exciting features that my colleague mo will be showing you the experience for so thanks again for tuning in today before we dive in just a few housekeeping items that we wanted to cover please stay on mute and introduce yourself when asking a question virtually or directly we'd love to know who you are please put your questions in the chat window and if you want to ask your question directly use the raise virtual raise the hand feature and wait for the moderator to call on you we'll we'll be as diligent as possible and get your questions answered quickly once we see them come in this session will be recorded as lisa had mentioned so this will be readily available for you to review at a later moment hey mo why don't you go ahead and please introduce yourself hi everyone good morning good afternoon my name is mo abushaba i am the product owner on the now support portal and i'll be talking to you a little bit later on shortly about upgrades and the all-new upgrades experience on the now support portal thanks so much mo my name is pete withers i'm a senior campaign planner here at servicenow i've been been with servicenow for about five years my primary my primary focus is on the customer post purchase journey so that includes upgrades that include includes campaign planning around now the now support portal um and a few other a few other reverse sites i'm going to more or less play the moderator role today as uh as mo shows you you know some of our new and exciting features on the now support portal so at servicenow we're proud to deliver hundreds of innovative new features to our customers in each servicenow family release we roll out a family release twice a year and that typically occurs in the spring and the fall with the last being the quebec release which was back in march to unlock these continuous customer driven innovations you need to upgrade to the latest family release when it becomes available so please save these dates and roam as mentioned here is going to be coming in mid-september so you can actually already sign up for the early release program and that's available in now support as well before we dive into uh the demo from from my colleague mo um just wanted to cover a few more points here so new customers are provisioned into the most current family release when they sign on with us so right now that's the quebec release and with this you'll be able to leverage the power of a single platform to fuel fuel business agility and resilience whether that's optimizing it productivity and costs driving customer loyalty delivering employees the right experiences or creating new work workflow apps and what do we mean by a family release it means that the platform and all servicenow apps are updated and released at the same time you can't mix different versions of applications on a single servicenow instance and why that is is because servicenow apps are designed to work together which adds value so family releases let you access this platform value along with all the updated and new apps that we release so just remember this only applies to a specific service now instance if you have multiple instances each instance can be at its own release level for example you might want to develop on rome our next release once it's released and still keep your production environment on quebec until you're ready to upgrade to rome and now for the good stuff i'm going to go ahead and hand it over to mo to show you the new experience in now support awesome thank you pete appreciate setting the stage for that and yeah at this point we'll get it we'll get to dive deeper into the uh demo for the all-new now support reimagined as we call it experience this went live on may 1st so it's literally 24 days old still fresh and figured it's a good opportunity to showcase some of the new streamlined features we've simplified a lot of the functions and upgrade experiences and how to do upgrades and manage upgrades so what i've done here is of um using i'm using my demo user joe smith from demo company acme and this is what you'll see as a customer logging into the now support portal the first thing you want to do for managing your upgrades or managing anything related to your instance is going to the instances bar or section here and under that instances menu you'll click on instances dashboard and this is what we used to call the manage instances quote unquote section in the previous experience in the previous portal so what you see here is a holistic view of all your instances production and non-production and it shows you a few key information that you really need to know that's marked against each and every instance so for example the status you know is this instance end of life is it coming up on end of life um is an upgrade already scheduled for it and if it is what's the date and time what's the current version that's running on that instance so that that's also a key attribute to planning and scheduling your upgrade and knowing what version to take it to also the scheduled upcoming changes that are marked against that given instance as well as the cases that you've created or that are open against that instance as well so really a kind of 360 high-level view on what's all going on with your instance whether it's changes cases upgrades what version it's running into at a quick single glimpse and of course we've cleared over the um the actions menu now the actions menu that could be done on each instance is sort of the common catalog items that you can execute such as activating plug-in um renaming the instance or or in this case our subject of discussion today is upgrading the instance so say you know i want to go ahead and schedule my upgrade for my production acme instance here so i'm going to go ahead and click the actions menu i'm going to click on upgrade and instance and what that's going to do is it's going to fly out this window this catalog form in which my instance is pre-selected i go ahead and select the available version of course you would see multiple versions here but you would go select the version that you desire and of course it'll put the recommended badge on the one that's that we recommend for you so like if you know quebec patch 2 is the latest and greatest we'll recommend that for you so you would go ahead and select that then it also displays release notes useful information such as product documentation one of the known errors prbs that are included as part of this version release so once you select that available version you go ahead and select the date and time that you desire to schedule this upgrade say saturday 5 you a.m submit once you click submit it generates that upgrade change