ServiceNow Administration Basics

0:00Hi, Sean here and welcome to this course where we're going to be covering a wide variety of different topics that will get you well on your way to becoming an effective ServiceNow admin. Now, before we jump in here and start learning all these topics, the first thing that I'd like to do is give you a better idea of what exactly it means to be a Service Now admin, right? On the surface, I mean, obviously it sounds like it's important because it's an admin, right? What exactly are you doing in your organization as a ServiceNow admin?

0:32Well, a metaphor that I like to use to explain this is picture for a moment that you're a building manager of a big old skyscraper. And let's say that there's a company that's working inside there, maybe several companies even. Well, in that building, there's going to be an awful lot of people going back and forth. And the fact is that you're not really going to know or care very much about the specifics of what those people are doing, right? So there might be a lot of people having a meeting in a room. And it's important that the room has the lights on.

1:05It's important that the air conditioning is working in the room. But it's not really your responsibility to know or care what's being discussed in that room. And the same thing is true throughout the whole building, right? You really, your job as the building manager in that case would be to keep all the systems of the building running and in many cases, doing things like updating the systems, modifying, you know, certain layouts in the building, things like that, so that everyone in that building can do what they need to do in order to, you know, move that organization forward.

1:38And that's very similar, right? If you can follow my metaphor here to what you're going to be doing as a service now admin, right? In other words, everyone at the organization that you're at is going to be using service now for specific tasks. And it's not always going to be a responsibility to care what those tasks are, but you're going to need to make sure that service now allows them to do those tasks as efficiently as possible. All right. So anyway, hopefully that metaphor helps you to understand a little bit more just how important your job is, but also how it's, it's kind of decoupled in a way from what everyone else in the organization is going to be doing.

2:19So with that said, the next thing that I want to talk about is what is service now exactly? Well, if you want to learn the basics of service now, I'm actually going to be assuming throughout this whole course that you've already done so. So I'd highly recommend that you take a look at my other course that covers the basics of service now, right? It'll cover the basic interfaces that you're likely to see just different terminology about service now. But really the flows that different things go through, right, information goes through when it's traveling between people on the service now platform.

2:53So I'd highly recommend that you take a look at that course first before jumping in here. But just to give you kind of a, you know, a 10 to 15 second explanation of what service now is, service now is a collection of very powerful tools that help organizations centralize and streamline everything that they do, right? So all of the information that's flowing through that organization, all of the tasks that are getting worked on at that organization, service now helps you keep track of all of those things.

3:24And also in many cases automate them. So that's ultimately what service now is going to help you do, right? Instead of having to keep track of all of these email threads and text messages and phone calls and things like that going through your organization, it gives you a single central centralized place to keep track of all of those things. And then it gives you tools to control how all of those things move through your organization. Again, we're going to be seeing these things in a lot more detail, at least from the admin perspective throughout the rest of this course.

3:55But again, if you want to see the basics, please feel free to go back and take a look at the basics of service now course.

0:00All right, so now that we have a basic idea of what it means to be a ServiceNow admin, the next thing we're going to do is go a little bit deeper and take a look at the basic responsibilities that most ServiceNow admins will have. So the first thing here, and I'm going to show you also, I have all of these tabs open in my browser here that will actually show you the parts of ServiceNow that will be required in order to perform these responsibilities, but I'll just write them down here also for you know, just so that you have a list, right, that you can look at.

0:36So the first thing here that you're going to be responsible for as a ServiceNow admin, this is by far one of the most common responsibilities is user and role management. Right, so the basic idea here is you're going to be managing what people have accounts in your organization and ServiceNow in the first place, right, not everybody will necessarily need access to ServiceNow, although in many cases, everybody in the organization will, even if it's just to do things like report hours, but you're going to be the one that will usually set that up.

1:09And also, and this is in many cases even more important, it's going to be your job to control, right, through means that I'll show you a little bit later in the course, who can access what and who can do what in the platform. So for example, you're not going to want the intern that you hired a week ago, no offense interns, to have access to everyone's salary information in ServiceNow, right, that's just a bad idea and ServiceNow gives you as an admin the means to control things like that.

1:41All right, so some of the tools that you're going to be working with in order to do this kind of user and role management, let me just open up that browser over here. There we go. This here is the ACL, right, the access control page. I'll discuss that in much more detail a little bit later, but this might not look like much as is the case with pretty much every interface or at least a lot of the important interfaces in ServiceNow because it's just a list of data.

