well welcome everyone this is charles rayburn i am a customer success advocate senior manager customer success here at servicenow welcome to today's office hour the office hour is all about flow designer from paris functionality overview perspective so we'll talk about practices changes that have occurred etc we have our a wonderful subject matter expert here brian bim schleger be talking to you guys about flow designer as always the format of our office hours are the first 20 to 30 minutes is all about the superman our expert talking about from a best practice perspective and grounding us in the topic nature that's uh the remaining time is available for all of you guys to ask any key questions i would just ask that if you have any questions please put them in the chat window i will ask those questions on your behalf to brian uh so they let you answer those questions and definitely if there's any topic nature things like that that you would like for us to cover in future office hours reach out to your advocate as well as submit some information in our surveys and this is how we prove and put together these office hours in the future so with that said brian can you hear us okay okay i think he had dropped off and back in uh i can hear you perfect all right well the floor is now yours so welcome brian all right thank you very much um nice to meet you everybody hope you had uh good holidays if you're celebrating them uh today as charles mentioned we'll be talking all about flow designer uh i'll start off by talking about uh what's what has recently released in paris some of the things we'll we'll go into a little bit deeper than others but we'll we'll go over all the top key features at least in terms of why they're important and what you can accomplish with them and then if we have time at the end we can give a sneak peek of some of what we are working on in quebec as well certainly some of the features that we're starting in paris we are continuing or extending in quebec so it might be valuable uh to show what's happening on that front as well um as charles mentioned feel free to add any comments into the chat and we can answer those questions as they pop up um i i plan to keep it about 20 minutes uh because if there are you know 50 plus of you that have joined this call and operating under the assumption that you have some questions or you know you're looking for a better way to to do things within flow designer so with that said uh just let me get something set up real quick and we can just jump into what is going on with paris all right so i am operating under the assumption that you can see my screen right now it says paris flow designer at the top uh this is kind of the laundry list of what is coming out in paris um we'll kind of go through them one by one but there are a couple themes that we were going for and sometimes those themes aren't necessarily noted well within bullet points um but one of our big themes for us has been performance for flow designer specifically for flows that have you know 50 plus actions on them we know that the flow engine itself is incredibly performant but we frequently heard from customers in new york and orlando that anytime you tried to open flows that were large flow designer just started to crawl a little bit so that's one of the things that we didn't necessarily bullet out on this screen but is one of the notable improvements that we certainly think our customers are going to appreciate in paris now the second theme that we had in paris and that we're really extending on in quebec as well is providing more secure access to the product for non-admin users and you know automation is becoming core to the workplace not only for admins but for for non-admins as well you know standard members of of the workforce just want to automate stuff to get things done uh so we're trying to create an environment where admins or you know servicenow administrators or people in the i.t department can create an environment within flow designer that is safe and secure for non-admins to be building within flow designer the first item that kind of demonstrates that focus is persona based access with flow access criteria so what we are doing with this feature is you can create rules that define what content is available to users of a certain role and when we say content we're talking specifically about flows subflows actions triggers and steps within actions as well now this is really cool because if you are an admin and let's say you have an incredibly intricate flow that handles a lot of security related items or it handles really sensitive data and you don't want it being visible to other people or you don't want other users who might not have the same familiarity with the flow as you you can create a content rule that disallows other or only allows visibility of that role to only allows visibility of that flow to people with a certain role uh this is also pretty nice because if you have more complex actions uh you know whether it's connecting to servers or looping through a bunch of of data or anything that connects with external systems you might want to limit one of the use cases we've already heard of is for companies that want to limit flow designer use and like the hr department to only have slack and email access and the standard servicenow actions well now we have a way to do that so this this first item right here is is pretty big uh and it's all around managing what content people have access to within flow designer the second one is run with role now this one is really cool because we can allow users who don't necessarily have sufficient permissions to run something we can temporarily grant them a higher roll so they can run that flow when they trigger that flow they can run it with a particular role so this works really well in combination with our first item with flow access criteria so let's say for instance as an admin we have a particular flow that we don't want members of the hr team to to access or our flow contains actions that we don't want members of the hr team to access well if we want them to be able to run this flow but not grant them the actions we could temporarily grant them with an elevated role to complete this flow this is a really nice way to allow users to still you know trigger off automated workflows without necessarily granting them the the keys to the kingdom uh so these two features are really big in creating a more secure environment for non-admin users now the next one is decision table actions these are going to be honestly pretty useful and can be a helpful replacement if you use a lot of nested if statements or complex if else logic within your flow the the decision table actions it references decision tables within the servicenow platform and ultimately allows you to get one or many results out of a particular action so anytime we get to that that point within a