the tokyo release is here and it's time to find out what our developer advocates think are their favorite features this time on breakpoint welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast here's your host chuck tomasi hello servicenow admins builders developers and curious individuals and of course i always say that with the utmost love and respect welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and tradecraft to accelerate your career we've got not one but two two guests today my fellow developer advocate teammates starting with our newest team member lauren mcmanaman how are you today lauren hey all chuck i'm doing great how are you doing off to a good start as always and also joining us is developer advocate earl duque hello earl hey i love these three guest episodes have we done any of these before i don't remember with the developer app it's only for developer advocates rock on man well now you've both been on the show before so we'll keep the introductions light let's start with you lauren hey my name is laura mcmanaman i am the newest member of the developer advocate team i've been doing fun servicenow stuff for about seven years as a former customer turned employee and i've just transitioned off of being a solution consultant so i'm very very excited to be joining you all here today and also earl please give the listener a little bit about yourself first of all welcome lauren to the team uh hi everyone i'm earl duque i am a developer advocate with servicenow but before servicenow which was about a year ago when i joined i was in higher ed i was doing a bunch of different positions usually engineering to team leading to starting up student developer programs but i've been with servicenow for about ooh five years now but before that i was in student affairs and contract management basically everything not really tech well thank you both very much for joining today let's get on with the main topic and rather than do a rundown of all the features like we have in the past we're going to cover some of our favorite features that impact developers mainly around app engine automation engine platform features let's take a a slightly different approach than the inventory that we've done in the past and zero in on some of our favorites and i think we'll do this round robin style so in the spirit of live coding happy hour we'll go in the same order lauren why don't you kick us off with your first tokyo favorite i get the pleasure of kicking things off well i would be remiss especially if having worked with customers so intimately over the past couple of years i would be remiss to say that probably my number one piece of excitement is app engine management center so it debuted obviously in the san diego release to some extent but always that second release is where you really start hitting the stride for any new product and seeing what is coming out for that specific piece is probably my number one you have to explain to the listeners who don't know what is app engine management center so app engine management center is a really nice workspace that was introduced in san diego to answer a bunch of questions so as the community around app engine in general grew obviously the need for its maturity grew as well and so people were wanting more insight as far as usage and management and how things existed in the various uh instances that they owned and so app engine management center was introduced to answer a bunch of those questions essentially once the concept of pipelines was introduced you could see basically track an app through its entire life cycle through the management center that piece alone was really helpful to track functionality and bugs and things like that as well as like deployment processes so obviously probably putting something onto sandbox is probably very different than putting something onto or hopefully different and putting something on abroad um as well as a lot more like things around security so reducing risks and bottlenecks is a huge functionality point of the tokyo release uh and i think that that was something that was at a large room for improvement in san diego and it's exciting to see so fast magnificent earl what's on your list so i was talking about in the intro how i came from developer roles right before i joined servicenow and one of my things that i'm looking forward in the tokyo release is the upgrade center everything about the upgrade center and everything about what changes they bring to the upgrade kind of excite me because i know that will make the lives easier for a lot of the developers out there and so in upgrade center you'll be able to do upgrade previews you can watch analytics on and insights about the upgrades that are happening across your instances monitoring systems but the thing i was excited most to hear about is that you'll be able to move away from update sets when you do your upgrade reviews so most developers know that when you do an upgrade there are things that you have to go through to review through your skip list and to fix things and usually you bundle all those things inside your update sets um and you release those as you do your upgrades but with the changes in tokyo uh they're taking that they they're allowing developers to uh move away from the update sets and use the ins the in company uh app repo and so it feels just a little bit more part of the system more organic you can not rely on updates that's to do it so that means you can do versioning of your upgrade uh your upgraded i don't i don't know what to call them now it's not updates that's upgrade plans is what they're they're bundling them together so you can go through and see this application has these plugin dependencies and has made these changes and this is what i want to do with them it's all part of this plan that you then publish just like an app through the app repo and then move it through dev and test and prod and and install it from what is it system applications my applications uh you know my company same place you would for any of the other applications you've pushed through the app repo so it's it's simplified it and made the the whole goal is to shorten that upgrade cycle time yup and everyone loves faster upgrade cycles i can't think of anybody who's ever said gee i wish it took longer to do upgrades except maybe a person who works by the hour [Laughter] all right mine i'm i'm going right for the developer's heart here because it's been one of our most