The Portable Web Client is a chat widget that can run on third-party web pages, in the service portal, or in UI Builder portals.

The Portable Web Client is a new Seismic component that makes it easy to add Virtual Agent chat to your page. It simplifies configuration and provides the following features:
  • Easily configurable
  • Simpler single sign-on (SSO) authentication flow
  • Connect to Service Portal Agent Chat
  • System parameters and context variables work the same as before

Prerequisites for using the Portable Virtual Agent web client

The Portable Web Client uses an inline frame element (iframe). The third-party website must be under the same parent domain as your ServiceNow® instance. For example, site1.company.com and site2.company.com share the same parent domain. If you're embedding the web client on any subdomain that is not shared with your ServiceNow instance, the URL must be a custom instance URL. Due to increased browser security, the web client may fail to load if you don't use a custom URL.

Before you begin, do the following:
  1. Activate the custom URL plugin (com.snc.customurl) in your instance.
  2. Add the custom URL (that you previously purchased and registered) to your instance.
Note: To learn more about using custom URLs, see Associating custom URLs to your instance.

Using SSO authentication with the Portable Virtual Agent web client

After you embed the Virtual Agent client, you can optionally trigger SSO authentication from the web client, but only when your instance is set up to use an external SSO provider. Your hosting site must also use the same SSO provider as your instance. For details on setting SSO providers, see External single sign-on (SSO).

To trigger SSO authentication, create a JavaScript script that defines conditions for running authentication and redirects users to a web client page that you specify. You also specify the allowed URLs that can be passed in this script, by identifying them in the com.glide.cs.web_client_login_redirect_urls system property. Specify the full redirect URLs or the host part of the URL, such as https://example.com.

This procedure requires that you set values for the following two system properties:
  • com.glide.cs.embed.csp_frame_ancestors
  • com.glide.cs.embed.xframe_options (IE 11 only)
These properties determine the security policy for the embedded web client, namely how browsers render and secure HTML content for Virtual Agent and Live Agent chat, in an iframe, before you embed the web chat client. The HTTP header directives that you specify tell the browser whether a page can be embedded on certain domains to mitigate clickjacking attempts. Setting both properties ensures that there are security directives for major browsers and also older browsers, such as Internet Explorer.
Note: If you're using the Content Management System (CMS) application to create custom interfaces for the Now Platform and ServiceNow® applications, be aware that it does not support Virtual Agent.