flow we can evaluate uh certain criteria against a particular decision table and get our response back and continue with our flow it's a pretty elegant solution for dealing with really complex conditionals now uh we have improved catalog support as well we won't get into these as as much other than to say that these were some of the most requested items that we see on our idea portal is really tightening that connection between uh service catalog and flow designer so when we get into update and delete multiple these are going to be steps within within actions so one of the things we found through through testing with a lot of our customers in in observing how they build flows is we found numerous instances where customers would need to perform some actions on a bunch of records so they'd be creating small loops to loop through like an array of records but always updating the exact same field perhaps updating the status or the state on a handful of records or going through and modifying the short description on a handful of records well we now have steps uh and actions built in so you can pass in an array of these records and you can update the same field on all of these records all at the same time and we also have a couple of flow api enhancements so one of the the biggest uh biggest items here is this get output via context id so via the flow api we can pass in that context id and we can get the result of that flow so we can get that the flow outputs that you know within a standard flow you can define certain flow outputs so this one is pretty helpful if you have multiple flows uh that you know might might link to each other or might operate in isolation but you want to get values from from one before continuing another those are really kind of the the big improvements again with the the notable exception of performance overall which isn't bulleted out right here but in terms of the new features that are added we really think that the access related items whether it's flow access criteria or run with role are are really huge and should enable this this new wave of citizen developers to safely use the flow designer product and we're continuing to improve our service catalog support and then smaller fine-tuned actions like update and delete multiple items now when we get to our our kind of smaller improvements these are things where we're kind of tightening the screws on the product or quicker wins that you know help out our customers in smaller ways you know relative to uh safe and secure access for the flow designer product one of the the items that you know was really small that we've added but um in early testing our customers have found the most useful is the duplicate action uh we've found through a lot of testing with our our users that a lot of times when you're building flows uh you use the same actions over and over again you know whether it's a part of a conditional or it's part of a loop um or you just you know constantly trying to look up a record or delete or or modify a record or you know adding in a log statement sending email whatever uh it's it's pretty frequent occurrence for users to use the same action multiple times within a flow so now we actually just have a duplicate action button directly on the flow designer canvas so you can hover over any action that you've already added and you can click duplicate and it will copy all of the contents of that action as well as the action itself so if you have a particular email configured um that you want to send as a notification once you get to some point in a loop or conditional if you hit duplicate on that it will copy all the 2 and the cc and the subject and the body with it as well so this is uh really useful for for building out flows that they use the similar actions and the next one that we think is a big deal at least for for readability is flattening out the action numbers and and what that means is on the left-hand side of flow designer in pre-paris versions uh we'll have items where you know i didn't make those sandwiches period um we're good to go no it's it's all right uh uh let's see uh flattening up the action number uh yeah flattening out the action number is is really interesting and it helps from a readability perspective uh we noticed that when customers were building really complex flows um so with nested looping nested logic uh you know a lot of nested steps in that would go deep many levels our numbering system of you know action 2.1.1.1.3 could get out of hand pretty quick and didn't really map with the amount of space that we had allocated to the numbering on the left-hand side of flow designer so switch to a flattened numbering system or anytime you add another action to the canvas it just increments the step by by one so all of our actions are action one action two action three uh now so they all have kind of a unique single number and they don't have any dot notation and then this next one is ghost actions it's a little bit of an edge case but it was a scenario that we were running into when customers were bringing flows in from sub prod into production instances where let's say you're bringing in uh you design a flow that has a particular spoke or particular action on your subprime instance and you bring that into your production instance but you don't have that particular action or spoke you don't have a particular action or spoke that is contained within the flow well before paris flow designer would kind of freak out a little bit and not exactly know how to handle it but now with paris we have what we are calling ghost actions where there will be a representation of the action that you don't have set up in the flow and it will be informing you that you know something should go here you just don't don't have it and then in most scenarios we found when customers are in this situation they're in control of both you know the sub prod and the production environment so they can pretty quickly triage which action they are missing but this allows that flow to effectively be recoverable so if i import a flow and i don't have a particular action once i install that action on that instance then my flow will be back to normal so this is a pretty handy one when moving flows between instances uh and then the last two items we have here are a little bit more of exception handling and how to handle items when when things go wrong we are this is kind of a an introduction that we have into handling errors and exceptions and it's on a very very specific basis um and we'll actually be extending this type of functionality uh across all actions within rome or at least that's what the tentative plans are right now um but this allows you to set particular timeouts for a wait for condition so you're just not waiting forever for some condition to to happen um if you have a step or an action in your flow that's you know wait for a particular condition you can