welcome to another episode of inside the barrel where we talk about behind the scenes being a servicenow consultant and today i have two amazing guests with me uh and we're gonna talk about the tokyo release that's like alpha like coming out really really soon so we wanted to give everyone a sneak peek of some of the research we've been doing for the last month and trying to you know get ahead of um when servicenow releases for customers to be able to utilize it so i'll give it over to ashu to introduce himself hey thanks dorian thanks for having me so i'm ashutosh munoz i am a dev mvp and a community mvp and i work in netherlands with the one of the insurance company as a solution architect drew or to you oh thank you for having me here man i am the roof gupta and i'm just at mep not a community one so i work at accenture as a technical architect and yeah having fun there's a nice weather in london it's cloudy it might rain it might not but yeah it's fun yeah actually where are you located right now uh i'm in in the netherlands yeah what's the weather like there today it's pretty good it's almost 25 degree celsius so which is very good in netherlands at least yeah it feels like it's like 32 in portugal right now all right so yeah we have action-packed stuff um a couple comments on this uh servicenow normally gives like a safe arbor thing uh we're not we don't have the capability to give a safe harbor thing but we'll tell you that this is all rumors it may not come into the release we don't work for servicenow so we don't know anything other than uh when it when it actually does get released um we do know that tomorrow uh early availability is supposed to launch so if you have a developer instance you should be able to install early access for tokyo tomorrow so hopefully and then i know chuck is doing a session on all the cool things tomorrow as well so stay tuned for pretty much the next week in the next month of like tons of tokyo related um uh versions uh release notes cool so i created a little powerpoint for us so um hopefully this is useful for some people um to kind of go through i wanted to talk about this is an old picture i know i got lazy and i couldn't find the new one yet uh servicenow releases so they released twice a year and then each release has a bunch of features patches and bugs and then they also have smaller patches as well after the fact and they they have over the last year made it a lot easier to upgrade the upgrade center has definitely improved a ton where you get previews of records and so call out to that team that has done a really good job on making that easier yeah and mainly here i like the functionality to trigger atf after the upgrade is done which is a great feature which has helped us because if you have custom applications if you have like 80 90 of service now and if you want to test everything oh it's it will take a long time so atf yes along with instant scan that is yeah yeah and i know i know our friend mark is like the guru at instant scan so he has a community post about like 88 instant scan checks or something that he's built and given to the community so if you haven't used any of the his instant scans you should definitely check those out yep um cool so uh and we are going to talk about atf at some point in here because there is a super awesome feature coming so excited for that but let's talk about anything related to apis and core since we're more on the technical side anyways um so i'll let i'll let you guys think oh i haven't even like updated this this slide why didn't it that makes me really sad let me uh let me update this slide because i put new things on here i should have auto refreshed um i was already excited to talk about rpa i saw yeah let's uh let's let's talk about rpa start it so there's some income apis yeah i mean rpa if you see within our rpa is totally new for us so i don't know if there is any customer out there who is already started using it but it's really really great because i was in amsterdam for the meetup and we did actually so topic was rpa yeah so we went through the rfpa configurations how to do it how how it will actually help the organizations and which are the use cases which you can do like for example reading a word document converting it into a beautiful pdf document that can be the use case creating your uh pos filling a form and for that rpa can be used um go for testing man testing of the your not so wonderful machines that could be done and then you can use it in discovery of identifying those machines as well we used to say it was out it was not available at the moment but now with rp you can do that and moreover if you are using agent client collector or anything you can just use these apis i need to check what's there in those apis but it's a good thing to have those apis you can build your process around those using those apis yeah and i know i think at least for this one it was really focused on like queue and like being able to start and stop and queue um rpa so you can you know have some sort of automated process within it right like you're running some devops build or something like then you will be able to like you know trigger queue up you know an rpa so it can then go and log into some you know old legacy system and do something um mainly so literally yesterday we had a discussion with one of our finance team where they want to automate uh few things within their process with one tool which does not support api at the moment and for that we are evaluating if rpi can be used because out of the box we have three apis in the back end for rpa for starting the job starting the process