If you’re new to ServiceNow you’re probably realizing that there are a lot of cool things that you can do with the product.  In most cases, the functionality you need is already set up and ready to go.  Other things can be accomplished by installing a plugin that fits your particular need.  In my experience, there are a few plugins that end up being used (or should be used) on almost every ServiceNow installation.

Good news! After discussing these (and a few other) plugins with the ServiceNow development team, they’ve decided to include all of these plugins in the default ServiceNow build! Each of these plugins is still extremely useful, but if you’re working in a new install you shouldn’t need to worry about turning any of these plugins on.
See this wiki article for details…

#1: Best Practice – Incident Resolution Workflow

I have yet to build an incident management process for a client that didn’t include an incident resolution workflow.  Until recently, this functionality had to be built from scratch.  Now, you just need to activate the plugin.

#2: Best Practice – Task Survey Management

Surveys often end up being an important part of the Incident management process.  They allow you to get one more measure of your effectiveness as an IT organization.  This plugin enhances the out-of-box survey functionality, making surveys much easier to relate to tasks and giving you much better information for reporting as a result.  Install the corresponding Demo Data plugin to get a feel for how things can be configured.

#3: IP Range Based Authentication

If you’re looking for a way to restrict access to your ServiceNow instance, then this is the easiest way to do it.  Simply install the plugin, add the allowed IP address ranges, and go!  If you plan on using update sets then you’ll want to make sure to add allow permissions for all of your other ServiceNow instances so that they can talk to each other.

#4: JavaScript Editor

This plugin adds syntax highlighting and script macros to your Script fields in ServiceNow.  If you spend a lot of time as an administrator working with Business Rules, Client Scripts, and UI actions, this plugin can really help to speed up the process and make your code more readable.

#5: SLA

Small name, extremely useful.  If you’re planning on doing any sort of SLA/OLA management then you’ve got to have this plugin.  It adds much more flexibility and functionality over the basic SLA setup that you find in the out-of-box configuration.  Don’t forget to take that ‘Escalation’ field off of your forms and lists after installing this plugin.  The concept of a single Escalation per ticket really doesn’t mean much when you could possibly be dealing with multiple SLA/OLA records per ticket.

#6: System Update Sets (with remote update set support)

Update sets are the best way to migrate configurations between your ServiceNow instances.  The ability to capture configuration changes and migrate them to another instance can obviously be a huge time saver.  Make sure that you read the documentation on this one thoroughly before you start using it though.  Not everything gets captured by an update set and you need to make sure that your ServiceNow instances are all on the same release as you develop and migrate code.