2:13But the fact is that this is one of the main places where the real power of ServiceNow comes from, right? All of the data that you have in lists that are in specific places like this ends up kind of fitting together like a giant puzzle and creating the behavior that ultimately runs your organization. So again, even though it might look a little boring, might just look like a spreadsheet that you can't edit, right? It is actually extremely powerful, the ability to edit the data that's in these kinds of tables, all right?

2:47So besides that, you'll also have the ability to do things like edit data policies. This goes along with user and role management as well. Data policies basically just define things like mandatory fields, right? So if you want to make sure that like an email field is always filled out when someone submits a form, you would do that in here. All right. So really the first main category of things that you're going to be working with the second is you're going to be working with tables quite a bit and you're going to be doing this in more of like a meta way than most other employees, right?

3:24So you're not just going to be editing the data that's in tables, but you're actually going to have the power to edit tables themselves. So in other words, you're going to have control over not only the data that your organization has, but also what form that data takes, right? What fields need to be on that data, things like that. So here's the tools that you're going to be using for that over here. This is the main tables and columns editor.

3:56As you can see, there's quite a lot going on here. And again, we'll talk about these interfaces in much more detail later on in the course. I just kind of wanted to give you a little taste here of what's to come. All right. The third thing here is you're going to be responsible in many cases for what's known as form and field management. So again, this is where you're actually going to be in charge of editing the forms that people in the organization will be using in order to enter data for different things.

4:27So, you know, let's imagine the incident reporting workflow, right? When something goes wrong and someone reports an incident in service now, if you want to have some sort of special field or, you know, multiple fields or if you want to delete certain fields, you're going to have the power to do that as an admin, just as a simple example. All right. Now, just to give you an idea of what this might look like, let's head over to our browser again. And, you know, what you see here is just a simple incident form. Well, and we'll talk about this in much more detail a little bit later, you can actually edit this by going to configure and clicking on form design.

5:02And that'll bring you here where you have almost total control over this form, right? So you can add new fields, you can remove fields, you can move them around, things like that as well as many other things, of course. All right. So beyond this, you're going to be responsible for managing business rules. Now business rules are essentially logic that can be applied automatically to certain situations in order to streamline different processes, right?

5:34So as an example, let's say that you want to automatically assign incidents that have the word printer in the title to maybe the IT support team, right? That would be an example of a very simple, but also very useful business rule. Okay. So the way that things like business rules are managed, the interface where these are is over here. And again, this is just a list and so it might seem deceptively simple, but there's actually a lot of power behind this thing, as I said before, right?

6:06Same thing as what we saw with the access controls over here. All right. So again, as we'll see later on in the course, by editing these business rules, by creating them, deleting them, modifying them, you can really change the behavior, right? The automatic logic that supplied across the ServiceNow platform for your organization. All right. And this also includes things like client scripts, right? These are actually scripts that are run on the client side, right?

6:37Basically in the user's browser of whoever is using ServiceNow. That's something that we'll go into in much more detail. So don't get confused. Just know that working with these things looks an awful lot like a lot of the other things where you're going to just be working with list items and forms. All right. So we're on number four here, number five, right? Really the fifth main responsibility that you're going to have as a ServiceNow admin and what we're going to cover in this course is workflow management and workflow automation.

7:08All right. So I'm just going to write workflow, we'll say management and automation. All right. So just to show you where in ServiceNow we're going to be doing that, that's going to be in this workflow studio, right? It's actually a separate application outside of ServiceNow. And as you can see, it looks kind of similar in the fact that you're just going to be editing lists a lot of the time. But what we'll see when we talk about this in more detail is that it contains a lot of extra tools that are going to make this process a lot easier for you.

7:43Now workflow management and workflow automation also includes managing things like who needs approval from who and for what, right? So as an example here, right, if someone submits a vacation request, right, request to take vacation time, who is it that needs to approve that, right? A lot of that stuff can be automated. And as an admin, you're going to be in control of making sure that those work flows are set up correctly. So that whenever employee A submits a vacation request, employee B, which is, let's say, employee A's boss, gets that request and can approve it in ServiceNow.

8:21All right. And this also includes things like configuring notifications, right? So you can control as an admin who gets notifications when specific things happen. So again, let's say, you know, when someone submits a reset password email, who gets a notification about that? You have control over that and you can specify those things in a way that I'll show you a little bit later by basically working with the data that's in this part of the app. All right.