and triggering the robot but let's see because there is always a contradictory discussion between ui path and rpa so we are having that battle at the moment yeah yeah yeah and rpa is new so you're probably bound to run into you know a couple hiccups as you go and you'll you'll learn and it'll provide feedback for for service now but one thing which i also want to test is like we have for atf headless browser thing right so that part and this part i really want to test which is useful if it is going through [Music] rpa but a disclaimer maybe rpa can cost some money or license some other cool things that i saw is we did a lot of ip address changes i would call them like ipa ip address validation ipv6 v4 conversion like data migration it's like the first time i've seen the servicenow release of ability to migrate a string to like an ip a a different type of field so that's kind of uh really cool one thing which i would like to really just say here was the glide aggregate improvement they have bought one api which will set the window for the aggregate yeah i'm not here because i i didn't i didn't know if it if it worked yet it does not but it does look nice it does look nice yeah me and roof we will have um maybe we can have you also dorian then to discuss that in one of our video so the the interesting part about it is like they're they're still working on glad aggregate where glide query is supposed to be the future right so yeah um but yes useful if you haven't if you go on the script include table there are like thousands of those things and in each one of them they have either glide aggregate or glide record so it will take time to go through them and upgrade those things i i thought another cool thing is about this change success so they're essentially trying to get data around like how successful are your are your changes getting into you know production or into some system versus like ones that back out so it's kind of cool that they're providing you know a pa dashboard and a bunch of functions in order to determine how successful you are at your change management process they've also bumped up now pa can handle 10 million records without coughing um or hiccuping that's that sounds pretty cool um attachment encryption i saw was interesting you know being able to uh and encrypt an attachment was probably a very common feature in the government space where they don't want anyone not everyone just be able to see attachments so i think that's probably uh will be used a lot um in some of those secure environments um the data privacy to anonymize with rollback i thought i mean like i get that all the time we want to clone from you know prod to subprod but there's sensitive data in some of the tables so then we just exclude the whole table and then it makes testing really hard yep um so i i welcome it and your list of excludables preservatives i also saw that's probably a big for user admin or servicenow admins is that data filtration on tables so being able to easily filter out without creating an acl um who can view records or who can view a table so i heard that acls are getting scoped or something we are getting some admin workspace as well oh yes i did i do have that on here there's like an admin center so yeah we'll talk about it and then i i think the elephant in the room es12 is coming indeed and then uh for es12 i just a shout out on fifth of august there is one uh lcsh live coding happier on this topic so nice and sky doesn't leave any opportunity to do shameless plugs i love it yeah i think it's going to be interesting because i'm all for you know es12 but like the issue i see is you know because it's not going to be supported in global on launch is it going to be worth it to do stuff in es12 until the whole platform supports cs12 um yeah and then now you have to have admins understand both es12 and you know yes 2015 right so cool there is some you know controversy or discussions that are going to happen at an architect level to determine whether or not you should uh use it yeah and also the user experience analytics i am using it already uh the analytics center basically to track how employee center is performing or behaving with respect to performance and all those things also with ai search which you mentioned durian because i think it's an amazing feature and yeah what improvements they have done and bought in tokyo will help the organizations who has more load on their system 100 yeah i think servicenow has really doubled down on getting data for admins to provide to the organization before is really hard you're building a bunch of reports and and now you kind of get dashboards in order to to make it easier to to sell to the business or show value to the business um one thing maybe from this what do you think about scriptable flow runner api because i think that's again a great improvement um yeah man that too with the roles and kind of a thing you can test your flows you don't need to run everything it's simply like uh when we can't impersonate we have apis to uh script down how to impersonate a user kind of thing so if this would be good for testing and all of those things i mean maybe you can put some logic as well so that your floor understand different scenarios for same item like if someone is requesting something if he is an admin then do perform this way run the flow as admin or this is something that way it would be useful i think it's going to be really good when you have like a a scripted rest endpoint that you want to then call a flow i think this is going to be really nice to be able to securely lock that like how that uh flow is run based on who's hitting