requested features in the last six years it's got to be the update to our ecmascript standard we have been using es5 for since 2014 2015 i don't remember exactly when we flipped over prior to that we're using es3 and we were you know getting a bit of grief now we do take a fork of the rhino implementation so that we can run javascript on the server side well pretty much like any technology the day you release it it's outdated and people say when are you going to support es6 when are you going to support es7 when you get it and it went on and on and on it's like the most upvoted thing on the idea portal and it's all over the community i get pinged on this about once every week or so well we are happy to introduce in tokyo what we're calling ecmascript 2021 and it supports what we term es6 plus it's many of the features from 6 7 8 12. now if you want to find the official documentation of what's supported and what's not it's on the doc site you look for the ecmascript 2021 and you'll find it it says here's what you can do out of es6 and i believe there's a list that says here's what you can't do we have a break point no i'm sorry a live coding happy hour from august 5th where we're going to be tinkering and testing some of these things live we will have other venues where i'm sure this will pop up and we encourage you to do some testing exploration i at the time of this recording i don't know a whole lot beyond es5 so i am excited i've heard good things i've got uh a buddy whom i've known for almost 40 years who i trust in these capacities he's just not part of the servicenow ecosystem but he's he's been you know leaning into me going hey you got to start exploring some of these newer features and i am i look forward to doing filters and maps and things that i don't even know what i'm talking about right now but hopefully by the time this podcast drops we'll have a little more experience on that and i will fall in love with that and who knows maybe there will be some updates to the javascript series with some of these newer features that we can take advantage of save time be more efficient less code that kind of thing all right back to you lauren what's what's next on your list well for the attendees of the knowledge 22 content especially the builder track a huge theme of that use case was some uh was a school and school district creating some sort of app and that template being shared now incidentally at the time specific template sharing wasn't actually a real functionality piece but now as of tokyo it will be so in the tokyo release users will have a lot more intimate control over the ability to share templates within the organization to specific like users or groups or just generally to everybody um and so there will be like a whole like governance feature around app templates i think will be very very helpful that's going to be interesting to see what kind of libraries people create of their app templates and i'm told even more governance is coming i don't have any specifics on that but our product team says watch this space for more governance kind of thing because that's what customers are demanding they're like great you know i i'd love to have 2000 developers in my organization building low code apps uh but i need to control them in a little better way and not just the apps but the templates seem to fall into that same mindset as well absolutely and one of the interesting thing that was starting to pop up when i was active as a solution consultant was using templates for the sake of like a franchise model or things like that right creating a an app for a business that could be easily deployed but but allowed them to make small changes now granted maybe if they were a larger business like something that was based on a geo creating a business in japan for example versus creating one america would be wildly different and so maybe controlling the permissions around that just to avoid confusion would even be nice earl you got another one for me yeah so flashback to 2015 i was in a contract manager position and not doing any tech and i had never done tech before and i my first dive into any form of automation was taking a bunch of excel spreadsheets that i did that i thought were so slow and figuring out ways to automate them i figured out some visual basic for applications and started writing my own macros but i for a lot of us that are on the platform that are doing administration or development uh we started off with excel sheets we that was our bread and butter and we and i was i loved excel and i love excel now but um one of the things that i'm looking forward to tokyo release is um formula builder and so formula builder is this thing that they're introducing into the dictionary for tables for columns that instead of uh using javascript to do calculated fields you can use a simpler language that most of us are used to like excel language and so instead of having to learn scripting just to do a calculated field you could type in the language of equals or concatenation or use the notation that you're used to and it'll build the formula that way instead and so that's something i know that will benefit the ecosystem as more people as more of our citizen developers as more of our help desk converts um all those people that are used to excel come into the system and don't have to necessarily know uh all the pro code all the scripting that'll make it easier for them to get get the ball rolling to create their own apps to create uh anything that really helps them get the their first table out the door so that's one of the next things i'm excited for absolutely yeah that's going to be fun to play with from a pro coder standpoint too because the less script you write the less technical debt you have and if the more people can understand what your application does and how to maintain it because honestly you know one of the biggest complaints i've heard in the ecosystem is oh my gosh if i get 2 000 citizen developers out there who's going to support these in the long run well if you reduce the technical debt theoretically pretty much anyone and especially if it gets handed off to it to support god bless you that we've got simple things to think about instead of digesting somebody's 10 000 line script include going well they said it was reusable and they wrote it quick it's not documented we've all been there it's one of the things that i always say to anybody that is a pro coder that is scared of low code or get annoyed