8:52So that's number five. And that was, let me just go back here. That was workflow management and automation. Number six here, and I'm running out of room. I might need to start over if there's many more. Number six is managing the service catalog. So as you may recall from the previous course, or, you know, if you're just already familiar somewhat with ServiceNow, the service catalog is basically just a centralized repository, centralized collection of all of these services that your organization provides both externally and internally.

9:28So if someone wants to, you know, get a new laptop for a new employee, let's say, the service catalog would be where they submit that just again as a simple example. So that's going to be service catalog management and obviously the specific services that an organization provides, that's going to be a fairly fluid thing, right? And you're going to be in charge of that, right? Or you're going to at least have the ability to modify that as a ServiceNow admin.

9:59So just to show you what that might look like, let's go back over to our browser and open up the catalog builder. That's what the tool is called. That's used to edit the service catalog. As you can see, this is just a nice fairly user friendly interface. In some places it looks very similar to just regular ServiceNow where it's got the lists and everything. But this interface makes it very easy for you to do things like, as you can see right here, create a new catalog item, create a new template for, you know, different requests, things like that.

10:30All right. So that is number six and I'm going to end it there. There are obviously many more responsibilities that ServiceNow admins are going to have. But these I think really form the core of those responsibilities. We may cover some other ones that are not necessarily related to these in later skills, but I'll discuss that in more detail when we get there. So anyway, hopefully this video has given you a more specific idea of what to expect as a ServiceNow admin and some of the interfaces that you'll be working with on a regular basis.

0:00All right, so now that you're a little bit more familiar with those tools or at least have a better idea of what to expect With the tools going forward as a service now admin It's time for you to get a developer instance set up in service now Right, this is what you're gonna need in order to follow along with the rest of the videos in the course so what you see here, this is actually a Development platform right or a development instance of the service now platform Meaning that we can make whatever changes we want really without having you know without there being a danger of us Messing something up. I would highly recommend that you play around with a developer instance in service now quite a lot Before actually making any permanent changes You know to your your organization's instance. So anyway Let's take a look now at how we can get this set up right the first option for you is to go to the developer page of service now right you can get there by going to developer dot service now calm And that should take you to a page that looks like this They'll probably have changed the branding a little bit or whatnot but anyway, you're gonna need to log into that and

1:16Once you've done so you should see some button up at the top here or some other option elsewhere Right, that's where it was for me again things might change That says request instance and I've already done that So you'll see this little green thing with the instance underneath it right that that's basically Indicating that I've already created developer instance if I click on this now what you'll see is That sure enough we see instant status online and you can open that up by clicking start building and that'll open up something that looks like this Now you'll notice that this is a little bit different from the one that I just showed you The fact is that when you use a developer instance in service now some of the developer instances that you'll work with are Pre-configured for something specific. So for example the one that I'm gonna be using here is Pre-configured for the service now administration fundamentals on demand course right basically service now just has this training course and Along with it. They have this very helpful, you know create instance open my instance thing where it's all pre-configured for everything You'll need for that course And since the needs of that course and this one aligned to a large degree

2:32That's another way that you can do it right but most of the things that you'll see You can get just on the regular service now instance like the way we just did it. Okay so anyway, that is the basics of getting a service now developer instance up and running and You should see just a few other things to notice up in the right hand corner here You should see someone that looks pretty much like this unless they've changed the you know default photo for this System administrator since I recorded this course This is because you're logged in as a system administrator, but not actually yourself right this is just kind of like a fictional scenario if you will and Because you're logged in as the system administrator on this developer instance You're gonna be able to do a lot of things that you may not necessarily be able to do or may not necessarily have the permissions to do At your organization, right? So, you know, you're probably you know if you're watching a service now Administration basics course you're probably not already a service now admin at a company And so if you try and do a lot of these things that I'm gonna show you in this

