welcome to another episode of inside the barrel where john and i today are gonna jump into exploring san diego's san diego servicenow san diego release because it just launched last week and so john and i have been trying to dive into some release notes some cool things and just kind of give our our first impressions of what we see um cool um and then if you guys if this is your first time uh joining us then you know what john and i normally talk about is pretty much anything servicenow hey do me uh dimitar hopefully i'm pronouncing your name right um welcome um and yeah we're just gonna dive through give you some consulting you know behind the scenes and also just you know anything about servicenow so so yeah chattery yeah yeah yeah and now we we have some nice little um uh sounds so whenever john does something right well [Applause] [Laughter] sweet cool so so walk us through like when a new release comes out john like where do you start or like what do you what what's your thinking process um really it's gonna be you know when am i first gonna get a a a a project to be on it you know what i mean like normally you get clients who are a couple you know or not a couple but there'll be a release behind and so the new release will come out and you're like oh yeah oh i don't get to use it you know yeah so that's my first thought is when do i actually get to you you know get into it and use it with a client or at least experience it because of the client i'm with um so that's probably the first thing i do i think deltas help this a lot because you're kind of forced into at least getting a quick look into it um when deltas come around and there's a new release for that yeah definitely like delta's is probably where i i it forces you to find all the cool things because in order to like do your delta you got to go through the release notes right and like it's yeah it definitely definitely helps for sure for sure but uh you know oh yeah go ahead no i was gonna say where do you so when we are ready it looks like you start on the the doc site right is that yeah um and it's pretty i mean it's not hard to find it's super easy to find you just you know for me or for anyone out there it's just you type in servicenow san diego release notes and you'll get here but uh um you know it'd be the same way you'd find the information for what you for when you're doing your deltas too you know so you'd get in here and start looking and reading through the notes and and so forth um [Music] i don't i don't like that it took me away from my left menu there i like this better do you ever use your build your own release notes personally i have not um i don't think i have nothing i think [Laughter] maybe i don't know oh i was hoping it would like you know select a bunch of stuff and like create it for you but it doesn't look like it's it's that intuitive but this is like essentially telling you go through the process i i don't log in a lot of times to this side of it i mean when i'm looking for notes and stuff i don't i i get that message down here i'm like no i'll log in later if i need to but uh yeah it would be kind of neat that you could pick and choose the the stuff that you want and then have it as a yeah like select select your entitlement or something and like it tells you all the things or maybe like do a quick scan of your instance and you see the most popular things that you you use or have turned on and like generate some release notes that would be kind of cool that's like creator con stuff oh man you heard it here first like that would be pretty neat though to have you know have it check your instance and say oh we recommend these things and here's the release notes that fit what you currently have oh man wait wait let me let me get that going just kidding yeah yeah i don't know ip we we set it here first right that's that's plain to fame right um you know i was i was excited about san diego coming out because we were getting a lot of new things and i'm always you know because i do a lot of portal stuff i'm very visual and so i was excited about the new uh ui that was going to come out um i don't even what's the name i don't remember what the name of it is so i think the official name is like the next framework right or the the servicenow next uh ui um okay what's gonna happen when there's a next next right but it's uh uh but i think yeah i think that's what it officially is there there's other names like polaris that was like you know that's right polaris yeah yeah and you'll still see it littered in the properties and in other places but i think from a marketing standpoint it's the next framework i got you yeah so let's let's jump into like where do you want to like maybe let's find the release notes or or let's talk about polaris at a high level like do we want to look for that release node or just jump right in uh let's see um it probably i'm trying to think of where i don't know you know probably in the combined product i think when i did see it in release notes it was like the new ui like that's what it was like yeah it's like if anything um so maybe it's like next hopefully it's next next experience yeah i like how i like how this profile my uh cask or inside the barrel profile just went red yeah it's beautiful uh okay so um seems kind of small well i think it's because like it's for the product itself right um [Music] and it's like here's the release this is what's new um so this is the user unified navigation yeah and that's what will throw you off like i think if you come in here if if you have not experienced it yet it's what'll kind of throw you off because this this is new i mean normally you'd have your left nav that's always there but uh i mean the the these these are kind of you know favorites in history we've had those before but