** NOTE: MY POSTINGS REFLECT MY OWN VIEWS AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT THE VIEWS OF MY EMPLOYER, SYMFONI ESM**

When the Helsinki release arrived we all saw Service Portal and what it can do. All our focus was on how it would help us move from the old CMS application to a brand new world with Service Portal. Giving us the widgets, AngularJS and other fun stuff. Which would make our life both easier and funnier.

After a while the mind started to wander away on what other functionality that could be possible with Service Portal and its pages. Lately I have noticed that I haven't been alone going in this direction when similar thinking has been popping up at the community. Some of the questions has been on what you can do with those pages and if it's possible to display them inside the normal UI of ServiceNow. And of course this is something you can do it and you can do it pretty easy as well.

Before I had time to look into this any deeper Istanbul release came and now we are really starting to see the true power of Service Portal and what you can do with it.

The whole CAB Workbench is built within a Service Portal and I think it's just the beginning. I think we will see more and more applications being build this way and beside the having it built as a own UI, I bet we will see more and more pages being displayed inside he normal UI, like this example I quickly made:

This is easy created with a Service Portal and a module with an URL link.

Looking at what ServiceNow has on it road map and what the rumors says, they are moving more and more into widgets and Service Portal. And it's the right way in my opinion. Going away from UI Pages, means going away from Jelly. And neither we (users) nor ServiceNow is really happy about Jelly and seeing a road ahead which means less Jelly, I think we all will love to go down that road.

So in the future when I get to a requirement that in the past would have been a UI Page, I will first look if it's possible to do as a Widget/Service Portal. If not, perhaps there would be another solution and a UI Page as a last solution.

The only place I can see there is a need for a UI Page is where you using the GlideDialogWindow. Here I can't see any solution to replace it with something from the Service Portal, besides perhaps building the whole thing within the portal and that might be overdoing it and one of the places it isn't worth the effort.

So to answer my question in the subject. I think that UI Pages will still exists for a few more releases, but we will see less and less of them. I hope this little article has gotten your ideas a new perspective and hopefully we will see some real creative solutions in the future with Service Portal.

//Göran