your rest api so i think that's the biggest benefit that i see from it so so which means that we have a parameter extra parameter to pass a flow name inside this api is it it can be something like that for the quick api um yeah so basically you will have two more functions i guess one is quick i i don't remember the other name uh it would be like earlier when we used to have api to run flows it just take the flow name and on the flow level you configure how the flow will run but now you would be able to pass on the roles or the type of a user basically that's the role only which with which role you want to run that thing yeah yeah cool let's talk about flow designer since i feel like it is upgraded in every release [Laughter] just before the call we started with the top item right convert oh my god um but i must say because i am a big fan of citizen development uh program uh and if people start using this according to me i think we need to train them again on this topic that how they can convert it uh or should we i personally think that there should be option to hide this from them interesting yeah so the reason i love it the most is i think about like when i'm coding and then sometimes you want to like like refactor a function like you realize you just repeated some some sort of function twice right now in flow designer i i instantly just start with subflow i don't even like start with flow originally and so this is nice where i can start with flow and if it stays simple then you know go with it and then if it gets more complex then then you can you know convert it yeah we got we got we got someone in chat says data filtration on tables for before he sails the winner i i think i think everyone's gonna love that one yeah because we're like essentially like condition building you know um uh data specific records or things on tables without having to do complex acls sounds like is it more like a amazing beer or something i'm not sure what's uh sorry the data filtration yeah it's like essentially like a table that um will allow you to exclude records or exclude specific criteria it's kind of like user criteria a little bit for um query business right yeah but exactly before um but but that's complex to potentially right so they made it a little bit simpler but recently i did one small project about report view acls and that was already a great success because we always used to get something in pen testing that you have public reports that can be accessible from a non-authenticated user why what so and the snc internal role external rule also helped us to now secure the more secure more platform and this is addition on top of it so i think we are improving in security yeah awesome um i you talked about citizen developers so now you'll be able to allow people to view flow designer or flow designs without them having the permission to create or change them i think this is big is before you allow agents to be able to view a workflow right and you didn't need special permission to see it and this allows them to be able to see configuration or have qa validation or some sort of testers or auditing to be able to view without having to give them extra permission but i i still have to test one thing then in tokyo that the execution things of the flow were only visible to the flow designer role or there is some role which is kind of an admin role which gives more access to the person and we had to give that if you want to see the execution of a particular flow at least that table not when you test it but when you actually want to see the execution list you have to give that rule because that table has that acl on it and that service now clearly mentioned it if you give this role please consider please keep in mind that it can be equivalent to an admin rule so i need to test that if that is been improved or not yeah i wonder if if that isn't the case like maybe they that's still blocked in tokyo then like you you should be creating a custom acl right just to make that easier but there is an issue there that i need to find the application scope there uh because each flow has its own application scope and then the data separation comes into picture which i don't want that's a nightmare yeah um also flow supports go ahead uh seeing like this feature for allowing user to see flow it will be more useful if we follow the leading practices like putting on the comments on every step of the flow so that they can understand otherwise i have seen certain flows where people just design the flow but no one knows what is that yeah maybe uh dorian you remember we were having some discussion on process automation designer so i think they have also kept that in mind that the process owner should also see the cross or the other flows and that is the reason might be they bought this feature because both are different processes but flow designer is embedded in pad so maybe a process owner needs a visibility into a flow so i'm just thinking out loud yeah yeah i mean there's probably a lot of different reasons on why you'd want that i mean i think it's having more granular view access roles i think is just more helpful yes it's a lot to maintain and manage a bunch of roles but like having the flexibility when you need it like like i feel like as an implementer you're like oh if if it has the view role boom done like i'm i'm like you know easy but if it's not then you're creating you know multiple acls before query business rules and yep it's just kind of painful so um cool and then moving like they have archive operations in flow designer now um i think this is interesting i i don't i don't i didn't i've never