they've been in that left nav so that's not too unfamiliar they're searchable now so you can you can search those and that's like oh that that feels that feels good it is it is super nice because you know once you hit a certain length on on here how do you find what you're after you know yeah same with favorites and then all you know there's your list of stuff and i really do like you know i'm always a big fan of the kind of um uh transparency here you can see the words app engine behind the menu i like that i think that's good looking um i think they've done a pretty good job with this at least this landing page and how it looks um what about some some gripes with this this top bar because i have some oh do you have some gripes here yeah let's hear them i i think the middle like where it says the page that you're on i don't see the value of it or i i'm like constantly distracted by it and yes it's nice for favoriting it once but like i don't it's it's like i want to click on it and it never does anything you know like yeah maybe at least would be nice if you clicked on it and it refreshed the page like maybe that's something useful for but well yeah as a ui you know someone that deals with ui a lot why would i put them why is there a menu icon there and why is there uh a button frame around it yes to me that's like oh yeah i should be able to oh i can't do anything yeah that that that is distracting i i don't know that i care for that and um i i'm not in love with this little bicker yeah no no i'm not saying the previous one was good uh but like this one is just rough and i think didn't they move i think preferences is the old thing um yeah although it's old stuff is gone yeah so there's not even a way and and maybe uh our nude the guy who built uh essen can do something about this but i i don't how do you do you know if you can get the pickers back up there or is it always through oh you can't it's only two yeah and like i don't know what i really want there is like hotkey switch you know like i know you flash commands slash commands exist but like servicenow should hotkey that you know or like remove it from us and we never have to deal with them again right like find another mechanism that manages it for us because managing update sets and scopes like is constantly a nightmare in my opinion it is and and you know that's why you end up with the slash commands from s and utils to try to move around because now you know unlike before when you'd have the picker up there it's it's now an extra step to get in there and do something right and i'm glad they put the filter in there and you can search for it that's that's nice but you still have extra clicks and i think that's actually kind of a a common theme across this new ui is that they've added extra movement and clicks but i will say for like another upside is agent workspace ui builder and the now ui navigation is all the same which is nice like if you go into a workspace or you go into the ui builder like you're not going into something else right so it's the same nav bar but i will say it's incomplete because i think if you go to flow designer it actually opens it up and it's in it and it like breaks it out so there's still a few things that isn't in the navigator right like ideally this would just be inside of a nav bar right so now you're back to that like old style right and i've noticed this there it goes in and out here and there you know there's different places that you end up in the old style look and then you move into the new style look and so it's a little i i don't i'm not sure why it's that way but um now that we're on a list of things oh see here's the the old way of this working yeah not if if i think or i feel like if i can remember where a good spot to look at this is incidents yeah that's exactly where i was going uh this drives me nuts and honestly i am i don't like it and i and i'm i can't imagine who thought this was a good way of doing things but you know it's just i don't have enough anyways so you have your you know before you had your your check boxes down the side right and they're still there so you check mark them and then you'd have your action right here just like you saw on flow designer right by the check box right and i and i know this is all relative but um you know i use a wide screen i have like 34 inches or whatever um and so when i'm working and i need to do list actions i click the box and then i have to travel the mile and a half to do things over here yeah i don't i don't necessarily understand why they thought that that was a smart move to move this stuff all the way away from where you're actually working yep i'm with you i i think i'm so used to when i don't see a new button on the top left that it means i can't add something to that right right but now i have to constantly look to the right to be like oh wait it's still there we're good yeah yeah yeah this drives me nuts i i i'm not happy with this chain but i will say s and util shout out um that little button next to the action on selected rose that's really nice uh so uh where over here uh two more to the right this one so this is s and utils and it will click quickly add your updated created and updated by tell me that's not nice yeah because that is nice just because the amount of like lists that we deal with and i'm always like when was this created who updated this he created it and you know um i've i've been in some instances where they have i i'm not sure how they got it that way but they have some of the weirdest columns set up in their list views and it's like why would you add these in there this really doesn't help anybody but make it unviewable but yeah that is nice that it that it um adds some defaults in yeah so cheers cheers to you that's the details definitely um i