should be able to tweak the update set to include setEccParameter(). Perhaps that would allow you to do some testing.

[jdempsey]

Actually, the "no sensors defined" message is something we've seen long before New York and never really had an answer/fix for, so perhaps the suggestion from Charlie will now help with that.  Again, that isn't New York-specific, as we've had reports of this all the way back to Helsinki if I'm not mistaken.  It hasn't been something we've been able to reliably reproduce in our own environments but has been reported by a few customers.

I've also heard that there are some New York-specific issues related to the Employee App Provisioning (task sequence) use case in ServiceNow, but I'm not really aware of any customers that have been using that.  If anyone is currently using this functionality (regardless of ServiceNow version), please let us know.

[jdempsey · Accepted solution]

I received an update from Engineering today indicating that the existing update set will continue to work with the New York release of ServiceNow with the following caveats:

1. Environments where our update set was applied before being upgraded to New York will continue to function correctly without any additional action required.
2. Environments that are already on the New York release when our update set is applied will have issues with the Employee App Provisioning (task sequence) capability due to ServiceNow disabling a module that we have a dependency on.  The normal Self-Service Software Request functionality is unaffected by this change.  Customers that need the Employee App Provisioning functionality will have to work with ServiceNow to have that module manually enabled for them.  Engineering is working with our technical writers to update our documentation with the details.