Contents

Overview .......................................................................................................... 3

What does the Integration accomplish? .............................................. 4

How does the integration work? ............................................................ 4

Software Design & Integration process ............................................... 6

Performance Considerations ................................................................... 7

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1 Overview
1E Shopping is an industry leading solution that provides an App Store for the enterprise.
Shopping is used extensively by large and global organizations worldwide. IT organizations
rely heavily on Shopping to service end-user requests for software and other IT assets.
Shopping empowers the end-user to be self-sufficient and to get the software and services
they need, when they need them with minimal reliance on IT
While IT is happy to empower the end-user with Shopping, they are keen that the requests
submitted through Shopping be monitored through a centralized repository and platform
such as ServiceNow. Organizations like Coca-Cola and Cigna who have been 1E customers for
a long time, have now invested in the ServiceNow platform and are keen to provide the
unified and integrated experience that the integration will deliver
1Es suite of disruptive IT operations management tools save billions, solve problems and
simplify the management of large, complex IT environments in record time. Designed with a
singular focus to help drive down costs, 1Es solutions include tools for IT asset management,
Windows systems management and BYOPC. To understand how 1E can help you run your IT
for less, please do get in touch at info@1E.com, or:

UK (HQ)
1E, CP House,
97-107 Uxbridge Road
London W5 5TL, UK
Tel: +44 20 8326 3888
USA
1E Inc., 5 Penn Plaza, 9th Floor
New York, NY 10001, USA
Tel: +1 866 592 4214
India
1E, 10th Floor, Tower A
Advant Navis Business Park
Sector 142, Noida - 201305, India
Tel: +91 120 402 4000

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2 What Does The Integration

Accomplish?
The goal of the integration is to provide an integrated experience to enterprises:

By providing end-users with an App Store experience to shop for IT assets and
Enabling Systems Administrators (including help desk personnel) across different
support areas to use ServiceNow to monitor status of user-requests and provide
the appropriate level of responses to meet SLAs.
Providing a consolidated view of all IT incidents or tickets, including the ones open
through Shopping.
Consolidating 1E Shopping status information with other IT incidents allowing for
better correlation of incidents and faster and more targeted response from IT.

3 How Does The Integration Work?

Our solution, integrates 1E Shopping with the ServiceNow Incident Management module. A
new application has been created in the ServiceNow portal that has all of the required and
specified customizations for the integration.
Customizations include:

New fields in the Incident table

New choices for some of the existing fields and
Import set table and a transform.

Using the Web Service Import set, data from Shopping is populated in the Import Set table
from where it is transferred to the Incident table based on the mapping created between the
Import set table and the Incident table.
Shopping has an Integration Framework that facilitates the integration with 3rd party systems.
The Shopping Integration Framework invokes scripts at events such as Application Request,
Approval Update, Approval Completed, and Request Completed, that in turn makes external
calls to other 3rd party systems (shown below).

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Parameters captured by Shopping are passed from the Web Service Import Set to the import
set table. For this certification, Shopping does not make use of the ServiceNow web services.
However Shopping has the ability to use any interface that is callable, including web-services.
Integration steps and sequence of events:

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When the Shopping script is executed for the Application Request event, Shopping
passes the data to the import set table using the Web Service Import set which
includes a unique Shopping Reference Id.

The Shopping reference Id field in import set table is set to Coalesce and thus when
the Shopping script executes at the next Approval Update event, the Web Service
Import set updates the existing record and does not insert a new one.

When this data is transformed, the State of the Incident changes according to the
data passed from Shopping.

Import set mode is set to Synchronous so that transformation happens

immediately between the import set table and the target Incident table.

Thus for each request submitted in Shopping, an incident is opened in ServiceNow.

These incidents are updated and closed based on the workflow or user actions in
Shopping.

4 Software Design & Integration Process

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Shopping workflow integration process is initiated when a request is made by the

end-user from the Shopping web portal. At this stage, the Shopping Central
component kicks off the Application Requested script. The workflow integration
scripts are vbscripts that have been extended for this integration.

For each request, Shopping creates a unique Shopping GUID/reference id. This
Reference ID is the field or unique identifier used for tracking or updating tickets in
the ServiceNow Incident Management module.

The Shopping Reference ID becomes the unique id for the ticket generated in
ServiceNow Incident Management and is used for further modifications in the
ticket.

Shopping passes (to ServiceNow) information about the Caller, Request, Request
category, Assigned to, Assignment group, Additional comments, user email,
contact type, user machine name, opened by and other relevant parameters to the
Incident table, to open the ticket in Incident Management. This information is
passed to incident table after it is transformed from the import set table.
o

An additional .Net client has been developed (and is being used for the
integration) that calls the Web Service Import set to populate data into Import
Set table. This utility instantiates the call to the web service import set. The Web
Service call requires Basic Authentication.

The .Net client reads a settings file kept in the WorkflowIntegration folder of
Shopping installer directory. This settings xml file has the static data that needs
to be passed from Shopping to the incident table.

When the end-user submits a request from the Shopping web page, the Shopping
Central engine executes the script launched at the Application Requested
event which in turn makes a call to web service import set.

Once the request is approved by the first approver, status of the ticket changes and
this change now needs to propagate to Incident Management. The approval
triggers the execution of another vbscript launched at the Approval Update event.

The above process is repeated during the Approval Completed and Installation
Completed events, that each in turn execute similar scripts to finally close the
ticket.

To summarize the sequence of execution of scripts at appropriate events:

o

Application Requested script opens a new ticket

Approval Update script modifies the state

Approval Completed script modifies the state and indicates that delivery is
pending

Installation Completed script Request Completed (Closed)

The above workflow stages in shopping are described in more detail in the
Shopping Architecture document [R1].

The workflow integration framework in Shopping is a single threaded process that

supports the execution of one script at a time. One record at a time will be
imported and then transferred to ServiceNow from Shopping. Unless and until the
1st script either completes execution or times out, subsequent scripts will not be
triggered.

There is a single call to the webservice import set in the script. This is done to
ensure that there is no performance threat to ServiceNow during the integration.

Performance Considerations
The Shopping workflow integration framework is based on scripts for outbound transactions.
The framework only allows script to be run one at a time (single threaded mode).
Execution of each Shopping script will call the webservice import set to send data to the
import table. Data is transferred at the rate of one record per transaction. At no point, will the
transaction have more than one record.
The solution has been designed to control the flow of data and avoids generating data in bulk.
Request from Shopping

Transaction with ServiceNow

1 request per second

1 transaction per second

10 requests per second

10 transactions in 10 seconds

The web service Import Set inbound web service is used for passing data to the import set
table.
This call in the workflow integration scripts will not generate more than 1 transaction per
second, which is clearly within permissible limits. 1 record is created/modified in the Import
set table after each transaction.

To get more details on the integration and steps to implement it in your organization, please
contact your 1E account manager, email professional.services@1e.com, or call us at the numbers
below
About 1E
1Es suite of disruptive IT operations management tools save billions, solve problems and
simplify the management of large, complex IT environments in record time. Designed with a
singular focus to help drive down costs, 1Es solutions include tools for IT asset management,
Windows systems management and BYOPC.
Contact us
UK (HQ): +44 20 8326 3880
US: +1 866 592 4214
India: +91 120 402 4000
info@1e.com
Copyright 2014 1E. All rights reserved. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.

1E 2014