User Administration

Now that we have learned the basics of the ServiceNow platform, login process, and its user interface, let us dig deep into how to create and assign roles to new and existing users. As part of your project at ABCD, Inc, you are suppose to provide Server Administrators access to your newly procured ServiceNow instance and they should be able to access Incident Management, Change Management, Problem Management, and Knowledge Management applications.

In this chapter, we will learn how to create new users and associate them to a group. We will also learn how we can assign roles to groups and users. Furthermore, we will learn how we can impersonate a user to test if our newly created users have access to proper applications and modules.

User Administration is one of the easiest but most important functions an administrator and developer needs to perform. ServiceNow allows administrators various ways to manage users, groups, and roles using simple modules accessible through the User Administration application, as shown in the following screenshot on the right. Let us quickly go through the different modules available under the User Administration application:

• Users: Lists all users in the system and allows administrators to easily create or update user records and associate existing one to different groups or assign roles
• Groups: Lists all available groups and allows administrators to create or update group entries
• Roles: Lists all roles defined in the system and allows administrators to create or update role records
• Logged in users: Lists of users who are currently logged in to the ServiceNow instance
• Active transactions: Lists of transactions running in the foreground
• All Active transactions: Lists of transactions running in the system
• Departments: Lists departments defined in the system and allows administrators to easily create or update existing department entries
• Locations: Lists of all locations entries defined in the system and allows administrators to easily create or update existing location entries
• Companies: Lists of all companies defined in the system and allows administrators to easily create or update existing company entries
• Location Map: Plots all locations defined in the Locations module on to a Google Map
• Countries: Lists of countries defined in the system and allows administrators to easily create or update existing country entries

In this chapter, we will get started with ServiceNow User Administration and gain an in-depth understanding of how to create new users, and assign group and roles to existing ones.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Creating a new user
• Creating a new group
• Creating a new role
• Associating users to one or more groups
• Assigning roles to a group
• Impersonating as a different user
• Configuring location, department, and country