have a time out after a day a week etcetera and then the look up record catch failure before paris if you attempt to look up a record and it doesn't exist or there are a couple other circumstances where it might fail uh like if you're requesting from a particular table and table has an odds set up uh it would it would fail and you'd just kind of be stuck but now we have a way to gracefully continue if there is a failure on the lookup record action so those are a couple of the smaller improvements that we have on the right and that as mentioned at the top there are a couple transform functions as well i think the main one that we added in paris was key value mapping we have documentation on it but it allows you to uh kind of customize customized values i believe in a if you have a json object or complex object that you're passing in you can transform it to override particular values uh so that is is paris overall it it's a kind of a oversimplification of the the hard work that the team has has put in um but again the the big themes have been in performance uh so handling on the front end complex flows that have 50 or more actions and also uh managing content and secure access for for non-admin users and then third improving the support with with the catalog builder uh i know that that was kind of a lot to to go over and when we've talked with with customers about our paris functionality before normally there is one or two of these features that is particularly more interesting than than another to them you know kind of based on a use case uh so i i suppose what we could do right now is um open this up to two questions and just answer any questions that you have about what's coming up with paris or any best practices and then if we have time at the end uh we can give a little sneak peek into what's coming with quebec as well great well brian i do have a question in the chat window from ryan how do you avoid having workflows built and understood by folks that subsequently leave the company this is a long-standing problem of allowing our colleagues outside of it to create workflows in excel access slack etc um avoid having workflows built and understood by folks that subsequently leave the company yeah one of the things that that we encourage from a best practice at least within flow designer is to use the the annotation feature so when you are in flow designer you can annotate any particular action that is on the canvas i myself when i build workflows i use that to effectively act as as comments for what i'm trying to accomplish at a particular step uh you know within any enter large enterprise organization sometimes it's it's hard to manage who uh you know what happens when when employees move on and leave what happens to their their work and their stuff but i'd say from a best practice flow designing perspective using the annotations to describe what is happening at each step or what you're looking to accomplish at each each step is really useful when new users or other employees need to look at the flows that you're designing uh can can we require annotations uh that's a good question um i don't think so but that is uh something that i'm gonna have to go back and check on uh it ryan admittedly uh that is the first time i've been asked that question and i think it's a really interesting one great yeah all right other questions from the field now is that time to go ahead and type in a question or if you want to unmute go ahead and ask your question point blank um i have a question this is melanie can you talk about when best practices from when you would use flow designer versus a workflow um just maybe talk about why it's more important to you flows low designer versus when it's best to use a workflow yeah absolutely thanks for the question melanie uh this is a question that we get a lot and probably probably it's uh understandable that we would get the question a lot because we have two tools that do relatively similar things you know we automate automate processes kick off something perform some actions and achieve some outcome what i can say from our recommendation is if you're building something new we recommend building it in flow designer from a feature perspective at once quebec launches workflow and flow designer are effectively at parity they can accomplish all the same things sometimes there's a different way to accomplish the same thing but from a functionality perspective they'll they'll be uh comparable uh the the key difference is uh we are continuing to support the workflow tool but we are not enhancing it and we haven't enhanced that product uh over the past two years so for a lot of the functionality that we're releasing today like persona based access or you know creating secure environments to run with a particular role and a lot of the concepts that we're building out in in uh quebec and we're planning on for rome to take advantage of those concepts and in that functionality we'd recommend uh building on on flow designer did i accurately answer your question yeah you did you actually did thank you okay great so so far i don't see any additional questions in the chat who would like to ask a question point blank then thank you melanie hmm silence you know brian i guess uh if you wanted to go into some of the items that are in quarterback maybe that might spawn up some uh some time for them to kind of have some questions uh thought about sure sure let's uh oh well we did have one more one more thing for for paris now admittedly i'm the pm for flow designer and not for integration hub but some of these features coming up for integration hub are pretty important um there are there are a lot of things in here that are extensions or updates of existing functionality but one of the big ones is a data stream from a source so if you're trying to get a whole bunch of records like tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of records from an external source this will allow you to batch them so instead of timing out the entire system waiting for all your content to be imported you can grab a certain amount at a time and process them this is really good for switching over between systems or updating directories of information multiple active connections is is really good for example if you have multiple slack instances and you want to be able to have active connections for multiple slacks at once or your company has two box accounts for whatever reason or there are two [Music] most of the time when we see multiple active connections it's with messaging tools or document storage but this makes it easy to have multiple active ones at the same time now the the big one in here that we found uh customers enjoy the most at least in early testing is the json parser step so json parser will allow you to take an input of json during the action designer process and you can map that json to a a complex object within paris