3:48course You know just logged into your regular service now account you won't be able to do them So that's just a caveat there that I wanted to get out of the way as well All right, so anyway once you've got that set up you should be prepared for the rest of the course We're not gonna be using this I think until the next skill at least not in a whole lot of depth But it's good to have this set up one last thing too that I personally find a little bit annoying for You know when I'm in a in a hurry and ready to record for the day things like that is Opening up a developer instance, especially when you're doing it for the learning courses here It does take about you know 15 to 20 minutes to To wake the instance up, right? That's just how they how they manage having a lot of free instances running At the same time is they'll actually put them to sleep after after a period of time so What I usually like to do is when I start for the day I come here I click it it'll say like wake my instance or something like that and I like to click that and then I go make my coffee and come back And it's it's already you know, it's already to go So just a caveat that I wanted to share with you there so that you don't waste, you know 15 20 minutes tomorrow morning

5:05So anyway, that is the basics of setting up a service now developer instance for the course ♪ ♪

0:00All right, so at this point, hopefully you have a developer instance set up. So before we get into, you know, performing all of the different tasks that ServiceNow admins are typically responsible for, I want to discuss some basic terminology that you're going to need to know as a ServiceNow admin, in case you're not already familiar with it, right? That's one of the big steps in becoming a ServiceNow admin is actually using these terms correctly. So the first term that you've already heard me say a handful of times in this skill already is instance, right?

0:33I've mentioned, yeah, I've talked about developer instance and creating one, and an instance is basically like a specific environment of ServiceNow. So this gets really important when you start doing actual ServiceNow administration because when you make a change in ServiceNow, usually you're not going to want to just make that change, boom, immediately, and have that take effect across your organization.

1:03That's usually a bad idea for reasons that we'll discuss sometime later. But more often than not, what you're going to want to do is have multiple instances of ServiceNow, one of which you can kind of experiment around with, the other one that you can, you know, test on to make sure that everything's looking good. And finally, an instance that everyone in your organization is actually going to be using, right? Normally, these are referred to as the dev instance, right? This is kind of where you're allowed to experiment around, make changes, things like that. It's kind of like a sandbox.

1:37The QA instance, right? This is where some changes that you've made that you want to, you know, take effect across your organization are going to be tested more often than not. And finally, you'll usually have the production or prod environment, which, again, is, it's the environment that everyone's going to be using. So these are each going to be different instances in ServiceNow, which, again, is why that term is so important, right? So anyway, that's the basic idea of an instance in ServiceNow and that term, why that term is so important to use correctly.

2:14The next one that I want to talk about, or next two that I want to talk about, actually, are application and module. The interesting thing about, especially the term application in the context of ServiceNow, is that it means something very specific that I think is different than what a lot of people typically think of as an application, right? Most people think of an application as like a smartphone app, and they also tend to think of, like, ServiceNow itself as an application, but ServiceNow is actually much bigger than that, which is kind of the interesting thing, right?

2:51So if you open up this all menu up at the top, we talk about this extensively in the previous course where we go through the basics of ServiceNow, what you see here on the very top level, all of these are actually applications , right? So essentially, an application in ServiceNow is just sort of like a logical grouping of functionality, right? Like if you search for incident, right? Let's just search for that there up in the top search bar there.

3:21Sure enough, what you'll see is that there's this application called Incident, and it's got a lot of individual actions or pages that you can go to. These are actually referred to as modules, right? And all of those are related to incidents, right? So if you want to create a new incident, you click on the Create New Module inside the Incident application. That's how those words work in ServiceNow. All right, now the next term that we're going to talk about here is Table, and I already mentioned this one in a previous video when we were talking about some of the key responsibilities of a ServiceNow admin, right?

4:01One of those was going to be managing tables, as you'll see, and tables are important in ServiceNow because everything in ServiceNow is stored as a table, right? So you can think of a table as just kind of like a collection of related data items. So, you know, let's just find a table in here. In fact, we can do that just by going to Incident and going to the Incident's module under ServiceDesk. All right, so most of the data that you see here is coming from a specific table, right, an Incident's table.

4:35But there are other parts of this data that you see that are coming from other tables as well, right? So this Collar column here, this is actually a link from the Incident's table in ServiceNow to another table. And this is one thing that you're going to be responsible for managing as a ServiceNow admin is the relationships between tables as well as the tables themselves. All right, and if you've ever worked with like SQL before or really any kind of relational database, you're probably going to be very comfortable with the idea of tables in Service Now because the concepts are very similar.

5:14Now, as I showed you in a previous video here, if you search for tables and then go to System Definition and Tables there, right, the Tables module in the System Definition app, right, what you'll see is that this will actually contain a complete list of all of the tables that ServiceNow contains, right, or that your instance of ServiceNow contains. And you can see down here that there are quite a few tables in ServiceNow that you can potentially work with.