will say though i mean they're they're they are trying to emphasize like the the top left is really like configure your your columns or your your menu action your your filter or like your like native search which is kind of cool um i don't know if you've ever used this it came out i think in rome um or maybe one before it but if you type in like caller or something like that in the where it says well so this is your old school one where you're searching right but inside where it says what do you want to see oh here if you type in the natural language filter yeah so if you type in like caller or something like that it'll it'll try to guess what you're looking for and then be like is you know like caller is that's kind of nice but yeah if you try using it right so do you like um so type in caller is oh does it not do spaces oh there we go i mean i mean yeah system admin something like that and what's nice is if you aren't experienced with um you know building out queries right if you're a new admin like it tries its best to and the filter added caller name contains system administrator so so is this part of their ai stuff it's part of their natural language um uh uh querying so yeah part of the ai kind of bundle in general and they give you little tips on it right if you you want to improve your queries right which is kind of kind of cool now if they only had a keyboard shortcut right next to them [Music] um but yeah so that's kind of cool not really san diego related but also cool but you know going back to this header like incident view self-service is now the that top uh like where that star is of the top bar that i was mentioning yeah like i wish it was just something more interactive if you're going to provide that front and center so i see so if you are you saying if you change um yeah if you change it all it'll change it as well it's nice um and maybe it's there because now the url has changed it's become so much longer [Laughter] [Music] because now it's all built in like agent workspace um technology or i guess the now framework technology um yeah so but cool what else anything on service portal or ui builder since you were talking about ui you know service portal really hasn't changed much um not that i recall seeing anything super new or super different with you know your normal your normal uh day-to-day with service portal it all you know they really haven't changed much so configuration looks the same uh yeah so if you color updated though if you went to the release notes for service portal and you click the link it's it's a broken link so don't do it so too many dynamic script compilations within one minute yeah so some charting thing is failing but oh oh it's back now but yeah so if you went to uh i'm looking at it right now there's no new updates in san diego for service portal so again it's a testament that they're really doubling down on ui builder right yeah so so maybe those release notes are really good ones uh yeah i mean i think everyone knows that that's the direction they're going um i just wish they would get uh it looks like they've changed employee center so maybe we should look at that i don't know if i have employee center so i think it's i think it's uh started by default or installed by default what is it ecc just e uh esc that's right yes i'm so used to the oh look at that oh beautiful uh so that's a that's a normal one it's in the docs there's a script that you can run um to fix those for the first time because our remember our long time ago shout out to the first time we reviewed this in rome we had a we had to manually go and change those uh those cross uh oh that's right yeah right right um but this looks mostly the same actually i don't think they they made anything new i'm looking at the release notes and there's nothing new for san diego on this one so and i don't remember if i mentioned this last time we uh talked about san diego but this this whole thing that they're doing with like um like if we look trying to think of a good way to get in there the taxonomy and stuff like that that they're using behind all this [Music] some of you might be old enough to remember some of us old-timers but back to like the early 2000s where you'd have stuff like drupal or php nuke you know those old uh frameworks there was a lot of emphasis on taxonomy and grouping things like that so to me it caught me it made me think you know it's weird that they're going back to this like older um i don't know what the word is but you know this older thought process on how to set up stuff to you know to categorize instead of categories right let's use taxonomy um but i do like i do like the idea of how they've done the the combination of grouping things together because i think a lot of uh projects that i've worked on is what you know we were already kind of doing that custom-wise we were putting things together where you would have a combination of requests and and catalog items are not catalog uh knowledge articles because they all fit under a certain category right but uh yeah and i think search now is called they call them topics now right so you you build topics that have also topics within them um so whether you are actually using the content strategy of topic you can at least use that framework there to group things together um yeah yeah um yeah the so i think you know one of the bigger things that i've seen in san diego and this is kind of you know servicenow is kind of step forward is they're building more data models um so if you're a specific industry and you're you're essentially building a bunch of custom things on top of service now they're trying to alleviate that pain um and provide you with a data model that works for you so i think if you go to the release notes there should be under um under features by