when they people talk about lookout it it's it's not going to restrict you it's going to make it so much easier for you like you said it yourself the it's so much easier to debug a low code app or a low code formula or anything low code that it is to try to decipher archaic scripts that were written 10 years ago in a language in or in a way that has no that nobody understands and that employee hasn't been here in 10 years so it's always easier it makes it much more faster to manage all those kind of things amen to that earl a lot of the things we've got have gotten to a point almost where you could almost click like control p print them out and hand them to someone and they're equally as intelligible as you wrote a description of what that thing was actually doing especially like flow designer it's always been impressively helpful from maintenance and communication to the business perspective yeah we could get on a whole religious whereabout low coded pro yeah i'm the old man in the house so i'm not going to go there too all right my next one is around authentication and usually when you say oauth people cringe it's it's a fairly complex authentication process and to date it's been like here's your oauth account for work day or name your favorite system over there and it's been one account one credential one integration well with tokyo we've got the ability to attach those authentications to users so think github maybe we could now be pulling down github examples for individual users or when your employee on boards and you need to go set them up or get their tasks out of workday or your hr system it can be authenticated as that user to get their tasks i'm looking forward to trying this out on one of our live coding happy hours coming up with twitter and see if we can get you know a list of tweets and say schedule this for november first schedule this for november 3rd schedule this for december 22nd whatever as aubletutor as lauren mcmanaman as earl duque and see if we can get earl's tweet in this table to authenticate and post to earl's account something we can't do easily today but with tokyo that's that's like mind-blowing it's like yes we're finally there i've been asking for this for years josh nerius is no longer with the organization but even when we were as developer advocates and then he became a product manager part of that team i i'm like josh when do we get this when do we get this and you know the feature came along after he left unfortunately but i i i feel like the seeds were planted and he nourished them and now we get this okay lauren back to you well i'm mad because earl stole my one with formula filter it was on my honorable mention list too fair fair i just i really like that one to sell i'll double click on that but i think one of the most interesting things that will pop up as far as it's like how it'll be used by all of our customers is dock intelligence uh one of the biggest asks of service now in the past has been hey you make it so easy to attach documents or any type of files to basically any record on the system but we would like you to be able to manipulate those attachments with a little bit more dexterity so doc intelligence will essentially bridge that gap of easily adding files to servicenow and then powerfully be able to do things with the information inside of them so just having the ability to not only see a document but have the ability to kind of parse through its information and instantly link that to your data structures it's going to save people i think hours and hours and hours of time i love this and i've seen this on other systems too where you scan a document or you send them a picture and it goes oh i see the total here and the tax there and the tip there and you know it kind of parses it apart into their system that's what we're bringing is you'd be able to upload a po or something and it goes boom run it into your process and hey you can now use that tied in with the out-of-box flow designer spokes that we're going to provide with the amount is less than a thousand you don't need an approval so lots of intelligence you can do with that i like the way that one of our people put it we basically taught servicenow how to read yeah that's that's exactly true and also like you said tie that with the flow designer pieces that already exist i can think of a million use cases for for that even which within my own personal life let alone my work life i'd be so nice don't make more projects for me please it's hard not to it's really hard not to yeah when you see some of these features every every release i take a look at the inventory of new stuff and go oh what can i do with that on existing projects and what new projects are born out of this it's like walking around the you know the home improvement store where you go light bulbs that change colors where could i use i have no you're making up projects as you're going around looking at the parts seriously i'm about to go on a big scuba diving trip right now every time i do a dive you have to write it in a little book and so i manually every time after log it into a servicenow app that i made but with doc intelligence it could essentially kind of scan through that and make its best judgment on all the information from my dive it's pretty cool that's you know that's intriguing that you could you take that hard copy you know i was filling out a dive log like that 40 years ago lauren yeah that's right it's not changed at all right it hasn't changed at all this is truly a legacy process entering the digital era one is waterproof and what is not so it sounds like a upcoming app build a creator toolbox or a live coding happy hour maybe maybe we do have we do have document intelligence live coding happy hour coming up in mid-october so watch for that if you haven't already seen it or you're listening to this later okay earl give me another one next experience i we have to talk about next experience every time because it is constantly growing it is the future it is uh the frameworks that we all want as developers and it's growing and growing and growing so in tokyo uh the amount of new components is great the there's more parity coming to ui builder there's uh components for uh mini calendars what let me look at my notes there's uh pivot tables oh my gosh um condition builders doc intelligence um there are gantt charts now there are modals within it you can do stackable containers now much more stylized text stuff there's just