now what that means is that from an output perspective your action that you create on the flow canvas can output json represented as your data pills so this makes it really easy to use like a json output from some previous step or something that you get as a result of a an api call and get that into a usable format with data pills um this one is is really handy to use and makes connecting with external systems a lot more uh friendly once this is configured correctly um there are two questions since we last chatted what things cannot be done in flow designer that you can do in workflow uh it's a good good question uh i'm trying to think because uh with each each release we knock a few things off of the list um there's one particular nuanced action um uh one of them is the rollback action where you can roll back a workflow to like a state at a particular point within the workflow that is not directly supported within flow designer but using loops and combination of different methodologies you can kind of create the same effect that's one of the big ones i'd have to check on what the other one is but there's other one other particular feature that is not supported but we hear about it from customers so in infrequently uh that it's not top of mind right now so i can double check and get back to you after this call uh the next step how would the json parsers step handle name value pairs that were not present in the original payload uh yeah this is a good question so the way that the json parser best works right now is you'd want to have some sort of example of a standard payload that you would be getting because you handle that mapping of the keys two data pills at one time during the design experience so um you you'd want to get an example of a standard output that you would would have and map that the initial time and then uh then kind of go from there now if you have json output that has arrays in it where you could have an array of objects and you could have anywhere from you know zero to n objects i'd say make sure your example json output has at least one of those objects and then uh we know how to map it for you know the rest of the number that that come in in future payloads cool so with jumping ahead to quebec now i know this is a little bit in the future because obviously what this call about is is in paris uh but quebec has some really interesting features that are are coming through um the first is well i suppose talking thematically again one of the big focuses for quebec is enabling citizen developers who have limited programming experience but have some level of technical aptitude to you know be able to create automations app engine studio is going to be a standalone product for low code users to build applications including the data model security automations etc and flow designer is going to be a part of app engine studio as well so everything you can do in flow designer you'd be able to do within app engine studio which would kind of allow for a controlled streamlined environment for low code builders to create applications secondly we hear a lot of feedback that flow designer can be a little bit difficult to understand how to use especially the first time you're introduced to it particularly for users who don't have as deep of a technical background so with this release we are introducing guided tours so kind of pop overs that help indicate what the user can do within flow designer we have templates that the user can build new flows from and these are for simple but common scenarios so send me a notification when thing x happens or when this this particular record gets updated to this particular value go do this thing or a standard service catalog approval request workflow and then finally we have embedded help embedded help is is really cool we found through testing that when people are building out flows and flow designer they frequently have flow designer open in one tab and they have a knowledge base or documentation open in another tab with embedded help what we are doing is bringing that help for each action each standard servicenow action directly onto the canvas so if you add an action to the canvas you'll get a little help icon and when you click on it a side panel opens with all of your help content available for you so you can be building and referencing the documentation all within one screen so you can stay focused in terms of usability improvements we're updating our logic how we represent if statements in particular to more clearly represent what is happening we had a couple we have repeated feedback where users don't fully understand how the uh power if statements are are working because we don't necessarily require that you mandate we don't require that you add an else or an elsif you can just kind of have a an if and a branch and kind of be done with it um and particularly when multiple if statements get nested together for you know chaining complex logic uh we heard repeated feedback from from customers that it was difficult to understand when certain branches of logic ended or what happened when you end a certain branch where do you go once a certain branch completes so we have a couple improvements mostly from a visual perspective to help communicate what is actually happening from a logic perspective now uh with the action picker if you remember in paris we talked about duplicate action you know people are picking the same actions relatively frequently or they use the same action over and over again at various points of the step we're updating our action picker to have two new categories now the first of which is recently used so it will contain your top or the most recent 10 actions that you the user have used within this action picker so if your organization has a whole bunch of different spokes different actions etc you can save all of your time from from browsing or searching or digging in and you can go back to your your most recently used we also have most popular so this is to help make most popular is the most used actions within your organization so this is valuable when a new spoke might get added and new actions are made available to end users if you know one one developer one admin starts using that that spoke pretty heavily it could appear and most popular on a different users action picker list this is a valuable way to discover what other people in your organization have been been using without you know the need of some formal notification now in this other category we have feature access criteria and if we zoom back to paris we had content access criteria so feature access criteria and content access criteria are two parts of the whole right content access criteria allows you to define what content flows subflows actions triggers etc are available to users with a certain role and feature access criteria allows you to define what features are available to users with a certain