5 Reasons for Portal Pro®
09.11.2022
When developing a Service Portal in ServiceNow, you will quickly find some often desired features are missing when it comes to the out-of-the-box form and data table widgets. Portal Pro® is a collection of helpful Service Portal widgets that address this issue and allow you to rapidly develop a powerful customer-facing Service Portal.
We use a unique approach of building on top of the out-of-the-box widgets without cloning and provide additional features that are easily configurable. Among many others, these features include:
- Displaying Process Flows in Service Portal forms
- Displaying out-of-the-box form annotations in Service Portal forms
- Displaying Embedded and Related Lists in Service Portal forms
- Easy styling end enabling/disabling of buttons in Service Portal and Classic UI
- Ability to add client-side logic to your portal buttons to achieve various use cases, like:
- Showing confirmation dialogs
- Create a new record in a lists with a modal dialog
- Perform redirect after completing UI action
- improved attachment handling
- Dynamic styling of cells in Data Tables
- Opening records in Data Tables in a modal dialog
Reasons for Portal Pro®?
1. Security
The most suggested way of adding new features to out-of-the-box widgets like the data table and form widget is by cloning the widget. Cloning the widget however, will prevent your widgets from getting upgraded during ServiceNow releases. If a security fix is rolled out for the data table or form widget, you will not know about it and the fix might never be applied for your widgets. The Portal Pro® widgets use the default form and table widget, which ensures that the latest version of the widgets is always used and the latest changes from ServiceNow are integrated. The Portal Pro widgets use the default form and table widget, which ensures that the latest version of the widgets is always used and the latest changes from ServiceNow are integrated.
2. Upgradeability
Reason one can be prevented by properly maintaining your cloned widgets in every Service Now release. Tracking the changes done to widgets, performing new clones and re-applying customizations to new versions of widgets can be very time consuming and theoretically should happen twice a year. When using Portal Pro, we guarantee you can greatly reduce the time required when upgrading your custom Service Portals to a new releases.
3. Speed
Developing an appealing and functional custom Service Portal with ServiceNow can be very challenging. Even basic features like adding client-side buttons for confirmations or displaying related records in an embedded lists can be time consuming and difficult to implement for the most experienced ServiceNow developers. With Portal Pro®, lots of functionality that is required in almost every custom Service Portal can easily be enabled and configured. This will reduce the time needed to create your custom Service Portal from weeks down to days.
4. Maintainability
Developing workarounds for advanced features in a custom service portal, like styling in data tables, showing an embedded list in a form or adding a confirmation to a button can be very difficult and hacky. Maintaining such solutions is nearly impossible. This is especially true if the know-how from developers who performed the cloning of widgets and developing workarounds is lost. When using Portal Pro®, the whole responsibility of maintaining the widgets will be shifted to us, and we will ensure our widgets work properly with every new release.
5. Low-Code
When working with Service Portal widgets, it requires knowledge in web development, HTML, CSS, JS and AngularJS. Even for the slightest changes to behavior, you will need to have great knowledge in those technologies. With Portal Pro®, a lot of features can easily be configured without coding. Adding annotations or embedded/related lists is as simple as adding them to the form in the Classic UI. Defining styles for data tables or configuring mandatory attachments can be achieved by simple configuration.
Try it yourself
Portal Pro® can be found in the ServiceNow Store. If you want to give it a try and see how Portal Pro® fits your purpose, please consider requesting a free trial:
If you have any questions about the Portal Pro, do not hesitate to contact us via prtlprrctvch.