product so and then if you scroll down a little bit yeah industry products so you see all of these industry products that they're focusing on so this is like you know if you're in these industries like you should potentially look at these release notes because servicenow is trying to really make your life easier um so like i think technology service management actually is like the new like similar to like itsm um bundling of data models so i don't actually remember specifically but yeah i know this relates to itsm but but yeah so the the goal here is again like they're they're really focusing on specific industries and um and trying to make life easier if you're in those industries so you don't have to build a bunch of custom tables you don't have to figure out how you're supposed to use the cmdb to handle all that so i know that that's like a like a big thing something else that caught my eye here is that digital portfolio management you want to click on that one so digital portfolio management and i don't know if we can actually show it but it may not work is the goal is is if if not if you're a fulfiller but if like you're an architect or a cmdb manager or maybe a portfolio owner like servicenow is trying to give you your workspace to to be able to handle or build work or organize your work that's related to your strategic portfolio management or your your cmdb or your services portfolio service now is is also investing in it seems like service now is investing in more than just the fulfiller right it's always been around the fulfiller for so long but now like with these new workspaces or how quickly they're building workspaces for a given person it's more than just uh fulfillers in the system nice no this is neat i i i do like to see servicenow branching out and and bringing more things in um because to me you know for a while it seemed kind of stagnant there probably up till uh let's see what came out before rome what was rome paris quebec quebec um somewhere around there it felt like it started changing um there was a lot more things coming and when you get on those you know if you if you're lucky enough to listen to the road map like i've been invited to a couple of the road map uh zoom sessions it's kind of neat to hear you know their strategic plans for the future um but yeah it just seems like they've really been in looking at new new ways of doing things which is really nice i i enjoy that so to round off like our our ui focus of this well maybe let's check out ui builder and maybe we have to start with the release notes on the new stuff with ui builder um because i think you know that's that's probably a good theme for this so it looks like they've added a loco json editor at least in the server oh that's right you were talking about that the other day weren't you yeah so the way i got to this i would just go to the combined one the combined ones really nice if you know their products so cool tip here if you if you go to the combined release notes and you know the product that servicenow has the name of it you can you can kind of just dive right into it so but if you don't know the product and you kind of know like the skew it's involved or the the category it's a part of then you know go the other route um so if you scroll down a little bit it should tell us yeah right there so looks like in rome they added the conditional builder and then this one maybe a low code editor um and i think if we scroll down there should be some notion of the json editor but maybe they don't have a screenshot of it so maybe maybe we have to maybe let's jump into the tool let's let's figure it out um so it should if we just open up ui builder and we go into any one of those like default ones um uh just just give it a second um maybe the csm uh fsm or let's do uh the cmdb workspace one sorry um just because that's new in san diego so the cmdb workspace they've they've also invested a lot more time and and making the cmdb again back to the non-fulfillers right um so this is something that it would you know look like oh this one's only read only so maybe we can't go into configure on the right hand side and so i think this is where the the json editor would would would show up um but let's go in so we can't use the cmdb one because it's read only um let's open up the csm1 and see if we could we could find one yeah and it looks like they've also added a repeater which i think john will enjoy when we get to that one um being able to repeat components so like you're like essentially your angular you know ng repeat right if you didn't want to if you needed to build a bunch of components um so yeah so now on the right-hand side let's go to config and we may actually have to click on let's like click on something and see if we could find where this low code editor is yeah uh um so is that is that it i don't think that's it um we just need to find an example of one that you had to put in json oh that maybe we should do a custom one yeah but i'm trying to think like what's the what's the way to to trigger that as you can see john and i apparently haven't spent enough time uh in the json editor what does it say about that oh they didn't talk too much about it did it right here but there's the repeat thing i was looking for yeah we could jump into the repeat one we'll have to i'll have to do some more searching for that loco json editor oh so you just choose it as a repeater and then give it a query um or how to get uh the output right if you wanted the output to show like so if like you had a list like you had a query that returned some names um you could then create a a repeater component and then throw the output of your query in it and it it's it's basically the same ideas like when you do a data list right with the the widgets and service portal you