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Service Portal & Employee Center

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In this lesson, you will learn:

  • What a portal is and who uses it
  • What the Service Portal is
  • What Employee Center is
  • How portals connect to the rest of ServiceNow

1 A simple front door

Most people at a company are requesters. They just want to ask for help, order something, or find an answer. They don’t need the All menu, lists, or forms.

So ServiceNow gives them a simple website called a portal. 🚪 Think of it like a shop’s front counter. Customers come to the counter. They never go into the storeroom.

Key term: Portal

A simple, friendly website on top of ServiceNow, made for requesters. It shows only what they need.

2 Service Portal

Key term: Service Portal

ServiceNow’s tool for building portals. The standard one opens at /sp, like https://snwr.service-now.com/sp.

On the Service Portal, a requester can:

  • 🔍 Searchfor answers
  • 🛒 Orderfrom the catalog
  • 🙋 Get helpreport an issue
  • 📚 Readhelp articles
  • 📋 Tracktheir requests
  • ✅ Approveif they’re a manager

📝 Note: Portals are built from pages and small blocks called widgets. Admins and developers can change them. That’s an advanced topic for later.

3 Employee Center

Employee Center is a newer, modern portal for employees. It puts help from every team in one place: IT, HR, Facilities, and more.

A requester, Riya, uses the portal instead of the full ServiceNow screens. The Employee Center page for SNWR shows a search bar, quick links to Get IT help, Request something, and HR questions, a My Requests list, and To-dos. Behind the portal, the same ServiceNow tables store the incident, request, and knowledge records that agents work on.
Figure 1. Requesters use the portal. Agents see the same records in the platform.
Service Portal Employee Center
Address /sp /esc
Best for A simple self-service portal One modern place for all employee help
Extras Catalog, knowledge, requests Plus to-dos, campaigns, and help from many teams

⭐ Remember: The portal is just a different window into the same data. When Riya reports an issue on the portal, an agent sees a real incident in the platform.

💡 Good to know: There are other portals too, like the Customer Service Portal for a company’s customers. They all use the same portal technology.

4 Let’s try it: visit the portal

  1. In your browser, go to https://your-instance.service-now.com/sp.
  2. Search for email. What results do you see?
  3. Open the catalog (Request something) and look at the items.
  4. Impersonate Riya Sharma (Lesson 6.4), open /sp again, and report an issue.
  5. End impersonation. Find Riya’s new incident in Incident > All. It’s the same record! 🎉
  6. If Employee Center is installed, try /esc too.

5 Quick recap

  • A portal is a simple website for requesters
  • Service Portal opens at /sp
  • Employee Center opens at /esc and brings all employee help together
  • Portals are built from pages and widgets
  • Portal requests become real records that agents work on

6 Check yourself

Think of your answer first. Then tap to check.

1 Who mainly uses a portal: requesters or admins? Show answer

Requesters.

2 What do you add to your instance address to open the Service Portal? Show answer

/sp

3 Riya reports an issue on the portal. Where does it end up? Show answer

As a real record, like an incident, in the same tables that agents work in.

Nice work! You finished this lesson. 🎉

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