There is some notification functionality, which is missing in ServiceNow. And it’s all about real-time in-browser notifications.

Like when Alex is a service desk agent, and there is a critical incident or alert triggered by something or someone — Alex may get an email or text message, but there is no way ServiceNow will display a message in real-time in Alex’s browser. Something like this:

That is because when something happens on ServiceNow backend, the browser doesn’t know about that. You cannot write a business rule or a client script which displays an error message in Alex’s browser when Bob did something or something crashed.

The cause of this problem is that ServiceNow does not support or does not provide controls for working with a browser-server persistent connection. In most of the cases this handled by WebSockets, but you will not find anything about WebSockets in ServiceNow.

The good thing is that ServiceNow is a great development platform and you can bring your own WebSockets.

I did a session about WebSockets at Knowlege18 and tried to explain how that can be done.

And of course, there is a fantastic use case of WebSockets implementation in ServiceNow, that’s a certified application, which has its own website: https://buzzpost.io