Blake Skinner is an Senior Software Engineer for ThreeWill. In his previous positions, he has proven to be a well-rounded developer with the ability to effectively troubleshoot issues to increase efficiency. He is experienced on a wide range of platforms and has developed small to large-scale applications for Android, WordPress, and SharePoint.
Introduction
Microsoft Graph Connectors are now in preview mode and appear to be showing up for most folks who have turned on targeted releases in their dev tenants.
So, naturally, we had to see what we could break… er, do! If you want to see more on Microsoft Graph Connectors, my colleague, Mike Homol, wrote an article on a custom graph connector which can be found here.
Where can the search connectors be found?
The search connector tab can be found here.
What does the ServiceNow connector do?
This connector will index knowledge-base articles that are visible to all users in your organization.
How do we set up the connector?
The Microsoft built connectors are set up using an easy to use wizard.
Name and Connection ID are required but as far as I can tell, the values can be anything you want.
Authentication options include basic and oAuth with oAuth being the recommendation. This is where we are able to break… er, do things for the first time. Basic worked fine for us but as we mentioned, oAuth is the recommended option. The first mystery to solve was determining what the Redirect URL should be for the ServiceNow endpoint. After working with Microsoft, we were able to figure that out. Luckily, the endpoint requirements are now part of the ServiceNow connector documentation.
The next issue we encountered was interesting. Our dev tenant admin account did not have access to ServiceNow. When we clicked ‘sign in’ after entering our Client ID and Client Secret, a ServiceNow popup was shown. This popup should have granted us access to login with our ServiceNow account, however, it defaulted to log us in using the dev tenant admin account. Of course, we were broken…. er, not working again. Eventually, we figured out that if we were logged in with our ServiceNow account in a separate browser tab before we tried to create the connection, it would work successfully.
Once we resolved our connection issue, we made it to the configure data screen. We kept the default filter which is workflow state=published.
Next, we managed the search schema for our connector.
For search permissions we are only provided one option, “Everyone”. Our assumption is this will change in the future.
We kept the default refresh settings.
Our connection is now published!
Done, right…? Nope! Now, we need to create a Search Vertical and Result Type.
Creating a Search Vertical
Creating Result Type
We utilize another wizard for Result Type. We kept the default settings on each screen.
Microsoft makes it easy to customize how our search results look with a design wizard that will generate the json we need.
One Last Break?
We broke the connector one last time when we moved to production. In production, we had some articles in ServiceNow that did not have the ‘Last Updated Time’ (weird… right?). This caused issues with the index throwing a null exception. Our friends at Microsoft were able to fix this for us.
Conclusion
We named the vertical “ITHelp Knowledge.” As you can see, we now see ServiceNow content.
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