run into this use case where you have to like try to zip a file or compress a file or unzip a file but i can imagine there's some useful use cases for it yeah it's usually for auditing like you need to we usually have a process where we need to go on every incident print set pdf and then zip it and mail it to one of the auditors from the auditing firm so that could be that cool uh i think i recently saw that you know you can now run a flow with a personal oauth token i thought it was really hard before like you always had to use it a lot that was uh configured in the system but now you're providing a personal auth just makes it easier to test stuff um and then i i think when it relates to the rest step improvements which is kind of integration home not so much flow designer but they pretty much improved header uh so like you can provide like a duplicate editor i think this is like an interesting one because i don't know what the the standard requirement is unlike if you wanted to pass the same header multiple times like why why you'd want to do that um but there's probably some rfc protocol that supports it and now servicenow is catching up with it yeah the live coding happy hour two weeks ago where pranav was quoting something with roof um that time we had this discussion that maybe two headers should be supported because right now if you try to save it it gives you the error that duplicate error information provided yeah well now it's now it's live [Laughter] and then i know they improve the flow diagramming for anyone that doesn't visu hasn't visualized their flows yet they've improved it to add more triggers and use cases so that's super awesome and they've also increased the retention of the flow execution so like more context records being saved to enable better debugging because that's one thing that workflow did really good is you could really you know debug most things yeah they're bringing on some flow logic as well like i don't know what they are bringing now i'm able to do everything with those flow logics but it's good to have something new yeah so then let's talk about new modules um so really the only ones that i'm like super excited about is probably the admin center which is what you were kind of alluding to drew unlike again enabling admins to get more data to then provide that to the organization to sell the business case to to show the value of service down like the admin center seems like really cool they they're providing blueprints to help you analyze your maturity level so it looks like there's going to be a lot in store for for admins to view you need that because the kind of implementations people are doing you need to restrict them it's a way of you know not showing you the all the things or managing for you it's it's a way in the direction of restricting what you can do so that you don't fall on those bad traps and then i think the other big one is the servicenow vault that they're calling like so much focus on security tools now we have they have like secrets management you can verify code signing of the apps there's cloud encryption um those are kind of all related to security that i think you know security is going to be really happy for when evaluating servicenow and then i i added a few others like employee center is getting manager hub so i think it's employee center pro um so you can now get better views of what a man as a manager or how the employees are doing in servicenow and then they've also enabled better badge reader integration which i think is cool for both workspace delivery and also like a walk-up experience i was going to say the last thing walk-up experience because we are trying right now uh it will be live and there we had we are not doing the integration but security had a concern that i can impersonate for example dorian you and check in on be on your behalf so it can also happen that i can check in on behalf of the ceos and the badge reader will actually help in that case nice yeah yeah i'm excited for it too um and then new experiences as you can see i was like getting this filled up um i'm excited surveys and assessments are getting a redesign like i feel like getting customer feedback is always like super awesome in general so like making it a better experience to resume a survey if you started one to take an assessment like you know thank you servicenow for you know making that a a redesigned experience for people both on mobile and on the portal um chat interfaces so i i think the summary here is just more configuration as possible they're constantly improving i think they're calling it conversation interfaces or something like that which covers you know virtual agent and and and other experiences but um i thought that was really cool uh the document widget so i didn't even know this existed but like document management seems to get like a little bit of love this release where you can essentially like upload documents to the document service so you know version control and things like that for and then you can also modify which record that's like attached to so i think there's some sort of like trying to make document management easier and they provided a widget for the portal to for end users to do it have they provided a widget or a component like this is a widget yeah this is they for service portal i i mean there is a long list of uh next experience components that they've improved on that i mean i would you could take an entire session on that i think but the most important thing at least for me is the item service operations thing because the mcr team really needs it um because they need an eagle eye view on all the