The Communicate tab in the Major Incident workbench

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of The Communicate tab in the Major Incident workbench

    The Communicate tab in the Major Incident workbench provides a centralized interface to track and manage communication plans and their associated tasks during a major incident. It helps ServiceNow customers monitor the progress of communication efforts, ensuring timely and organized updates to stakeholders.

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    Key Features

    • Communication Task Management: View all communication tasks under their respective communication plans. Tasks can be filtered by all, active, or completed status for better visibility.
    • Add and Manage Plans and Tasks: Easily add new communication plans or tasks directly within the workbench. Modify recipient lists for saved plans using the Manage Recipients option.
    • Recipient List Optimization: When sending email notifications, recipient lists (groups of users) are used instead of individual users to improve system performance. Users, groups, and email addresses can be added as recipients. This feature is enabled through a specific system property (sncommmanagement.emailclientrecipientitemsenabled).
    • Communication Task Actions: Perform key actions such as Close Task (mark complete or skipped), Snooze (for recurring tasks), View Form, and View Activity to manage each communication task effectively.
    • Status Tracking: Monitor task due times, overdue status, and recurring task counts (e.g., Sent(2x) indicating two completions). Icons visually indicate task states like completed, skipped, or active.
    • Notification Composition: Send notifications from within the tab. For one-time tasks, sending a notification marks the task complete; for recurring tasks, the task remains open.
    • Work Notes & Activity Stream: Initiate chats and view activity history at both the incident and communication plan levels to maintain clear communication records.
    • Slack Integration: With Collaboration services installed, Slack can be added as a communication channel. Slack messages are sent directly to contacts defined in the communication plan, and task actions are supported similarly to other channels.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    Using the Communicate tab enables customers to streamline communication workflows during major incidents, ensuring that all communication tasks are tracked, recipients are accurately managed, and notifications are sent efficiently. The integration with Slack extends collaboration capabilities beyond email, supporting real-time messaging and engagement. This centralized management improves incident response coordination and helps maintain transparency and accountability throughout the incident lifecycle.

    The Communicate tab helps you understand the progress of a communication plan and its related tasks.

    If there are multiple communication tasks associated with a communication plan, all the tasks appear under the respective communication plan.

    Figure 1. Communication task filter
    communication task filter

    You can filter the communication task to view all tasks, active tasks, or completed tasks. You can also add a new communication plan by clicking Add. You can create a communication task for an existing plan by clicking Add Task. For more information, see Add communication plan from the major incident workbench. If you want to add or remove recipients from a particular plan after the plan is saved, click Manage Recipients.

    Note:
    When you create a communication task for sending an email on the Major Incident Management Workbench and select a recipient list, the recipient list is added instead of individual users. The list of users in the recipient list is calculated by the system while processing the email request, thus improving the system performance. Also, you can add users, groups, and email addresses as required in the Recipients section. Activate this feature by selecting the Property to toggle support for Recipient List on Email Client, on Communication Tasks (sn_comm_management.email_client_recipient_items_enabled) option in the Major Incident Management Properties. You can create a recipient list using a script to retrieve a custom list of users or include a pre-defined list of users.
    Figure 2. Manage recipients
    Manage recipients
    The following actions can be performed on a given communication task:
    • Close Task: If the task is performed at least once, closes the communication task and changes the state to Complete. Otherwise, the state changes the state to Skipped.
    • Snooze: Available only for recurring communication task. Enables the user to skip the communication task once and the due-in timer is refreshed.
    • View Form: For each task in the plan, you can navigate back to the form.
    • View Activity: Enables you to view activity history and post your work notes or additional comments for a communication task.
    Figure 3. Communication task actions
    communication task actions

    You can also view the due time of upcoming tasks and the overdue time in case the task isn’t completed within the expected time.

    To send a notification, click Compose. If the notification has to be send only once, then after sending the notification, the status of the task changes to Complete. If the task is recurring, the status of the task changes to Open. After a recurring communication task is performed, the status of the communication task changes to Sent followed by the number of times the recurring communication task is performed until that time. For example, Sent(2x) means that the communication task is performed twice.

    Figure 4. Communication task state
    Communication task state

    Icons to the left of the Communication Task name represent the state of the communication task such as completed, skipped, or active.

    Under the Work Notes & Activity section, you can initiate a chat at the incident or incident communication plan level. You can also view the activity stream for that record.

    Messaging users through Slack

    For Slack functionality, install Collaboration services from the ServiceNow Store.

    When you add Slack as a communication channel, it appears as follows:
    Figure 5. View of the slack communication channel
    Slack channel

    Click Compose to convey the Slack message to the contacts that you’ve already mentioned in the communication contact while defining the communication plan. The selected contacts will receive a direct message from the Slack bot. You can perform the communication task actions such as Closed Task, Snooze, View Form, and View Activity.