We are lucky to employ an impressive amount of ServiceNow consultants that are highly skilled, experienced and extremely clever (and that is not a joke). They are able to create solutions for complex situations and integration projects I would say in any accounts – small or enterprise. Often the consultants have in-depth knowledge of more than only ServiceNow, and also know about protocols, technologies, infrastructures, networks, etc.
Quite honestly, they easily outsmart me with their technical skills (and they should because I’m more business development than implementation).
But every now and then an answer might be so obvious that they forget the basic and first taught rules and are ready to ‘over-engineer’ not only the question, but the solution too which they have at their hands.
A few days ago an appreciated implementation consultant colleague asked me the following question (and it often starts with “you’ve been working with ServiceNow for a long time, so you know a lot about it…..”)
A customer is using SAML SSO, and it works fine on the main instance URL. But it doesn’t work correctly in combination with the CMS site(s) they’ve created. And end users access requires SSO to the CMS site(s). Any idea what could be wrong?
Now if you start to do some heavy thinking on this, the picture quickly becomes complex, complexer and even over-complex. Because if you think about the different aspects involved here, like the possibility for multiple different CMS sites for 1 instance, the fact that these sites all have their own unique URL, the fact that SSO works correct in the main URL, but not on the CMS site URL, etc. – investigating these is expected to be time-consuming.
The first thought however is that the issue might be in the (CMS) URL handling that SSO needs to be able to cope with……
And then you can of course deep-dive into the ServiceNow technology, get to the foundations of the application and try to find out how this SSO stuff works and handles the different CMS URLs.
And that almost happened………….until I – the business development guy – applied one of the first taught and basic rules I think always need to be applied
CHECK THE SERVICENOW WIKI!
Most people don’t want to be the first to encounter a non-working situation and don’t get over-excited if they need to “go where no one has gone before“.
You hope someone already faced the issue, resolved it and then took the trouble of documenting the solution and publishing it.
And that is exactly what ServiceNow provides with their Wikipedia!
So after a short brainstorm-session with my colleague I checked the ServiceNow Wiki, supplying just 2 words: CMS SSO.
And guess what: the answer was there – plain and simple!
I’ve included the ServiceNow Wiki screenshot below – so you can read the solution to the challenge is actually quite simple. And we – of course – tested this and it works fine.
So take a simple advice from an old ServiceNow business development veteran: be sure to always first check the ServiceNow Wiki!
You can find it HERE.
Be brave and enjoy your ServiceNow.
You can reach me at 
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