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ServiceNow:  8 Notable Changes in the Jakarta Upgrade from Helsinki

Written by Mariah McCrea | Jan 26, 2018 10:28:36 PM

As exciting as upgrades are, there is always a thing or two that fly over your head and can leave you stumped. Be sure that you utilize all there is to an upgrade by staying up to date with user-friendly tools. Here are some notable changes to Jakarta after completing the upgrade from Helsinki.

After completing the Jakarta to Helsinki upgrade tasks from necessary to prepare a feature or application for the upgrade process, and completing migration tasks to protect your data and customizations from changes to the system, follow up on the following features:

Financial Management

Financial Management is no longer dependent on using IT DataMart. The DataMart Definitions are upgraded to Financial Management Segments in Istanbul. Any new segments required for cost model or budget model must then be created in Financial Management Segments.

On-Call Scheduling

All events are recorded in the upgrade logs automatically after upgrading from the previous version- this action is not optional. (System Diagnostics > Upgrade History).

  • The existing business rules for escalations with escalations based Workflow is replaced with On-call Scheduling.
  • The workflow uses Notification Activities where it sends emails and not SMS messages. To send SMS messages, it must be modified to use ‘Create Events Activies’.

For links to other changes that you should be aware of when transitioning to on-call scheduling, click here

HR Service Delivery

HR data migration is always recommended when you upgrade from the global version of HR to the guarded version. This version prevents users outside of HR from accessing HR data. Customers that are already on this scoped version do not need to migrate their data.

If you find you need to migrate your systems from non-scoped to scoped HR, click here!

Calendars and Schedules

The Fiscal calendar is a platform feature and is no longer dependent on Financial Management, starting with this Jakarta release.

ITSM Guided Setup

The ITSM Guided Setup plugin provides a new, process-centric version of a guided setup introduced in this upgrade. It is activated by default for new customers. Existing customers can activate the plugin to enable the new version of guided setup.

You will find one, or both versions in the navigation pane and modules, or as links on the System Administration homepage. They appear as ITSM Guided Setup or IT IS Guided Setup (Old). ITSM Guided Setup (Old) directs you to the guided setup created in the Helsinki and Istanbul release. The administrator has authority to hide the version that you no longer want to use.

Note: The plugin name, ITSM Guided Setup, is the same for both old and new versions, but the plugin ID is different.

Customer Service Management

Following upgrading an instance, demo data for the Customer Service Management Demo data plugin will come back, even if the demo data was previously deleted. For detailed information and directions, login to your HI Service Portal.

Reporting

The Report Charting v2 is automatically used whereas Reporting v1 can no longer be used after the upgrade. The Reporting Chart v2 plugin uses the Highcharts charting library to generate client reports. This plugin generates all reports in the ServiceNow report set.

Note: Custom charts, scheduled report, and reports saved as PDF are generated on the server using the Highcharts charting library. Sometimes these types of reports appear differently than reports that are generated on the client side.

Workflow

In previous releases, the default setting to automatically improve performance was disabled, which required manually enabling the table cleaner for workflow context records. This is not necessary this time around, but if you prefer the table cleaner to not run automatically, you can disable it manually.

 Needing help upgrading ServiceNow? V-Soft can offer you a customized composite of experiences within ServiceNow. Whether you are looking to add a new feature tailored to your business needs, or implementing a new instance of ServiceNow, we can help!