UI settings and personalization

When navigating the ServiceNow UI, it's important to understand the difference between configuration, and personalization. These are defined terms within ServiceNow. As a general rule, configuration results in changes for everyone, whereas personalization results in changes just for you.

Most configuration modifies global system settings, configuration records, and properties (properties can be found in the sys_properties table), whereas most personalization results in modified or generated preferences (user preferences can be found in the sys_user_preference table). You can create Global default preferences by creating a preference record in the sys_user_preference table that isn't assigned to any particular user, but these default preferences can be overridden on a user-by-user basis, if users modify their preferences manually. It would be possible to create a data policy or business rule to prevent users from customizing certain preferences, but this may lead to a bad user experience. We'll discuss data policies and business rules in a later chapter.

Some examples of personalization are:

Some examples of configuration on the other hand, are:

Take care not to make configuration changes when you mean to make personalization changes. Having the admin role can be a burden in this way. Some even avoid this by having entirely separate admin-only accounts that they must log into separately, so they won't make configuration changes by accident.