Sub Production Email

#Share

Jarod Mundt

2 minute read

Share utility highlight: Treat your sub-prod email better

Guest post by: Jarod Mundt

Email Can Be Better

There is nothing that bugs me more on the Now Platform than seeing outbound emails without any personalization (logo/color/font updates). I have a love-hate relationship with email. Early in my ServiceNow career, as the sole administrator at a customer (on the Calgary release), some of my first high-visibility updates were based on updates made to the inbound and outbound emails.

Today, we’re here to talk about Email Filter for SubProd Instances, Finite Partners’ most popular item on SN Share. This is the first post in our series on “How to do ServiceNow email right”. (See the Finite Partners blog and YouTube channel for updates).

If you’re not familiar, “Share” is the SN Developer Program’s open-source code-sharing site that allows us to share update sets and code in an organized, categorized manner. You may have scrolled right past this section when you were on the Developer Program site, getting (or waking up) your PDI. It is a great way to learn all aspects of the platform, by installing and reviewing the code written and published by experts.

The out-of-box option

When activated in sub-production instances, the OOB Outbound Email Configuration sends all outbound email to a hard-coded email address (or comma-separated list of addresses).

With this option, it succeeds in taking the confusion away from your end users. We don’t want them receiving an SLA breach or approval notice because someone was testing some new code in the DEV or QA instance. By putting all emails into a single bucket (like a group mailbox, distribution list, or a single administrator’s email box), it shifts the burden of finding a specific message to the administrators and developers who are modifying components that send out-bound emails.

Get the extension

“There’s got to be a better way!” you say?

Our utility replaces the hard-coded address with group-membership logic that sends or ignores based on each individual recipient in each message. To opt-in users, simply add them to the a group and they will receive messages in their preferred medium (email or SMS), just like in production.

We use this in our own instances, and plan to support it indefinitely. We’ll test it with each new ServiceNow release, and track all changes publicly in our GitHub repo. Please send us any feature enhancements or defects.

See you online at the SNDevs Slack (in the #knowledge20 channel) or at a future SN event!

JarodM

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