The Idea Portal has moved to Now Support

[ServiceNow]

You have some of the brightest Ideas, and some of our most innovative solutions are inspired by you!  

If you are a long time member of the ServiceNow Community, you may have been familiar with the Idea Portal, an interactive space to submit and upvote community members’ product enhancement ideas. The Idea Portal still exists, and it’s still open to collect ideas and proposals, though it has moved from the Community to Now Support. Here's why: 

• Why it moved: When the ServiceNow Community changed platforms in October, the Idea Portal moved to Now Support in order to maintain a number of backend integrations that allowed ideas to flow easily to the product teams that could take action on them.  

• Where to find it: The Idea Portal has been relocated to Now Support (though you can still access it under the Resources tab in Community).  

• How to access and use the Idea Portal: Most ServiceNow customers have access to Now Support as part of their contracts. If you find that you can no longer access the Idea Portal, there are a few options available for getting your ideas posted. First, check in with your Customer Admin. They may be able to grant you access. Alternatively, many Customer Admins post ideas into the Idea Portal on behalf of employees.  

For more detailed information on who can access the Idea Portal via Now Support along with helpful tips on how you can use this tool effectively, please refer to Idea Portal knowledge base article. You may also refer to the Now Support login FAQs. 

[Jace Benson]

I'd love to give you some ideas but I cannot.  I am a ServiceNow customer but at my org I do not have access to Now Support, so you've removed my ability to create/share these ideas.  

A brief history for anyone coming to this.

A long time ago if you had a problem with ServiceNow, you'd log an incident.  HI support (now called Now Support) would address it, and help you or not depending on the ask.  Sometimes you'd ask for things that they considered an enhancement.  Only you could see your organizations enhancements.   There was no sharing of enhancements and I'm sure there were duplicates of them all over.

Sometime later ServiceNow decided they wanted a change.  They created the Idea Portal on the Now Community.  You had to log your enhancements on the idea portal but then the idea was everyone could vote on the best ideas.  Viewing was locked behind a login which I thought it should not have been but /shrug.  Voting required a login.

During this time if you had an issue on support and they deemed it was an enhancement they said "Put in an idea on the idea portal".  If you had an idea at all if you had an account on community you could create the idea regardless of if you were a customer, or a user, or a partner.

People did and it had it's flaws but it was mostly fine.

The Now Community had it's own set of problems so with the rollout of the new Community, ServiceNow pulled the idea portal back onto the Now Support site.  However, now they've limited access to this to only the individuals with active contracts.

> Most ServiceNow customers have access to Now Support as part of their contracts. 

This makes me the most sad.  The idea portal told us what ServiceNow was investing in, and more importantly what they were not.  

If you're like me and cannot share those ideas, I guess I implore you to comment here.

PS. The bit about the why, "the Idea Portal moved to Now Support in order to maintain a number of backend integrations that allowed ideas to flow easily to the product teams".  There's ways to have ServiceNow read the posts from a part of the this community via RSS and post them to the idea portal with your automation.  

[The SN Nerd]

Agree with your comments Jace.

As soon as I heard that the Ideas Portal was moving to NowSupport, I did raise a concern that not all users would have NowSupport accounts and would lose visibility. 

By this stage it was too late; the decision to move and development had already begun.

I hope ServiceNow find a way to expose the ideas to the community once more.

[Kim Tillano]

I have several ideas in various states, as well as MANY others I have been actively following, and now I can no longer access them.  I hope this decision can be reconsidered.

[jxsaxton421]

Please bring back the community idea portal. There are a number of things I have brought up internally with my team and would appreciate the community feedback. 

[dcb]

This is dreadful, we have many ideas but now we can no longer access them. Poor decision guys...

[Ramesh2]

Yeah, very weird as to not give access to check the ideas or vote on them..

[Dave65]

The move makes it almost useless since most of us do NOT have access to it now.
It should be available to anyone who uses ServiceNow not just the relative handful of people with access to Now Support.

For the most part, the changes that have been made to the Community in general have made it much more difficult to use.

[John63]

Agreed. Many other software vendors have an open ideas portal.

For example:

Microsoft: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/ 

SAP: Homepage - Customer Influence (sap.com)

Atlassian: System Dashboard - Create and track feature requests for Atlassian products.

You are probably missing a lot of valuable feedback and ideas.

