hey everyone welcome back to my channel my name is robert fedorick it is so good to have you here this is another go with the flow this is the video series where i try and teach you a little bit more about flow designer with as little edits as possible in this episode i'm going to cover three different ways that you can send emails from flow designer and the cost and benefits of doing each way i do have a favorite which i'll expose to you in the show so as you can see i have a little sample flow up here we're not going to worry too much about what the flow actually does i'm just using this as a place to show you the flow actions in question so when flow designer first came out we had send email as an action so let's take a look at that and send email has all the things you would expect out of sending an email and its closest equivalent is the email icon if you just want to send an ad hoc email from say an incident it wants to know a target record obviously we've just put in the incident that triggers this flow it wants to know whether it should include a watermark or not and you can put in a subject and an html formatted body so what benefits does this particular flow action have actually it's got one of the better ways to access cc and bcc if you're used to using traditional notifications you'll know that it's not impossible to add ccs and bccs it's just really annoying so if you absolutely positively have to have to have to have precise cc and bcc using the send email action might be worth it for you i also think that the send email is nicer to format just because we have access to all the things in the flow so we could just go to our data panel here and pick whichever data from whatever activity and just drop it into the twos the ccs the subject line and the body as opposed to that weird dollar sign field name format that we all had to learn when we were dealing with conventional notifications but there's a reason why send email is still my least favorite way of sending email from flow designer the reason is is that you don't have access to email templates in the same way notifications do and this is a huge pain in the butt for customers who want to have logos and fancy formatting on their notifications from servicenow this is especially important for those organizations that are sending notifications outside their own walls every csm customer in existence for example also there's no way to invoke a mail script i don't know maybe you can use this script on the body but it certainly doesn't work like a male script and that can also be a huge pain in the butt another thing is it has no obvious access to attachments possibly you can add activities to the flow to get attachments but i have yet to discover a way to get those and then attach them to this action in any rational way and the last and probably most important reason why send email is my least favorite way to send notifications from flow is because it's untraceable and what i mean by untraceable is that if something goes wrong where do i expect to find the wrongness when traditional notifications fail i know that i go to my traditional notifications but when you add stuff like send email in flow designer or the similar email action in legacy workflow you'll find yourself in situations where someone says something's wrong with this notification i got and so you're going doing the right thing going through your notification records looking for configuration errors there when in fact it was a completely different configuration being the send email flow action i like all my configurations to be grouped in the same place so i prefer methods that allow me to use the base notification table and the next two ways we are going to investigate do exactly that okay the second way to send emails from flows is by triggering an event now there's two ways you can do this you can either use the create record action and build out an event record or you can use the video that i just did previously in this playlist link is going to be in the description below you'll also see something popping up in the top right hand corner where we created a create event custom action in flow designer and this allows us to just invoke the event and feed the parameters and then that gets sent to a notification so the benefits of this is that you can still use your conventional notifications which may have already been defined which is awesome i do find it's a little bit obscured when you're using event driven notifications because the flow triggers an event the event hits the event queue and then the notifications detect that the event has happened so there's a chain of things that happen that sometimes feels a little bit invisible to an admin it's also going to require a developer familiar with flow and flow actions to create that custom flow action for you and i guess the only other disadvantage you can find here is that it's still hard to get to the cc and bcc's again not impossible just difficult but because you'll be using traditional notifications you can use mail scripts to alleviate that the last way to send emails from flow designer and my personal favorite is the send notification action what i love about this is that enables you to use your pre-defined notifications no need to create an event in the middle in which to fire you can just say fire this notification so the action to send notification the record obviously is the record that we use for the trigger and then it just asks you which notification do you want to fire now there's something you have to remember here because if i just look in the list of notifications even if i black this out and i look in the list of notifications i only have one of them which is silly because i actually have tons of notifications built on the incident table so how come it's only showing me one so here i am on that notification record and the secret to to which notifications will show up in a flow designer send notification action is this send when if you're an old timer like me you'll remember that notifications were record inserted or updated or an event is fired but in the later versions of servicenow they have this other options which is triggered and when you define a notification as send when equals triggered then those notifications are going to show up in your flow designer okay why is this my favorite a it leverages conventional notifications which means that it's traceable if something goes wrong with this notification i look in the notifications secondly because it's conventional notifications i have access to email scripts and email templates again essential for those who are sending highly formatted emails outside their four walls and there you have it folks three ways to send notifications from flow designer my personal favorite again is send notification send email is usable i would say the only time i would fool around with that is if i really had to have a high degree of nuance in cc and bcc thanks for watching another go with the flow i hope to see you on the next one if you're a servicenow expert looking for better opportunities but maybe your resume or linkedin profile isn't doing you justice reach out to me via linkedin or the email pictured here as i offer both career coaching and recruitment services and if you're a servicenow customer or partner you heard that right robert fedoric now does servicenow recruiting with a 1 500 subscriber youtube channel and mailing list and thousands of linkedin followers let's make sure your open positions get first go with the prodigious pool of servicenow resources reach out via the emailed picture here