This is a very short article, as it's just a quick update on a previous project.

In a previous article: Detect Update Set Collisions Before They Happen, we made a tool freely available, which would help to prevent developers from accidentally overriding or colliding with each other's update sets, or otherwise having issues caused by conflicts or improperly selected update sets.

Since publishing that article, we've gone through multiple version iterations, and we've recently released the official Version 2.
Version 2 is available from this link, as is the documentation.

The tool basically works by running in your development instance and monitoring tables that would be tracked in update sets, and ensuring that if the user is an admin, and could potentially cause a conflict if they saved the record that they're currently viewing, a warning dialog is shown.

Unfortunately, because of the limitations of ServiceNow and scoped applications, we cannot deploy this as an application in the traditional sense. There's just too much going on. However, we've built in a way around that so that all you have to do is load an update set and click Install.

The installer is actually the polymorphic part, as it determines how to install itself and what tables to monitor for updates, based on your instance's configuration and usage. We've also added some configuration options in the form of system properties that can be configured from the application module that's installed.

We're giving away this "USCA" tool for free, to our fantastic readers, who have elevated this website to one of the most popular ServiceNow help and development sites on the planet. Thank you!