ServiceNow Receives its “Calgary” Upgrade This Weekend

On Saturday, January 11, at 5:00 a.m., ServiceNow will be upgraded to the Calgary release (CHG119698). Included with this release are official upgrades from ServiceNow, including bug fixes and enhancements to existing features and functionality. The upgrade is expected to take less than 30 minutes to implement and ServiceNow will be accessible to users during this time. However, users logged in during the upgrade will lose their initial connection and need to re-authenticate.

This release has been tested and approved by the IT Service Management Office in non-production environments. Most updates will be transparent to users, but you may notice the below changes or known errors. For screen shots and examples, please view the SMCC website.

Reports

• PDF Page Header Footer Templates – This feature has been added to allow Report users to apply pre-defined header and footer templates to exported PDFs. Requests for custom header and footer templates can be submitted to the ITSMO through ServiceNow.
• Users will now be able to export a PDF directly from the report form and control what additional information appears on the report.
• Users will now be able to choose whether or not to include report creation details when exporting a report. Report details include the following information: Report Title, Run Date/Time, Run By, Table Name, Query Condition and Sort Order.

Knowledge Module

• In EDIT mode, the Knowledge form fields have been rearranged. The functionality is still the same, but the “Status” section and the “System Information” section have been moved.
• Known Printing Error: When printing an article from Self-Service, you will receive an error that the article no longer exists. This is a known error and currently being reviewed by ServiceNow developers. Work Around: Until a resolution is implemented, please use a screen capture tool and print from there.

In addition to the Calgary upgrade, we would like to bring to your attention a performance issue with personal homepages. Homepages loaded with reports cause a significant load to ServiceNow, especially if the refresh rate is set to every 5 minutes. To help improve this issue, we request you do the following:

1. Turn off the auto-refresh of your homepage and press F5, or the refresh button, when you want a new page loaded.
2. Examine the report widgets you have on your homepage and ask yourself if you really need them.  If so, ensure they are configured to only pull back information you need today. If not, simply click the ‘X’ in the upper right-hand corner of the report widget and remove it. NOTE: For historical views, you can go to the Reports section, and run reports on an as-needed basis.

Thank you for your assistance.  For questions or additional information please send an email to itsmo [at] emory [dot] edu.