services on their work what alerts are coming how they can work around it um because right now we have an experience which was tied with the agent workspace so there is only one workspace but now this is coming so we can have a dedicated workspace for them uh which will allow us to do some extra things and reduce our maintenance because if i change something on the agent workspace it used to affect them also very great yeah and i think agent workspace for hr is getting an improvement i think it's it's in ui builder now i actually don't know if it's the old one so there there's lots of improvements there there's a new record page for ui builder there's probably going to be a session on just that because i think there's that the record page is essentially used in almost every agent workspace um the duplicate a pid process i think is amazing i get feedback at knowledge to to improve like even copying a stage as well or like a lane or an action so hopefully they'll improve that in the future as well but you know if you have two similar tables and you wanted to copy a process like it's it was really painful in pid before tokyo and also i think recently we saw that there was one more improvement to add button on a stage on a step it was a interactive button and uh because right now it was really hard yeah they have made it like we know how initially i struggled a lot to add that particular button but now it's so simple because we were not aware of it and recently brad created one video on that which is really good nice um i think they also added reference qualifiers like a in pid so like you only want to see the data you want in the reference type field so you can like select what table it is or something like that i i don't know what that looks like yet but i think just any any quality of life things in pid is always gonna be a good thing yeah um i think they also there is there was like a line item on ai search for the unified navbar so i think just unifying search across the platform both for portal and internal i think is just gonna gonna be really good so sooner or later zing is slowly being deprecated new store apps this is the one for you ashu run atf's in the cloud instead of on your computer so not only just headless i'm assuming it sounds like you have the ability to run ui based atf's without human intervention there's not enough information but this is what it looks like i assume then that we can automatically spin up a vm in aws or azure and then do this that that will already save the cost for maintaining the server on prime again it just says cloud runner so i'm assuming what cloud runner means it's because it's a store app it's not in the release notes right of some sort so i have to wait for that to actually happen might be running on servicenow cloud instead of r cloud yeah yeah yeah again like i think it's going to be cool if it helps with any ui based atf's so whichever route they they go with it journey designers i'm not big into the hr space specifically but it looks like they are redesigning the journey designer for life cycle events and journey accelerators into kind of like a unified single experience so look for it on the hrsd side of things another slide that i couldn't fit enough information um quality i call it quality of life i didn't really like do it by product i've really just tried to like you know high level kind of capture some of this stuff um uh so i love uh the bulk delete and update records as like essentially queueing up a scheduled job that has rollback capabilities i think that's just like super awesome because i remember like having to create a schedule job just to run a script at the middle of the night and then i would would always be worried that did it actually run the script and capture all the things but if servicenow makes it a very easy experience i think that's going to be really nice a nice change i think for me ci attestation is very important to maintain the quality of your cmdb and student because now if we have this we can actually have the data stewards to do the attestation once a year or once a quarter which will actually tell us how accurate our cmdb is also with respect to cmdb is uh sorry discovery is your discovery getting all the data or not is it updating the data properly or not so all these things i think ci attestation can help anything like that like bulk bulk update i hope change like i think is going to be huge for admins if you had to manually clean up orphan ci's or or even the cascading dependent ci retirement like that sounds so nice this this was a pain deleting the dependent ci and retiring those ci so it looked like the language selection for guest users sounds awesome like being able to go to the portal you're a guest user change the language like uh that's that sounds super awesome um there are some speed up things right so scoped cache uh in memory so there's you know ways that they've improved the speed of when you're in a scoped application it looks like they are caching the audience that's viewing the ec portal so the user criteria doesn't constantly be run you can bulk translate kb articles i thought that was a really good one because manually it's a pain in the butt yeah um you can now put feedback control on who can rate at the knowledge base level rather than just the article level um so they increase they did more feedback controls uh i thought this was a good one because i feel like this is every other major sas tool is set up redirects so when pigs like instead of 404s everywhere just you know say it's like pass it to another article that is relevant oh huge one for admins catalog builder updates