5:44There's five in mind anyway. There's 5,594 different tables. Now, a lot of those tables are not really ones that you're going to touch, right? You're not going to have to work with all of these on a regular basis. But just to show you how complex these tables are behind the scenes and, you know, the exciting part about this is that this is where the ServiceNow platform gets a lot of its power from, is combining all these tables in different ways. So if you go to the module underneath that, right, if you go to Tables and Columns in System Definition, this is the one that we saw in a previous video where you can actually look for different tables, right?

6:25You're seeing all of the 5500 or so tables in here. So let's maybe scroll down and see if we can find that Incidents table. All right, there we go. And if you click on Incident here, you can actually see that this brings up this column names thing next to it. And this is basically all of the possible pieces of data, all of the possible data points that each incident can have, right? So activity do, actual end, actual start.

6:55You can read through the whole list if you want. And the exciting part about this is that it's actually editable, right? You can change what columns are in the incident table. You can link the incident table to other tables, things like that. We'll take a look at all this a little bit later. So don't worry about it right now. I'm just kind of showing you in more depth what you might be working with and using that to kind of explain the important terminology here. So anyway, that's the idea of a table in service now. Inside a table, you're going to be dealing with records, which are individual instances.

7:32I don't want to use that word, but we'll say it differently. Individual rows in a table, right? So if we go back to our incidents, let's just search for that again. Incidents will just go to self service incidents. In this table, we have two records, right? Each one of these things is a record and admins work with these things constantly, right? As an admin, you're constantly going to be creating, updating and deleting these records. Now, the individual pieces of data on a record, these are referred to as fields , right?

8:07So you can say this is an opened field of this record. And if we go back to where we were before, okay, under the column names, right? These basically represent the different fields that each row in a table can have. Okay, so hopefully it's all coming together there. You know, just some other pieces of the interface that you might have forgotten the exact terms for. I think they're maybe kind of obvious, but I'll just go through them anyway.

8:37Let's go back to incidents here. All right, if we go back to self service incidents, right? This here is known as a list, right? So a list is a very important part of the service now interface. It's basically how most of the data in service now is displayed. And it also gives you the option, of course, to edit the data if you're allowed to do that. Just by clicking on an individual row in that list. And that actually takes you to a form, right? So really lists and forms are by far the most common interfaces that you'll see in service now.

9:09Again, we talk about this in a lot of detail in the service now basics course. So I highly recommend that you go back and take a look at that. If you're not familiar with these interfaces and everything they're capable of, right? So like if you wanted to here, we'll just find something a little bit more interesting here under service desk incidents. Right, if you wanted to do a bar chart of all these, right? It's important that you know how to do things like that as well. And that's also one of the very powerful aspects of lists in service now is that, you know, while it might look a little bit boring on the surface, there's a lot that you can do from this interface.

9:47So anyway, those are just some of the basic terms that you're going to need to be familiar with in order to understand all of the concepts that we're going to go through. So hopefully those all made sense and with that we can move on. move on.

0:00All right, so the last thing that I want to do in this skill here is walk you through a few of the most common tasks that admins are going to have to do, no matter how much you know or how deeply you understand the surface now platform, right? There's just a few simple, fairly surface level tasks that you're just going to need to do fairly frequently. So I'm going to walk you through those, again, just to give you kind of just kind of round out this skill here with some very practical hands on demonstrations.

0:34So the first thing here is resetting a user's password. This is something that you're going to get requests for on a fairly regular basis, perhaps. And the way you do it here is by going into all, right, this is as we saw in the previous course, right, the basics course, where you can search for pretty much any application or module in your service now instance. And we're going to search for user administration. And we're going to go to users. Okay. Now we will be coming back to obviously this, this whole user administration app in much more detail in later skills, but you know, again, this is just to demonstrate resetting a user's password.

1:16So the next thing here is you're going to want to find the user. So let's say that Abraham Lincoln here has forgotten his password. We're going to just click on Abraham Lincoln there. This will open the user record as a form. All right. And you'll see the password field here, which is currently blank. So you can either type in the password there or you can click set password. And that will allow you to generate. It's got this nice little tool that just generates a new password for you. And you can see that it's a pretty complex, you know, just kind of a bunch of random characters there.

