Our user access example application is now complete, having been developed and tested. We will now need to deploy the application to other ServiceNow instances.

For our example, we will choose the method of publishing to an update set so that we could take this application to any ServiceNow instance. As we learned earlier in this section, we need to open up the user access application and click on the related link Publish to Update Set... to start.

In the window that appears, we fill in the form as shown here:

We do not have demo data for our user access application, so we can uncheck the box. A description has also been added to let administrators who install the application know what functionality the application can provide.

Once the Publish button is clicked, we can then see the new update set once the process has completed. This update set is already set to Complete when is is created.

We can see the update set created for our application here:

The update set for our application can now be exported to XML using the related link, which will then allow the application to be imported into any other ServiceNow instance. 

To import the update set into another instance, a system administrator can simply import the XML by right-clicking the header bar of a list view and selecting Import XML. The update set will then be available to be previewed and committed.

It is also possible to set up or use an existing update source to pull this completed update set into another ServiceNow instance you have.

Using our user access application example, we have seen the various stages of custom application development and how to progress through each stage. ServiceNow is such an open-ended platform that the custom applications that can be created are almost limitless.