for you and it'll display that up top here and at that point once you've scheduled this upgrade you could go ahead and load up the upgrade change at any time and this is where you can actively manage your upgrades quite easily so one of the common actions customers typically do and we've seen this in analytics is they've they they usually like to reschedule the upgrade or you know have some flexibility there so at any time you could always go in to your upgrade change click on reschedule upgrade button and then you can select the date and time that you want to reschedule to click select once you do that it'll give you that confirmation up top that your upgrade has been rescheduled and it'll reflect on the change record as well so that's another easy kind of self-serve manage upgrade capability the other thing you could do is um and something typically customers do is they change their target version to a different version say they don't want to go to quebec patch two you could just click on the target version you would typically have other versions listed here that that's ga and you could just select that other version click save and it'll essentially retarget that that upgrade change to that other target version that you desire so that's another typical one and of course since this is a self-scheduled change you always have the capability of canceling through this cancel upgrade button just click of one button it just cancels out the workflow as well as the the upgrade itself so that's sort of the manage upgrades or the the manual upgrade it fuels the self-scheduled upgrade option for a given instance that's one way to manage an upgrade quite easily the other way is through what we call upgrade wizard now some of you may may be familiar with this in the previous experience it was five steps we've cut it down to three steps so definitely more streamlined more efficient and the way you get to it is there's this banner on the top of your instances dashboard page which by the way includes a lot of useful information such as you know if the next version is coming out if there's a early release availability for rome for example you would see it advertised up here and it would allow you to either enroll in it or upgrade to it there's also a program such as upgrade assist which i would highly encourage all of you to look into which basically is a touchless experience where you can enroll certain instances such as you know a non-production instance and what that'll do is once a new ga version comes out it'll take you to that to that version so it'll put you on the latest and greatest version and kind of have you empower you to unlock the productivity and and features that we offer on the now platform so definitely look into upgrade assist um but back to upgrade wizard we've cut it down at three steps again previously it was five steps first step is really selecting and getting the recommendation on your production instance because what this allows you to do is it allows you to plan your upgrades holistically now this is starting your non-production instance and making its way to production instance so it allows you to stagger it out and schedule it accordingly so i'm going to select my target version click next and on step three this is really the bread and butter of it where you see all your pride and non-prod instances and then it'll allow you to schedule each and every one of them so it's kind of a all-inclusive end-to-end scheduling mechanism so say you want to do your non-profits first you schedule those first and then you know do your testing a few weeks later schedule out your production instance so what that'll do is it'll kind of lock it into the calendar and now all you have to do is plan your upgrades you know run your testing validate do regression testing and you you'd be all set to target for upgrading your production instance so that's upgrade wizard it's definitely a a good tool to use for your family upgrade planning and i would definitely encourage all of you to leverage that as a as a key resource and tool one other thing to point out on the portal is the help center the help center is really cool because uh it's really everything it's a one-stop shop for all the answers to all your questions whether it's kb articles product documentation community posts um you know known errors everything has been kind of consolidated into one place where you can search for any questions you have uh and and any knowledge that you'd be looking for um so definitely i would encourage anything um that that's upgrade related or not upgrade really even to to search to search um on the help center tons of resources here so definitely take advantage of that so with that i will hand it off back to pete thanks mel go ahead and share my screen again awesome all right so now that you've just heard from mo about the exciting and new innovations uh from the now pl uh platform quebec release and you've seen some of the new upgrade tools um within now support here are a few other of our key resources that that will help you in the upgrade process the first being the upgrade easily section on the customer success center we have a pretty comprehensive upgrade ebook that has the ins and outs of everything upgrade related a few demos that you can find in there to help you with that process we also have product product docs to get the latest uh paris and quebec release notes you'd probably be going there for the for the quebec release notes at this point um and the experience that mo just showed you uh you can now more easily schedule upgrades on the now support portal you know upgrade assist is has made the process pretty seamless the upgrade wizard is another great tool that we've you know consolidated down to three steps and you can also join the conversation on the upgrade advantage community if you have any if you have any questions during your upgrade journey or just want to see some of our upgrade premium content it's all posted in there if we have another ask the experts uh session coming up we'll have any relevant events or content that you might need to that you might want to take advantage of just during your upgrade process or as as you continue to plan out your next upgrade so with that does anybody have any uh any questions on on anything that we we covered today we'd love to love to field a few questions from all of you and and get your thoughts we can also cover we can we can also maybe to maybe spark um a few questions um i can ask maybe ask them a few common commonly asked questions that i've i've come across just just with upgrades um this one's fairly straightforward mo oh go ahead oh i just said great