role now this one's super valuable because the features that we allow users to control are a certain visibility of buttons ability to take certain actions so the example we like to to provide that kind of shows the value perhaps we want to allow some low code developers or some some business users the ability to create flows but we don't want them to publish the flows or activate the flows we still want the activation process to be a like a gate for the the it or the admin team well we could create a role that just simply doesn't have access to the activate or deactivate button so users could get in and build whatever they want but when it's actually time to activate it they would have to notify an admin to to review the flow this is just another way where we can customize the end experience for for users who might not need all the keys and all the the power of flow designer so if you take the time to to configure it content access and in feature access are really powerful tools to customize uh the flow designer experience for end users now finally the the big one uh that we always we always get questions about and you know we had a question in the chat earlier today what is something in uh workflow that's not in flow designer i specifically omitted talking about scratch pad variables which are temporary arbitrary variables that you can set we are introducing flow variables into flow designer in quebec which allows you to create your own variables which in turn create data pills and you can set their value to whatever you would like so they start off as as null and then you can set and update and modify the values of that data pill however you want throughout the course of your flow this is one of our most requested features and it was actually supposed to be ready to go in in paris but we had some uh kind of last minute challenges with team capacity so we're really excited for this to be out and i played around with this feature for a couple of my own automations and it makes it makes things certain things uh much simpler to accomplish so uh so yeah these these are kind of the big four areas for quebec now understanding we've talked about paris and we've talked about quebec any any questions about what's coming so so far i'm not saying any in the chat window but really interested in the whole flow variables that's just my opinion this is charles so yeah flow variables is um flow variables is the thing that makes uh any type of looping or recursion a lot a lot easier um definitely yeah and definitely the embedded help and i'm wondering if a lot of the a lot of you customers on the line are you guys finding the ability to to get what you need to help kind of build out some accurate flows things like that pretty successfully um do you think can see embedded health as something that's going to help enable that even better i'd like to see some of the more about information around those templates that are there anything to kind of help you guys be that much more successful in using flow designer definitely speak up or is it that easy to use um i would just say i think the individual or the just having the help with at your side would be very helpful because the first time i built it it took me i struggled a lot i got through it but it's a lot because the concept is totally different so um but to have those guides and help would be beneficial great yeah and the the guided tours whenever they are available they appear in the help panel for you as as well so within that help panel we have uh kind of general help content on how to uh build your first flow design your first action use logic that type of stuff but then once you click on help for a particular action it can be it will detail like okay here are the uh inputs and outputs for a lookup record action to help you guide through that process yeah i'm also looking forward to your the templates as well because i think that would be beneficial as well just have a guide something to work from and then build upon so perfect great oh a question in the field from laurel do you envision fd replacing workflows so flow designer replacing workflows in the service catalog request fulfillment space and definitely obviously i'm not a developer what do you think brian yeah i'd say for many of our customers they're already using flow designer for you know items like this so service catalog request fulfillment i know we internally are using flow designer for request fulfillment um one of the things i i would also say is that eventually at some point in the distant future we will be sun setting workflow as a tool but we always give 18 months heads up when that's about to happen and we haven't determined a date for that yet so my on unofficial guidance there were probably like two years out from that but um in terms of what like the long-term vague road map is eventually you'll want to use flow designer for uh for this type of work and in any automation work that comes up great okay and then terry uh when you sunset it does that mean any being used will stop working or we will just not have support for fixing any issues so sunset for the uh i guess the workflow engine yeah uh that's one of the things that we would need to figure out whenever we decide what the the sunset date is um we've been looking at a couple different options like you know would it be possible to to build a tool that could you know convert workflows into flow designer or like how do we handle support and things like that all i can say right now is uh we're not sure but any i i put it like this when we when we do decide to sunset workflow we give you at least a year and a half heads up and we by that point we would have a comprehensive plan for what support and transition and and all that would look like so sorry i don't have more more depth in detail for you right now but be assured that when we do announce that we will definitely have those answers great we have about five more minutes left any last minute questions for brian around paris functionality related to flow designer or quebec features or even for those who are still using orlando any uh current questions or comments related to flow designer all right i'm gonna start the countdown going once going twice all right well thank you so much brian for your time today it was a pleasure having you uh discuss flow designer from paris functionality perspective and very excited about to see the quebec items uh that are coming um definitely for all of you who are attending today from a customer perspective thank you so much and for those of you who are listening to the recording if you have any questions feel free to reach out to your success advocate and we'll try to get you some good best practice materials and guidance on your flow designer needs well thank you all so much i'll send out the recording as well as the survey after uh available thank you guys so much take care bye