know your data table if you were going to build a custom one same id you you want an array like incidents right your list of incidents then it just iterates down i would assume it's how they're setting this to work would be my guess because that's what it feels like if if you're doing a repeated list you know and you're basing it off a query you're just getting data and looping through it that makes sense anything else on the lower part of this page or because this one we could in theory do a demo of relatively easy so it looks like if you have nested um oh it even tells you how long and how many times it's repeated that's kind of cool um and then yeah i think it's just a level cool so that's neat um i like you i haven't spent much time in ui builder i haven't come across projects that require that yet um the only thing that i guess i would have to say that i've worked in new to me is flow designer but you were saying flow designer really hasn't changed much no we could we could open it i think i think there's some there's like a try catch block that you can use um there's like the flow diagram so [Music] if we open up um we can open up one of the like approval ones or something let's see how lucky you get just open one of the ones in global there's no search i don't like that uh it's because you're scroll down oh there we go let's see that's everything you you'd think this bar would be static so yeah open up the auto closed resolved cases so this one there should be some new stuff here um so one i don't know if we turned on the diagramming so we didn't yet you remember that diagramming we tried to do this time so we could we could try turning that on but if you go to uh add an action just for a for yeah and then flow logic so there should be one for the try catch yeah so this is nice if you think that or there's chances that your um flow can error um rather than aborting because right on the bottom where it says error handler like that will essentially run a special set of flow reactions if it ever catches an error but sometimes you don't want to like you don't want to cancel the flow um oh flow logic is now searchable yes we did see that i just want a drum for your kid [Laughter] um so also so yeah so the try catch is nice if like you just have a very specific thing that you want to try and catch you know it may hurt so super awesome um yeah and then it'll just continue on so that's that's really nice um it's searchable now what uh dimitar was uh was saying um so if you clicked on like another action and then you go to flow logic oh here this this is you can search because it's starting to get large action always had it but flow logic didn't but now since full logic is starting to get bigger um so that makes it nice um i know the things i ran into like with this one is uh i think there's a little it's weird that it doesn't well it was more about um if you don't pick the right thing sometimes you get weird like update record uh yeah see this one this is not the right one that you normally use you but it's supposed to be the core one but i don't know it was it was really weird i kept running into it like if you pick the wrong action um for the for the longest time the lookup one so if you type in lookup so i think they fixed this yeah so so notice how lookup shows there but if you do it look space up uh there's notice how they're different like one one's the plural like if you want to look at multiple ones they're not so they they fixed it so they both show up on one of them but if you type in look up one word yeah what's this yeah um yeah bug submission for sure right i mean it's been around for like three releases now so i don't yeah i think it's i think at least they both show up when you type it without um a space that's good you have to you have to know that though right that is true you do have to know that you know i think flow is kind of neat you know again this is i had a project just recently where i was exposed to it like i never used it before and i really didn't like workflows from the times i did have to use it but but flow designer is really nice um for a lot of things there were there was something i ran into where i i had to i had to script it outside of flow designer because i just couldn't get it to work right but for the most part you know 99 of the time um flow designer worked and it worked really easy um i think it was something to do with uh what i was trying to do with multi row variable sets yeah they were causing me some grief and so i had to move it outside of flow designer back to a scripted um resolution and that's interesting because i think they did uh they did you you can you can latch on to it and get those um there is uh i think it goes yeah there's ways to to get it in here but uh what i needed to do i i think just wasn't it wasn't working in flow designer um it wasn't it wasn't a simple thing it was kind of uh robust and so i think that's where i think that's where flow designer starts having some problems if you get too complicated with it it runs into some issues yeah i think that the trick you know just a free trick is think of your sub flows as like functions right and so like if you're doing something complex or something that you would be repeating in other places create a sunflow and then just throw it into a flow but if the thing is very simple then you know just do it all in the flow um yeah if the logic flow is is you know the flow logic if it's if it's straightforward i think you you know this is probably the easiest way to handle a lot of things because it doesn't take a lot of it's low code right or no code i mean there is chances where you'd want to script something or do something like that but for the most part you know this is your low code no code solution and it's very easy to