perfect so mo i think we probably alluded to this but i've seen customers ask the question how often should should i be upgrading my instance to the latest version of servicenow yeah that's that's a very uh that's a very key question because you know we encourage all customers to to be on end version when we say n it's really the current family release so the current family release right now is on quebec um but we realize you know there's a lot of planning and and resourcing that goes into that so at the very least i would say um you know when when a new version comes out like quebec or rome in a few months um upgrade the non-prods first you know let it sit there even if it sits there for for a month or two um to give you enough confidence that you know everything is working as expected um you know we realize the more customizations you have the more you know custom tables and and and skipped files that you have the more you know you'll want to do a little bit of more regression testing you know definitely leverage automated test framework atf's to help make that process more efficient but i would say at the very least keep your non-prods on the latest family versions and let that kind of simmer for for a couple months and then once you've felt more comfortable then schedule your production instance um to to them and version and then that way you're you're current you're secure and at the same time you're kind of balancing you know not being jumping the gun with the first day it comes out the ga version but at the same time given enough confidence and opportunity to test um on that new version so if if you do that i think that'll give you the edge um because you know levering leveraging your non-production instance you know that's what it's there for to test you know anything that you develop as well as upgrades to to the newest family releases um so leveraging that putting that on the current release um is is definitely going to give you that that edge to stay current perfect are there are there any other are there any other tools that we provide such as such as atf or anything of that nature that you would kind of recommend customers take advantage of during their upgrade process or or in the planning process yeah i would say planning the planning phase is key because you know you could leverage resources like upgrade center upgrade center was released in paris so september of last year so it has some some really nifty tools like uh you could view your skip files you could kind of create visual task boards on your skipped skipped files and you could do things like healthscan on your instance and what that does is it gives it gives you like an upgradability score of what your upgrade will look like so kind of a preview of your upgrades if you will so that'll really boost the confidence on okay you know if i upgrade how is that going to look like you know am i going to run into issues regression that sort of thing so really some good tools and upgrade center definitely check that out if if you get a chance it's only available on paris and later versions so if you're on orlando or previous you you won't be able to leverage that but that's one thing you know in atf's i mentioned that automate your testing as much as possible the things where you know the critical functions at the very minimal is what you should be automating and um using that atf framework that we've built as a as a tool to kind of get you to the latest and greatest uh versions awesome thank you mo um i guess i'll pose this i'll pose this potential last question as well would definitely love to hear from any of our guests if if they're curious about anything had some very high level high level questions uh it looks like uh it looks like we do have a question that that did come in um i'm going to pose this to umo we just we just mentioned automated uh test framework what is the best way for customers to start leveraging this tool and you may have touched on it a bit but they were still curious yeah i would say the best starting point uh for really getting acclimated and reading about etfs is just starting with the product documentation um and learning like what's it all about what's what's in scope what's included and how they can get started with that um and then you know just starting with with the documentation there and then kind of seeing if they can have their dev team or our servicenow admin team internally run it on their non-prod and test it out as a poc proof of concept and and see how that'll work for them um it's a bit of investment up front but it's for a greater return later so to set it up it might take some work and you know identifying the test cases the common ones the critical ones that could be automated and fulfills that criteria but once you've done that like work um it'll pay off because there's two family releases every year so and it comes pretty fast right so um you know you'll be able to run these automated testing quicker than if you would do it manually so i would definitely recommend just to answer that question use the product documentation i'll try to throw a link in the chat box as a starting point and then you know you could leverage that and kind of take it from there awesome thank you so much thank you so much mo and uh yeah thank you thank you for that question um we had another question come in though that i wanted to throw your way as well so this uh this viewer had asked what post implementation health checks would you recommend if any yeah yeah post implementation health checks um i would recommend really in on support on now support we actually do this it's you know it's kind of like what we call now on now we we run this ourselves because you know we upgrade actually to n um and plus one right so we're on we're on rome right and we test our own products so so this is not something theoretical this is something we we live and breathe um so as far as health checks there's no systematic way to do post health checks it's more of pre kind of health scan and again upgrade center offers that but i would say call it more sanity checking um and really sanity checking the critical flows like things like for example you have you know your incident management process and workflow you know if that's your critical function or event management then just you know really sanity test that right when you your upgrade is completed and you know make sure that things are the way it's supposed to be um and just have have you know maybe a list of 10 or 20 key flows that you know if these don't function if these break it's a p1 outage on your end right so if you you know have that list of 10 key flows and you kind