SysNews to transition to ServiceNow

On Tuesday, Nov.17, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) will transition functions of the SysNews website, including posts, notifications and tools, to ServiceNow. 

As a result, the ServiceNow IT Service Portal, available at help.ncsu.edu, will be adding the following functionalities:

• Announcements
  Announcements are broadcast messages to IT Service Portal users and should be relevant to most or all of campus. These should include supplementary information on other websites or Knowledge articles. Links to past SysNews posts will continue to be available at their original URL. Notifications will be sent to the SysNews mailing list when the announcement is created in ServiceNow. Please note that this occurs separately from the designated time for the Announcement to display on the portal.Announcements will display on the IT Service Portal homepage, with an archive of past posts on the Announcements landing page.

• Current Status
  The Current Status section will include current or planned outages or service degradation. Outages should be tied to Incidents or Changes in ServiceNow, which will allow campus IT staff to learn more about the underlying technical details. Notifications will be sent to the SysNews list on outage creation, updates and completion.Current Status will display on the IT Service Portal homepage, with outages linking to the individual service page in the Service Status.
• Service Status
  Service Status is a new page in the IT Service Portal and will display the Current Status content, as well as planned maintenance. It will also list many enterprise system services with service history details and the ability to subscribe to service notifications. Please note that not all campus services will be available on the Service Status page at this time. General categories will be employed to represent services not yet included in the service catalog, and OIT staff will continue to add these in future phases.

Additionally, tools traditionally available via SysNews will be moved to ServiceNow:

• System Tools
  System Tools will now be available via a catalog in the IT Service Portal. Tools may be bookmarked and links to request access and to get help will be available for all tools.
• User Lookup
  Finally, the User Lookup tool will be available on the platform user interface to all licensed ServiceNow users. User Lookup can be found by searching the ServiceNow application Navigator for “user lookup.” You can also use the “User Lookup” button next to the Caller field in Incidents. The User Lookup view will contain some fields visible only to those with specific roles. 

SysNews monitoring solutions will remain for now but are planned to be replaced in early 2021.

Documentation to use the new tools in ServiceNow will be available via the IT Service Portal as knowledge articles. Please report any issues or questions to the NC State Help Desk via the  IT Service Portal.