1:51And you could maybe send that to them as a temporary password if you wanted to. So I'm just going to click save password now. And that is how you reset passwords. It's pretty straightforward there. And then we can just click close and that will have that user's password updated. Now notice that this password field is blank because it's not a good idea to store passwords like that in plain text. And you know, service now follows that. So it's not going to actually display the user's password to you ever, no matter, no matter what you do.

2:24All right. So that's the first thing is resetting a user's password. The next thing is creating a new user for this. We're going to go to user administration again and users. And by the way, you might do this when a new person joins the company and you want to create a new user account for them. And we're going to go up into the top right hand corner and click new. That will open up this form for creating a new user. And really, you just have to fill everything in here and click submit.

2:54I'm not going to fill all of that out here myself, but you can feel free to do so. And once you've done that and clicked submit, what you should see is that that new user should be in this list. If you don't see them directly here, they might be at the end of the list or somewhere else in the list. So you can just search for them by name. So if you did, you know, George Washington, for example, you could search for George Washington and that would bring up. Oh, look, there is already a George Washington. Apparently someone beat me to it. So anyway, you know, if you did someone else that didn't, whose name wasn't already in there, you would see that show up just by doing that search.

3:31All right. So that's the second thing is creating a new user. Another thing here is creating or updating a catalog item. Right. So in the basics course, we saw that the service catalog, which I'm going to just search for here, right? Just go to self service service catalog. The service catalog is basically just a collection of all of the services that our organization offers, both internally and externally. So, you know, employees can get things like, you know, if they need a new charger for their laptop or something, they can do that through here.

4:08But also customers can, you know, make orders through the service catalog. So very powerful, obviously very important part of service now. And let's say that you need to create a new catalog item. Right. Let's say that, you know, your organization wants to start offering a new service and wants you to add that. Well, the way that you do that is you're going to go to service catalog. Right. And actually you're going to go to the service catalog application. I just had that opened up for demonstration there.

4:40And you're going to go down to catalog definitions. In fact, it might be easier just for you to just search catalog definitions. All right. And inside here, you're going to click on maintain items. Okay. So this is going to bring up an entire, you know, a list of all of the items that are in your catalog. You can see we currently have 226 of them. So if you want to create a new one, it's really the same as creating a new user , right? Again, that's really the power of these very simple, deceptively simple that is .

5:13His interfaces is there's really just a lot you can do with them. And it's pretty consistent whether you're creating a new user or whether you're creating a new catalog item or whether you're creating a new item in some other table, right? So you know, if you wanted to create a new catalog item, you could do that in here. You just enter the name. You'd enter the, you'd show the catalogs that it should appear on. The categories it should be part of all of those other things. All right, as well as the description, short description, things like that.

5:44I'll leave that up to you to play around with yourself. You can obviously modify these as well. So if you click on one of these, you can modify it just like we were able to modify the user's password. But you can just come in here, make any changes you want and click update. So that's again, one thing that admins are typically going to have to do quite frequently. What else do we have here? Oh, the last thing I wanted to demonstrate here for you is how you can imperson ate other users. We did talk about this briefly in the service now, basics course, but I'll show you again just because we're going to be doing this quite a lot, right?

6:21It's very important, especially when you're setting up different things like permissions, all right, access control, things like that, to actually test things out from the point of view of another user, because they're going to be seeing a completely different interface than you. And it's important that you make sure that that's what you expect. So the way that you impersonate a user is by clicking up here on the little, you know, profile picture icon in the top right hand corner, you're going to go down to impersonate user with a little eyeball next to it.

6:55And then you can basically search for any user in here. So let's search for Abraham Lincoln. All right, already there. And we're going to impersonate Abraham Lincoln by clicking this impersonate user button. Okay. So what this is going to do, I'm just going to click leave there. This is actually going to reload our application as that user. So if you were actually Abraham Lincoln, well, first of all, you probably wouldn't be using service now. It doesn't quite line up, you know, timeline wise, but let's just pretend if you were Abraham Lincoln and you were to log into service now at your organization, this is exactly what you would see, right?