like the component library for uh next experience is growing and that excites me because i mean as a developer october is just around the corner and we're going to be talking about oktoberfest again and the idea of people contributing to a collective the the new framework for next experience and component building really emphasizes the idea of hey if you build a cool component share it it might become an official component later it might become something that everybody uses and so knowing that we're moving toward this uh component framework this um more modern web framework is exciting and it's going to be growing in more and more and it's going to eventually uh be something that we all will want to be on um and what else is the next experience i know they're doing things like you are able to create custom menus and any ad administrator is going to be able to add custom menus with items that are useful to their fulfillers to their agents that are most um needed for their for them to complete their work and that custom menu will be able to be added into the sidebar and everything so just a lot of cool next experience stuff uh i can't i didn't name even half of the things so check the release notes when it comes out see all the different things that are coming out and we'll make ui builder and component building even better and we will have ashley and or brad on a creator toolbox breakpoint coming up in the october timeframe as well so check the schedule this is a good time to plug devlink.sn tokyo is our full-on here's what's coming when it's having links if it's already happened that kind of thing so keep keep looking at that and mark your calendars for the points of interest that you've got okay my third one has to deal with our old friend translations localization internationalization whatever you want to call it i know there's there's differences between them but a lot of people mix up the terms including me and uh when i was at knowledge 10 as a customer way back when there were 500 attendees for the whole conference jared bennett was doing a presentation on notifications and somebody raised their hand and said well how do i translate that for the end user and i had done something similar as a customer where i would trigger an event and i'd have like five different versions of the email watching for this event and it would figure out as best it could what language descended in it wasn't perfect but it was it was pretty good fast forward 12 years we now have a built-in way to create the translated versions of those effectively it's a related list on the notification so you've got your default let's say it's english doesn't have to be and you say this is how the message will look for my english recipients and then you've got a related list of translated notifications so you write out one for simplified chinese you write out one for portuguese in german and you've got this related list of those versions right on that same record so that you could see and the system will figure out at the recipient level so if you send it to a group it's going to do it at the recipient level and say this is for lauren lauren likes her messages in her default language is japanese therefore lauren gets the japanese version of this message and if it doesn't have one it defaults to whatever the default was let's say it was that english one that i used in the example so a lot of fun there with notifications that's built into the system and the second part to this is dynamic translations now this does require that you have you know the plugins necessary plugins on both for what is it language translation and dynamic translations is a new one and you have to have a service that does these translations for you so you can do the translations dynamically that one's that one's more of a configure setup make sure the integration works with google translate or whomever you're using as your translation service so you can do these manually and have a library of them or you can do them dynamically a lot of options coming up but this is a major step forward in reducing that trickiness and and making the user experience because that's what we're all here for is improving that user experience to get them the information they need in the language they most prefer all right we've gone through three each do you have any honorable mentions you'd like to shout out lauren i do so probably it's it's not necessarily a huge dynamic functionality piece that's why i kind of kept it to the end of my list um but i really like how in table builder so in the new table builder of aes they basically added an additional toggle so now not only when you're building your tables can you look at the forms and the policies but you can also look at your flows so the flows that are directly involved and tied uh to that data structure you will have easy access to essentially which is very very nice for always kind of working in one dedicated environment and it gets it more to that table-centric development like i've got a set of records here's how i want them to look and here's what behaviors i want to have the logic around those records as they proceed so yeah it wasn't that difficult to go back to the home tab open up the right flow but now it's right at the top for that table the the flows that are attached to that table so pretty cool stuff earl honorable mentions oh a mini lightning round for me here we go [Laughter] i'm excited for the new guided setup creation so this idea of being able to guide people through the actual configuration of certain things on your platform if you've been through some of the newer apps you might have seen this kind of guided setup for you but now you can create your own the next thing that i am excited for in my lightning round is integration hub debugging dashboard that's exciting for anything debugging wise i'm always excited for because it makes it easier for people to do their jobs and last i think i'll pick i am excited for uh automation center anything that gives me overview of everything that is going on with the robots and anything rpa and anything automation just so i can see it all in one place makes me happy and automation center is kind of cool because it's got like that whole life cycle you can take you it's got a catalog item so you can do or maybe it's a record producer i haven't checked closely yet the the intake for that process and then manage those and and approve the ones that you want to get into and implement so