of sanity test it right when you upgrade i think that will give you a more more of a bigger confidence that it won't be a monday morning kind of p1 situation and if anything it's a it's a minor you know pc p4 kind of bug that you could work through and roll forward um so if you can compile that list i think i think that should uh suffice but it's definitely a good idea it brings up a good idea for something we can you know i could take that feedback and give it to our product team on like what's a post implementation or post upgrade health scan i think that would be something good to implement on a now platform systematically awesome yeah that was a great question and thank you mo for the thoughtful answer awesome so yeah please keep keep them coming mo all i'll pose this question uh to you and you may or may not um yeah may or may not have thought too much about this but what are some of the maybe the common mistakes you've seen um in the upgrade you know in the upgrade process or another question could be what pro tips might you have that maybe we briefly covered on today that might be helpful for the audience yeah i'll start with the pro tips um definitely treat treat the upgrades as a project um you know because at the end of the the phases that it runs through is a project but a mini project if that you know with whether it's testing um planning scheduling execution um just make sure that it's something that's efficient and can you know continuous because it is continuous you know there's two family upgrades a year so you know we're we're a platform of platforms so there's a reason why we have two major releases a year because you know the sky's the limit to what opportunities our platform could provide to our customers so there's always new products new things that come out and we want you the customers to take advantage of that fully advantage of it and um and to to have the key to success is making sure that your planning is is down and it's just kind of a repetitive process atf i mentioned that you know making sure you have your automated testing in place to ease that friction and make it frictionless that's another pro tip another thing is you'll leverage the health scan on upgrade center i mentioned that as well so kind of a combination of all of these a common common mistake i see is you know a lot of customers just kind of really fall back on on upgrades and they kind of not prioritize it and kind of really fall behind um and that could open a slew of issues um you know and then they fall they fall back on versions and you know um and fall unsupported so so that's one thing always to keep in mind and keep yourself in check and and make sure that you are kind of ahead of the game and not behind um so really that's that's really everything what it boils down to um but i think having a good plan is ultimately the key to success treating it like a project and prioritizing it getting on the getting it on a calendar um making sure your resources are aligned and the bandwidth are reserved for that purpose you know if you make sure that's that's down at that point it'll it'll be a you know rinse and repeat process and and then you can always find ways to to make it more efficient as you go on but i think with that you know you should you should be in pretty good shape awesome thank you mo for that well thought out answered we had another we had another attendee on the line ask a great question um and the question is do you treat patch implementation differently than family upgrades if yes how so i'm going to direct that over to you mo yeah yeah that's a great question actually uh this came up on a separate knowledge 21 webinar that that i did late last week as well so patching is is a bit more lightweight you know versus a family upgrade so for example you know if you're going from quebec patch 2 to quebec patch 3 you know it's not equivalent to going from you know paris patch eight to quarterback patch two you know across families right because you know with patching a lot of it is you know we're fixing hotfix you know they're bugs through hotfixes or you know we're patching security vulnerabilities that could have occurred on a given patch version so it's it's more lightweight um there's no net new versions there's no you know it doesn't really touch your tables so a lot of the times you know an upgrade is running for four plus hours is because the sizes of custom tables and the sheer amount of size there so every every upgrade differs for every different customer so uh with patches it's much leaner it doesn't touch any of the core platform functions it's more patching things on the security layer on the platform and it's pretty lightweight there's less concern for regression functionally regression regressing uh on your instance because it doesn't it doesn't touch any of that and it's much more lightweight um as a matter of fact most of our customers they don't they don't go through the same testing process if anything they'll do like a very bare minimum sanity checking but that's that's pretty much sufficient um and we also run our monthly patching program for our security patching program on a monthly basis so so this is something that's now routine it used to be quarterly a couple years back but now it's monthly and it's again really meant to keep your instance on the cloud secure and at that very high level amount of security um so so kind of to answer that it's not it's it's it's a much more like lightweight version than a family upgrade you don't have to do as much testing as you would on a family upgrade um as long as you have your bare minimum flows to do the sanity checking i think that would be sufficient um and and there's there's less concern for regression on patches awesome thank you again for that thoughtful question uh to from one of our viewers and uh mo as well for for going in depth with them i uh will have this is the last call for questions if anyone wants to type anything to the chat or raise their hand give a brief pause give everyone a chance to think if they have any last-minute questions before we sign off for the day once again this this session will be uh on demand on youtube as well as the upgrades advantage community uh page we'll get that posted quickly for all of you and i'm going to take that as a sign that we have answered all of your questions and you guys are all ready to to explore the new now support portal experience and get ready to to perform your upgrade uh upgrade soon so yeah this is great and they can always post more questions on the community and so it'll be monitored and they can get back to you all right so thank you all today and you uh a