use yeah and i know someone mentioned to me as well that so one of the downsides of flow has always been it's slow sometimes to like queue it up and it generates a lot of records because you have your flow context you have your troubleshooting your debugging like your your messaging that it all handles they did release a an api that allows you to call a flow quickly which won't generate a bunch of their records and so i think the reason they did that was to help compete with business rules so right now if you you know want to create a simple business rule like it takes you know no time at all and it's super fast on the system but if you did that for a flow it it takes a lot of resources in order to do it under understandable i mean there's probably you know the the abstraction layer above this is where you know you're going to run into that and as an old school developer i i always love code more than anything else because a there's no magic involved you know what you wrote and how it's going to work right here you choose things and there's a magic layer that takes what you just did and translates it to code and that's i think you know that's where your performance is so if they can trim that down and make it more uh performant that's great you know that does everyone huge favors exactly and so do you you want to try uh finding if uh we can turn on the flow diagram we could we could show that again yeah yeah why not so let's the docs aren't really there for it yet but let's go to our favorite properties and so it's just just properties list or this is probably easier i think that does exist somewhere there so i'm sure it does we got some motivation that we'll be able to to figure this out i'm liking it um i'm a shy servicenow admin don't watch me when i look for something and then maybe star flow you know speaking of the asterisk this was um and this may happen to admins around the world but i was i was talking with a client one time and uh we were we were talking about you know that they weren't happy because they couldn't find records right and i'm like what do you mean you can't find records like well i type this in so i and by default i always put an asterisk in front of everything when i type in right yeah and so i did that and i'm like you mean this right here and they were like what how did you do that i'm like what do you mean how did i do that i i just typed it in they're like no you did something different because when i type it in i don't get those results and it finally you know came out i'm like do you mean the asterisks in front the wild card and they were like yeah i'm like well yeah there you go that's how you do it you just put an asterisk in there and they were like oh well this changes everything i love this product now it's like okay that's great you know what's interesting is i actually saw people that took it a step further and they changed it so you didn't have to type the asterisk and everything was asterisk now there is some performance there but there is a property to change all of your lists so that you just have to type in flow and it'll be always contains rather than starts so i don't know i mean for end users that's great for them because they need it but for me i'd be like i don't i don't want that to work when i do it well well the problem is is like now we're so used to star that when we when that changes and you try to put a star it thinks the star is like content so you've never got that gold why is this not working yeah totally all right what is it it's uh probably something with diagram let's just do that let's see if we can't be smarter about it diagram so you may have to change scope you have to change scope see this is so and i actually don't even know if this scope's available it may be a private scope yeah yeah click on that record remember this is what happened last time this one's not it's not ready for us oh that's right it was like sorry you can't oh yeah what's the deal with i can't and i swear i was able to like import this record and change it but i think they i think it's not possible yeah all right well we can't turn it on yet and there's no documentation yet on how to get around that oh yeah it doesn't even like switching to that because it's private [Music] [Laughter] oh my gosh yeah hopefully they're like it's just weird because it should be out right now and i don't know maybe it's a plug-in like that like maybe maybe it's under like a feature list maybe go to go to all and type in like admit flow administration and then feature access list i don't think it's in here but um because this is for like managing or limiting people so i don't think it would be in here flow templates is something they did but i think you need a plug-in for that one [Music] let's go to plugins and see what what's available for flow one day they're gonna make this page super fast oh so so one thing about the ui they actually lazy load the header which which i'm a fan from performance reason that load as much as you can whenever it's ready and so there will be times when you load a page and it'll just be all blank because it's like waiting for everything to complete but now the header will just show up even if it's blank it texts in there because it hasn't loaded all of the sidebars so kudos to them for lazy loading hopefully they incorporate that in this page one day well yeah [Music] it's true plugin page has always been incredibly slow yeah and it's crazy because it only queried 1900 things it's not like it's squaring a lot of things you know yeah i i don't they must be doing additional components to that lookup i mean yeah the only thing i can i think that would explain it because you know it's stuff like probably this and that and this here you know whatever tells it that it's installed i think it's