Upgrading From Express to Enterprise: What's Missing

If you're a ServiceNow Express customer, then you probably already know that ServiceNow is forcing everyone on the Express edition of the "Now platform" to upgrade to the Enterprise edition. While you might think that after an upgrade, you'll have a typical ServiceNow Enterprise instance, that is not the case.

The Enterprise edition of ServiceNow is far more powerful than Express, but there are some significant differences between the two platform editions, and much of the added functionality of the Enterprise edition is not enabled by default after an upgrade. You'll also find that some things in your post-upgrade instance have retained the names of their "Express" counterparts in the Application Navigator, for example; which can make it difficult to navigate around, or use the platform documentation. 

In this article, I'll briefly explore some of the differences you can expect, some of the features you can expect to be missing, and how you can enable that functionality post-upgrade. 

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If a Genie Gave Me Three Wishes, I'd Use Them All to "Fix" Scope

You can categorize the ServiceNow dev community into two camps: Those who love the idea of "application scope" and how it's been implemented, and those who think that scoped apps in ServiceNow are a bit broken.

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, I belong to the second camp, but hold on, don't go for your pitchforks just yet. I come with a peace offering: a few humble suggestions. Not to do away with scoped apps, but suggestions which I think might make scoped apps a little bit easier on all of us.

As the title of this post says: If a genie popped into my life (presumably by way of a magical lamp) and gave me three wishes, I would use them all to - in my opinion - "fix" the issues with scope in ServiceNow. That's my dumb way of saying that I think the implementation of scope in ServiceNow isn't quite as great as it could be, and is the source of some frustration for myself and my developers; and suggesting some alternatives which might make sense to consider.

Hey, at least I didn't make it "Top 3 ways I'd change scope in ServiceNow - You won't believe #2!"

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Service Catalog "Try in Portal" button

When building or modifying a Catalog Item in ServiceNow, the Try it button is fantastic for allowing you to quickly and easily see what the changes you've made look like in your development environment. This is a crucial tool for testing! 

However, as many of you will no doubt be aware, there are significant differences between the "classic" UI, and the Service Portal UI. Certain field types look and behave differently. Some even have different APIs for interacting with them in the Service Portal!

For this reason, it's almost always important to be able to quickly and easily view your catalog items in the Service Portal as you're building them, as well as in the classic view. Unfortunately, there is for some reason no out-of-box way to do this! 

To remedy this, our Service Portal developer (Kim) built a custom "Try in Portal" UI Action, which does just what you might expect - it allows you to preview your catalog item in the Service Portal.

Read on to see how this works! 

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We have a new book!

Hey everyone! By way of explanation for the lull in posts lately, allow me to announce our latest book! The ServieNow Development Handbook is, as the subtitle says, a compendium of guidelines and best-practices for ServiceNow development and administration. It's a short (<100 pages) information-dense guide that I hope you'll find yourself returning to again and again.

The paperback is only $15 and the Kindle version is just ten bucks! Click here to learn more and get your copy.

In addition to The ServiceNow Handbook, I've also been finishing up the second edition of Learning ServiceNow, which is also nearly complete and we're aiming for a release date in the very near future! 

You can see all of our books on Amazon at this link