How you connect other systems to ServiceNow requires considerable thought. Most of the time, the plumbing is fairly easy, but you need to know where to route the pipes. You don't want to get fresh and waste water mixed up!
At a very high level, there are two points to consider when importing data or creating an integration:
- What data points am I transferring? For example, which fields should I match it with?
- When do I want to transfer it? Is it on a nightly basis, whenever a ticket is created, or even when the Work notes field is updated?
This information should feed into whatever mechanism you eventually use.
In general, if you are exchanging data that represents more than one record at a time, ServiceNow uses a pull mechanism. This generally happens on a scheduled basis, usually nightly, to keep the two systems in loose synchronization.
Importing an XML or CSV file is easy with ServiceNow. Place the file on an FTP server and have ServiceNow check...