7:32And that's a pretty powerful feature, right? Because if we wanted to, let's say, give Abraham Lincoln access to some other feature of the service now platform, we could actually just, you know, instead of having Abraham Lincoln log in, you know, sending Abraham Lincoln a slack message, let's say asking, Hey, can you see this thing now? Abraham Lincoln says, No, I can't see it. And you know, you just have to go back and forth like that. Kind of doing things like that, you can literally just log in as Abraham Lincoln and check, right? So you can see, you know, if you wanted to check if Abraham Lincoln had access to submitting incidents, let's say you could just search for incidents and you could see that sure enough, Abraham Lincoln is able to do so by clicking new, you get the idea.

8:15So that is how you impersonate users. And when you're done, you can just come back here and you can do end imperson ation, right? So do log out that'll actually log you, you know, the admin out. You just do end impersonation and that will bring you back to yourself, right? You're no longer Abraham Lincoln. So again, those are just a few important tasks that admins are going to have to do on a pretty regular basis. So I just wanted to show you those right off the bat so that you know at least how to do those few things before we go into much more depth on the individual responsibilities that we talked about earlier in this skill throughout the rest of the course.

0:00All right, so now that we've seen how to perform those very common tasks and we 've also discussed quite a few other things about being a ServiceNow admin, it's time for you to do just a kind of a fun little challenge that will tie everything back in and also make it much easier to find those common tasks that we performed in the previous video. Your challenge here is going to be for each of the things that we talked about previously to create a favorite for that.

0:32Basically set it as a favorite for yourself under this favorites tab. I'll get you started here by showing you how to do this for the first one and then your task will be to do that for the other tasks. I'm going to go into all here and basically all you need to do in order to add a favorite. This is something that we discussed in the ServiceNow basics course but I'll just show you again. It's pretty straightforward. In order to do this, all you need to do is search for the thing you want.

1:03So in that case we're going to want to search for users and go to, where is it here, under user administration and for the password reset, you're just going to go to this and find the corresponding user. We're just going to want to set this module here as our favorite. All you need to do for that is go to the module again and click that little star next to it and then you can see that that comes up with a name. You can always just say something like reset users password if you want to give a little more context around it and then if you click done what you'll see is over here in favorites.

1:42Sure enough you have reset users password and no matter where you are, if you go to your favorites and click that, sure enough that'll take you right there. So again, that is your challenge here is to do that for the other tasks that we talked about previously. And once you've given that a try, you can move on to the next video where I'll just briefly walk you through that. [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00All right, well hopefully you gave that challenge a try, so let's walk through the solution. Now, this one was kind of like a two-for-one deal that we just had because the, you know, creating a new user was this one here, but you could have also, right? You could have actually clicked new, and that takes you to this page, and you know, there's not really a star anywhere in site that we can click on in order to set this as a favorite, but you could have gone into here, right?

0:31This little menu up in the top left-hand corner and actually done create favorite, and that would give you create new user as a favorite. So that one might have been a little bit tricky. Hopefully you were able to find that. And sure enough, up in favorites now, we see that create new user takes us right here so that we don't need to search for it anymore, right? It saves us a clicker too, which is very valuable when, you know, you're swamped with different tasks as a service now admin. And the last thing here is creating or updating a catalog item.

1:01Well, actually the last thing is impersonating a user, but that's already up here, so it's, you don't really need to set that as a favorite. So the catalog, right, what we're gonna do is we're just gonna search for catalog, and down here under catalog definitions, we're gonna do maintain items, and that's going to be where we want that. So if you wanted to set a favorite for creating a new catalog item, you could do that here, in exactly the same way, right? Again, that's a nice thing. You know where everything's gonna be because it's the same basic interfaces that are used.

1:33So we'll just click done for create new catalog item, and you could also just set this one as a favorite for catalog items, right? So that you could edit one if you wanted to. So we'll just do that under here, right? We'll search for maintain catalogs. We'll do something like catalog items list or something like that. And then we can click done. And that's pretty much it. Again, the other one, which is just impersonating a user, that's right up here. And that's really a sort of a different type of thing you're doing 'cause you're not really interacting with the data that's in here.

2:07You're actually just viewing the application or viewing a certain feature as another user. So you wouldn't wanna set that as a favorite anyway. But anyway, we now have our favorites. We now have four new favorites here for different things, for resetting users password. That takes us right here for creating a new user. That takes us right to that form, for creating a new catalog item. That takes us right to that form and for seeing a list of all the catalog items. We can just click on that and that takes us right here.

2:37So anyway, that is the solution to the challenge. Hopefully you were able to figure that one out and hopefully these new favorites help you in the future. [BLANK_AUDIO]