part of the uh i wonder if that's that's a con one like look at the network calls that it's making and then see if we can create i just googled google right yeah maybe diagram oh yeah diagram oh boom look at that update that bad boy hopefully us updating we probably should look at release notes nah that's okay uh well you don't like just to go you don't like to go cowboy on things and just load them in yeah that one i try not to maybe in my pdi which is this is your pdi so that's okay it's true let me tell you once you delete a database in production you get you get kind of cowboy shy for anything in production yeah yeah someone was telling me like i think the lesson there's a nugget here that around like update sets like let's say you're working on something and you finished working on that thing and you want to explore to make it better do the exploration in a different update set yes or your pdi seriously yeah yeah yeah because you shouldn't use your dev instance as your playground like you should use a pdi as your playground as much as possible uh it's so true because then i mean it's what facilitates like frequent um clone downs is you know you get a team of admins who are doing nothing but using dev as their playground right and then you're like oh my gosh dev is so far out of sync with production yeah we're gonna have to clone and then you get these terrible fast clone cycles yeah and then you're like well it's stopping development and you're like stop stop using it as a playground so okay so on the same topic what are your thoughts on um getting dev to a new version over production to to look at things do you recommend doing tests instead and still having dev the same as production as far as the version wait i'm confused like on a so let's say you don't you're well no no just just the instant just the version um so you've got you know the new one's coming out san diego is coming out um do you put it on dev or or test which way would you do it would you put it on top instead so i do it on dev first well so oh man this is a complex upgrading strategy that um that it it does depend um so step one could you not submit a highway ticket ask for a temporary instance boom ah okay that's that's like the the quickest way to and what you use that for is exploring if anything major is broken so you do your your developer kind of testing there if that all looks good then you install a dev test prod all the way up and you can you know effectively use your atf's you can effectively change uh that look at your skip logs et cetera but servicenow is great about like you if you haven't if you want a temporary instance to test something like super awesome um the only thing you have to be careful there though is once you start in dev upgrading like if you have a production bug like you're in a really weird state so right yeah because you develop and and dev and then how do you get into production so second use case right here is ask for a temporary instance and then make that a clone of prod and leave that there in case you ever have an emergency and it blows away when you're done so yeah no i i like that that process i wasn't aware that you could ask for temporary instances from servicenow i mean if they're if they're free and temporary that's a great solution i think because it takes it takes it out of your your um up your not your upgrade path but your you know your your push to broad path right because you don't real you really do not want to mess that up because i've been in situations where you've updated dev and something's a problem and now you've got this like well how do we develop for prod to fix things just like you said you know because dev is now on a different instance or a different version hey look at that yep well let's let's go check our properties let's see i'm reloading now how dare you stay on this page longer than you needed to my bad terrible always leave the plugin page as soon as possible yeah and now i'm i'm screwed i can't even get off of it all right let's see uh well assist properties maybe oh you want to go to this properties yeah well while that loads oh hey bro it finally reloaded that was a lazy load though i wonder if it's still private and you can open that same approval one well yeah now your instance is locked because this page is amazing i i probably shouldn't have tried to do two loads at the same time i mean what was i we'll stop that uh there is a uh s and utils one um oh but we won't have to show it to like cancel transactions uh that's nice dimitar says for one of the customers we needed to request a temporary sandbox and clone dev first just to safeguard it interesting nice i would i would have a temporary sandbox and you clone prod to there because it's then it's just like the closest thing to prod and it's now safe right run the upgrade run run the upgrade and then if it works blow that one away request a new one load prod on it and now keep that the same version as prod until you then you know work your way dev up to broad in case like you need to to fix any emergency things i mean that's if that if servicenow allows you to do that that's what i would do yeah yeah okay so guess what we're set to true now that update sets you to true so we should be able to so if you're in flow designer now okay oh look at that it loaded and then go to that approve lying about what i do by default right no i think it was the resolved case one oh i just know it's like a simple you didn't do the start yeah stop watching me yeah so yeah now what's next to that view button you now have uh there we go uh diagramming so if you haven't seen it yet you know here's kind of a a non-printable but uh viewable way to logistically look at your your flow so at some point i know they're going to add printing capabilities here um