[C Buckneberg]

Can't say I'm impressed with this move.  I have at least 2 ideas that I had shared in the Idea portal before the move, and now I can no longer track them, or send clients in our organization to them to get them upvoted (these idea were ones the clients had helped to develop so they are unhappy that they can't see them either).

Please reconsider this move, or find a way to cross post them to an idea portal mirror here in the community.

[Ct111]

Jace is spot-on with his comments...

It has blocked a path for users to contribute from community. 

[CMDB Whisperer]

I do not have access to Now Support, which means I have lost the ability to participate in the Ideas Portal.  It's too bad, although about 99% of the Ideas that I submitted or Voted on were eventually just cancelled anyway.  I would love to see a more transparent and more active/interactive Idea Portal, but this move just seems to be a step towards ultimate oblivion for the ideas.  What a waste of a good thing.

[Barry_W]

Agree with pretty much all of the above posters. I'm in the same boat - no access to Now Support - so can no longer view, create or contribute to ideas, which is really limiting, and as mentioned above, frustrating in that I can no longer see what new features may be on the horizon, which influences how we allocate our local development resources.

[muzhda]

@ServiceNow  

Does the move to Now Support mean that when viewing ideas we have a way to filter on a list of all ideas submitted by members of our company/account?

[Community Alums]

This is not a good thing to do !! Please bring back Idea Portal in Community.

[Leri Andrews]

I work in a BIG company.  Some of our tech guys have a NOW account but a lowly PO does not.  Now I cannot let you know how my product needs to develop to meet my customer needs.  I am still getting notifications for old ideas I submitted with a link that is broken. 

[Michael QCKM]

Oy Vey! Again SN?!

[jxsaxton421]

Hey, I hear this is being reversed and the idea portal is being relinked with community? Is there an official announcement about it? 
Seen in the SNDevs Slack Channel - "Ideas"

[CMDB Whisperer]

Whatever happens with the Idea Portal -- and I do hope it is brought back, or at least that access opened up to everyone with an SSO account, even if it continues to physically live on the support site -- I would also like to see more transparency around the process of reviewing ideas.  The ideas that I have posted or voted on in the past have often been closed without comment, even after receiving multiple votes.  While ultimately the product managers have the say about whether an idea is implemented, it is still important to acknowledge the need expressed, and if there is no plan to implement the idea immediately, then provide some context.  Maybe keep something alive in the backlog so that it isn't just discarded.  And if it is clearly something that ServiceNow believes they will never implement, but the idea is valuable to users, please provide a summary of a workaround or leading practice that you would recommend to address the user's need.

[Jace Benson]

They did restore access recently. You can get to it here now with your community or support account: https://support.servicenow.com/ideas

[CMDB Whisperer]

@Jace Benson that is not the case.  You still need an active support account to access that URL.  

[Jace Benson]

(EDIT: As of 11/15/2023 I can no longer access the idea portal.  Not sure when this changed but... it's unfortunate)

I'm able to get to it with my account.  I don't have a support account.  It looks like something is still not loading correctly for me as well but I'm getting past the authentication you're having.

[Drew Carpenter]

not available at all for HIWAVE?

[CMDB Whisperer]

Still says you need an active support account and I cannot in fact open it without one, so the previous claim seems to be false from where I sit.  

[Howard Pope]

I may have missed it, but have there been any responses to the comments about the shift and what is being considered?

[CMDB Whisperer]

Not to my knowledge (no pun intended).

[jxsaxton421]

Per this KB, they claim that access was restored. But it appears they still have it locked down to customers only for whatever reason. 

Idea Management for customer enhancement requests - Support and Troubleshooting (servicenow.com)

Seems like you can email 

rosamund.gillie@servicenow.com

as a point of contact to request access. 

[Steven Young]

😞  i'm sad.  I was on a call and was told to put an Idea in and i cannot.  Dont have the login anymore.

I have submitted several enhancements years ago that they never looked at because they weren't "voted" by the community.  A few years ago, i looked at the date/time of "like" things. 
Instead of upvoting something, people would create their own idea for the same thing, but since there were 2 ideas each with 1 vote, they were overlooked, because it wasn't 1 idea with 2 votes.

and not everyone has time to look through thousands of ideas to upvote something, so they just created another.

I get it,  but it also stinks that we can no longer see what ServiceNow is considering and what they aren't.