After purchasing Service-Now, the customer receives one production instance and two non-production instances, which are out-of-the-box and need to be configured as per your organization's requirements. In this chapter, you will learn to perform core configuration and management activities.

From Service-Now, a customer receives an out-of-the-box instance. Note that each and every organization has its own marketing and branding policies for IT applications. Basic configuration is an essential part of a Service-Now instance, in which you need to configure the entire Service-Now website (portal or frontend) for end users. From the IT point of view (where you can see incident, problem, change, self-service, and other such modules), you are allowed to change the theme of Service-Now and split the application pane at your convenience.

If the LDAP server is the master source of user date, then it won't be wrong. Out of the box, Service-Now provides a built-in LDAP server, so for streamlined user access, you can integrate your company's Active Directory with Service-Now, so whoever is in the company's Active Directory is allowed to log in with their company Windows or system credentials.

Users are a critical part of any organization, and application access should be smooth, so for streamlined access to applications, you can integrate Service-Now with your company's LDAP server. Out of the box, Service-Now provides an LDAP server and user administration modules for configuration.

A group is a logical combination of the same skill set or common purpose. In an IT support environment, there may be many support personnel with the same skill set but different levels, such as L1, L2, and L3, where L3 are experts and L1 may have beginners.

Service-Now provides functionalities or features in the form of system modules. Usually, modules are activated by default, but if you want to add additional functionality, then you can consider system plugins. Plugins are like small software components that provide features and functionality as an option. Let's better understand this with an example: Data Archive is a plugin that is not activated by default. The size of the data increases in Service-Now according to the time that has passed; for example, an incident more than a year old is less significant as compared to a current incident, and old data may affect the performance of queries and reports.

Configuration of the Service-Now form is critical as it holds a lot of information regarding the user, issues, impact, priority and assignment groups, and so on. In this recipe, you will see how you can configure the form as per your requirement.

UI policies are applied to the Service-Now form to customize the behavior of the form, such as read-only access or showing or hiding a field base on a condition. Keep in mind that UI policies run after the client script does.

A UI action is a form button used to perform actions, such as saving a record or creating a new ticket, change ticket, or problem ticket.

An update can be considered as a customized package of development items; you know by now that any Service-Now customer gets three instances or environments: One production and two non production. So, all new requirement or development work is done on the development instances, and all end-user testing is done on the testing environment. Once everyone is happy, the code is deployed in the production environment, but remember that only configuration can be captured in the update set, not data. To read more about update sets, click on http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Using_Update_Sets#gsc.tab=0.

CMDB stands for configuration management database. Let's understand this with an example. For instance, if you purchase a laptop, then you can easily maintain or install software, but in an enterprise environment with, say, 10,000 systems in different locations, it's not an easy task to maintain (monthly patching, installing new software security, and so on) such large numbers; that's why asset management tools are on the market; they search for devices and store them in Service-Now CMDB tables.