because that would be like super sweet and right and you can also add actions here so this may eventually become like the default place to to do things i think i think that the trouble that we have with this is this is becoming workflow again [Laughter] but i will say what i like about this is it's very structured like well yeah it was just like all over the place oh yeah i mean have you seen some of those complicated hr workflows and they're like following lines it was a nightmare yeah or path so how do you want to call it this is a little better because it's it's a straight line it's structured but you you get it you get an idea of what's happening right you can you can follow it much easier so even if they did merge workflow with this and to create you know one flow to rule them all right i like this view much better than the workflow uh canvas and you can search on this which is nice so on the search click like update and like it'll like you know highlight the thing for you so if you are in a complex one like imagine you are in like a 50 you know node one like searching is just like boom find me the thing really quick so i do like that that that really is nice i kind of wish i i do miss that they don't have that the left side over here because um it was helpful and i and i get that they have components here but you know what what can i oh i see where now where is it yeah well that doesn't seem to work very well i think yeah maybe it's because we're not in the scope if it is a scope but i don't think that's it it could just not be reported yet maybe maybe that's what it is yeah oh i think it's probably because you have search open that's probably a bug so close search now try that yeah oh you know that's just like the old ui too though if you have um any sort of uh like search going on here you get those weird like flashes and you're like i can't type anything i just i just wanna we get a drum roll we found a bug or no air horn we're gonna air horn found a bug i like it um yeah so i i i do miss like i kind of wish they had that here because the dragon dropped from this view is is helpful sometimes because you know what you're after you know you're just like oh yeah right here grab it drag it over honestly what i wish is data had a search like show me a search on the data one because sometimes you're going so deep in these things like like if you go into look up records like click on on the data on the right uh for underneath the data yeah like look up records should we show that oh you're looking and then you go into action status oh like yeah yeah it can keep chaining like i would love a search capability there to like you know quickly find what i need yeah yeah because yeah you have if you have to go multiple levels of not walking that common one is if you need like a user's manager right you go to the user you go to the manager and then you need their email and it's just like you're three levels deep like one thing yeah or maybe they're gonna add some predictive intelligence here to like help you say this is what you want or potentially this is what you need so this would be a great case point for uh that natural language i think yes you know if they brought this in here and you're like hey you know what look up case where whatever and you know instead of it it translates whatever your your natural language what you wanted to do i think you know just like it had before that would be awesome yup i'm with you i i'm with you i was like back in the day i was like i just want this to be yaml based like just i want to be able to just like type in an editor like that low code json editor that we didn't find like i just want to be able to type in there like i know exactly what my photo is going to do give me the boiler plate and i think they're trying to do that with flow templates like i know we didn't discuss it but it is a new one the idea of you know flow templates and um and making like a flow as a starter place for citizen developers so um this is kind of you know i can i can see that they're slowly getting into making things easier for people i love reusability and templates is a great way to do it this is it's one of those shortcomings in portal that i was never happy about like you create template there it's only for that widget you can't share it across other widgets so you have to go build another one and you can't use the same name or id yeah you know because you've already used it so why why can't i share it across other widgets you know it's it's and so that was one of the things i really did not i wasn't happy about with service portals that you couldn't reuse those you'd have to you know duplicate effort there well i think we i think we did a good job of like exploring some of the ui civil flow for san diego and if there are specific areas that and then we even talked about like the industries and where servicenow is focusing on uh we talked how to find the release notes i think we did a good job of just like you know tackling some of the things i mean san diego release is massive right you know servicenow is constantly has so many teams building so many different parts of the product that you know unless you have a very clear focus we could talk about the entire thing all the time oh yeah all day we could have done an eight-hour podcast but nobody wants to watch that yeah yeah yeah so we hope you enjoyed it um uh and if you liked it subscribe if you have topics you want us to do you could find john and i on like the sn dev slack or linkedin like shoot us a message and we're happy to have you on and you know dive into any of the topics that you want so yeah for sure and if you want to if you want to join us as a guest let us know yeah we love guests guests are fun all right well thanks again for for tuning in we'll see