get their own update set if you have ever used catalog builder it is so painful right now because you make one change and it up it adds everything in the catalog to your data so kudos to that for at least making it in separate updates that um i think there's just other other things passing a language as a query param on portal so you can do more translation i felt like tokyo was very international in a lot of their changes so definitely a lot of focus on multi multi-language things um what else we got i think that was it that was that was a a good summary for what i could dig up um i mean there's still a ton more right there's like not only new features there's like things that they've changed on existing features there's new properties that they've added and new components that might come in oh i mean yeah the new ui builder components um i think like the service catalog got a bunch of new things such as like there's a new system property that um that's related to the catalog item attachment variable so there's like one issue there where like it wouldn't delete the record if you tried to move it and and so like um you can look like there's like encryption on um variables for like mask variables so i think there's like a ton of stuff in catalogs that was changed as well um i'm like quickly um uh reading through some of the the other ones to see if i like missed anything i i think i liked one for mid server okay and that was about the secret management because uh there are many questions currently coming from the security teams about the secret management how how secure it is so we we can also now back up the key store which is very important if something goes wrong with the server you still back up your key store so that part is improved and then we can manage our secrets passwords and api keys within service now using a group let's see yeah and i think that can be but i don't know how how it will look like but i think that is also a great improvement which we have at least with respect to item space yeah it will be like like you don't uh need to i mean i have experienced that when you do external credential discovery whether you get potential from something like vr or pam portal or something it's tough it doesn't work that well but if you have key store in service now i think that would be much better so it's not volt world that said that's app right yeah and i also know in like i recently read that like they're going to reduce the noise and commit changes so if you use studio and you use like source control like like it's really hard to like review pr's right because like you're essentially seeing just a bunch of xml diffs and like trying to find the relevant ones can be kind of tough so it looks like they're reducing some of the system generated fields so that should make it easier and with respect to licenses there was one improvement made which i was reading through the notes on the subscription management dashboard or the record now they are going to link the definition with the product which will help as admins to understand which definition is used because right now i always have to go to service now ask which definition please tell me uh and then dig into it but license is always a pain it's always it will be i also saw that um on workspace now an agent can personalize a form so they can show or hide their own fields or like you could do that in the platform relatively easy but now at least you can do it in workspace as well if there's fields that let's say an admin was didn't show hide relatively easy at least on the agent side they can they can clean it up from the list view they can clear the form fields as well in in workspace right can they can personalize it now okay um i think that's it guys any other oh they do that from a security standpoint they for the topics for ec um topic taxonomy they added more roles to enable better management of it so you can give someone specific permissions and they can now like someone in hr right or someone in it can manage the topics and their subtopics so it's easier for them to to make portal changes so yep yeah and from csdm like we are just hoping to get those life cycle stage and state field i mean that migration piece i hope that might come in tokyo because we are currently going for a set thing and it might be a pain yeah yeah awesome any uh any last things um excited just a reminder like all these things we talked about again we have no idea if they're actually coming in we don't work for service now so don't make any investment choices or like decisions on it and starting tomorrow there's both a webinar and the early access developer for your instances so you can upgrade those and there was a couple other shout outs actually that we wanted to remind people of live coloring no uh i think oh you can see again august that is coming august swift you say i'm coming on live coding apr again for the evening i don't know if i'm coming but uh yeah they are doing on es12 and on fourth chuck is doing the tokyo thing and um on 20th you know me andrew will be creating short videos about the releases yeah and on 20th august we have a mavericks event it's a event which we organize so through started it and we will have uh chuck presenting in that on the tokyo your release again so please join us in that event also the registration link will be published soon within a within couple of days and then you can register for it thanks to dorian for giving the stage yeah yeah awesome thanks for thanks for joining and it's glad to go out to get everyone on here thank you take it easy everyone okay bye guys bye i like that song [Applause] [Music]