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Hi there,

One of my favorite nice new elements on the new Employee Center, is the Quick Links widget. Quick Links are a way to quickly access internal and external resources related to specific departments within your organization. You can create Quick Links, associate Quick Links to topics, and restrict access to Quick Links with ease.

Though what if you want to display a certain Quick Link always, independent of a topic like HR or IT? Or actually when having demo-data installed, you might notice out-of-the-box there are some Quick Links like these. How have these been made static/always displaying?

Let's have a close look at this undocumented piece.

Quick Links

Just a snipped of out-of-the-box Quick Links when having demo-data installed.

Create a Quick Link

The ServiceNow Docs does describe clearly how to create a Quick Link. Also how to assign Topics or how to restrict access to Quick Links is described well. See this page:

Create a quick link

What's not documented, is the part of Quick Links that are always shown, even when not attached to an active Topic. Looking at the earlier image, all these Quick Links will still be displayed when the Taxonomy is deactivated (or the many-to-many relationship deactivated or removed).

"Static" Quick Links

So why are some Quick Links always shown? What if you want to remove one of these Quick Links or actually add a static Quick Link yourself? In my search after this, I grabbed the sys_id of one of the Quick Links and performed a full instance search for any text containing the sys_id. One unclear result popped up: an Instance record [sp_instance] and more specifically:

(Employee Center)

https://your-instance.service-now.com/sp%5Finstance.do?sys%5Fid=2fd7d372775530104cdac0c23e5a9953

(Employee Center Pro)

https://your-instance.service-now.com/sp%5Finstance.do?sys%5Fid=9781a44153b030101865ddeeff7b129c

In the "Additional options, JSON format" field, I found the sys_id of the Quick Link:

"quick_links": {
    "value": "fed413e5e71130104cda66ef11e8a95f,3b445ba5e71130104cda66ef11e8a96f,12e413e5e71130104cda66ef11e8a965,9b729365e71130104cda66ef11e8a9a7,aff317a5e71130104cda66ef11e8a939,4e116048e76530104cda66ef11e8a9bc",
    "displayValue": "Our Company, Org Chart, Careers, Password Reset, System Status, Request Standing Desk"
}

Interesting! So if you would like to remove (not delete) the out-of-the-box Quick Links which will still be shown even without Taxonomy or Topics active/related, this is the place to be. Or when wanting to add your own Quick Link which always should be shown, this is the place to be! Simply add the sys_id of the Quick Link you want always to be shown.

And good to know… using User Criteria on static Quick Links is also possible, just works the same as regular Quick Links.

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And that's it. If any questions, let me know!

Kind regards,

Mar k Roethof

ServiceNow Technical Platform Architect @ Quint Technology

2x ServiceNow Developer MVP

2x ServiceNow Community MVP

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