there's like five different personas involved within automation center and just to control and get the visibility and ultimately you know the way we all justify our jobs is if the cio or ceo goes is it saving me money is it saving me time is it is it improving the process in general and how much show those measurable outcomes with automation center so i think that's that's pretty amazing that it can hit all of those notes at the same time i'm going to give a plus one to the guided setup builder i i have been waiting for this since we came up with guided setup in 2016 i think it was i remember hacking together one of my own and you had to have maint access to get at the tables and it worked but it wasn't a pleasant experience this is much better like finally because i think pretty much every custom app needs some kind of configuration turn on this property set up these lookup records etc etc to be fully functional and this saves you a lot of that documentation process that you would need to get this app up and running i mean when i did the loaner request app i think i had like eight videos on how to get this thing set up once i did the guided setup it was like load the update set go to guided setup follow the instructions now people can build those and distribute them with their applications this is obviously focused on applications you're going to be sharing between other instances you know i can see our share portal having a transformational effect with these things this can be great the other one i want to throw in since i'm an integrations guy is scim it is a standard for doing integrations of users and groups between systems many of us have done the old hey import my users from hr or active directory or whatever this is sort of a bundled way to get that information in one call you go hey give me all the active users in this cost center here they come now i can process them so scim or skim as some people will say is available as a client and as a provider on on the servicenow platform so when say a user is added to a group you can trigger a flow and you know do whatever you need to do in your hr system in your crm system whatever it happens to be so tied in with integrations this looks very promising and time saving and you know in my opinion standards are a good thing because there's so many of them finally lauren any parting words of wisdom regarding tokyo well i think probably one of the best pieces of advice i could leave y'all with is to upgrade your pdi's one of the third places that you can get access to all the fun tokyo content regardless of when your business is actually upgrading your instances uh is the developer website so go ahead and get that done pdi stands for personal developer instance we've got another podcast that has like a swear jar only they call it a jargon jar an acronym yeah anytime you use you know crazy jargon you got to put a dollar so we might have to adopt that policy on this because i know there's a lot of new listeners every day thank you very much for listening to the podcast but that's not the end we have to get earl's words of wisdoms regarding tokyo just with any release that we have whether it be tokyo or any future ones one of the things that i always asked my developer teams in the past to do is actually look through the release notes you'll learn about a lot of things that are coming up and you'll see vision for things that might solve your problems but you won't know any of those things unless you actually are engaging with the content of what is in that release so whether you make it an official task for your team to look through the release notes or you just encourage it on your team i want everyone to start taking a look at these release notes and i know the the tokyo release notes will be hitting the docs and everyone will have some nice light reading to do on the weekends my goodness this sounds like the call to action slide right from the tech now episode if you didn't get it go over to devlink.sn slash tech now and you can see it's kind of a table of contents and many of these features are mentioned quickly in there because there are so many of them beyond what we've covered here today devlin.sn slash tech now and you'll see the call to action is go upgrade your pdi explore the docs site which is what earl said read the release notes and the third box on that slide is explore experiment do what lauren and i mentioned earlier is like how could i use this in my personal life or what could i build or what can i add on to an application that would make it easier faster less technical debt in the future that kind of stuff the the wheels start turning as soon as you see these that's that's how we get caught up in that's how you get the experience so when you do get requirements thrown in your lap for these things from your real boss or higher up in the food chain you're ready to react you've got that experience or you reach out to the community and and find out more about that so thank you earl thank you lauren we will have links to your linkedin profiles etc as per usual so we don't have to read them out again and thank you wonderful listener for joining us today don't forget to check out the other servicenow podcast i can't remember which one had the uh the swear jar but i'm sure i'll find it and steal that soon you can find all of them at community.servicenow.com under the resources menu or you can go to servicenow.com podcast be sure to subscribe to this one or any of them to get them automatically delivered to you breakpoint is brought to you by servicenow executive producer me chuck tomasi video captions by him earl duque and you can find out more about servicenow developer program at developer.servicenow.com again thank you so much lauren and earl for sharing with us today thanks chuck and welcome to the team lauren thank you all so much i'm so excited to be here please let us know what you think about this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the servicenow community for more great information on servicenow development check out the servicenow developer portal at developer.servicenow.com thanks for listening all right go back in character now you had a hair affairs with the students huh bloopers flippers bloopers bloopers i i i i know josh josh so app engine excuse me lauren any parting words let me try that again because i was talking while i was talking hey that's a nice looking thing that i have no use for but i'm gonna invent one now uh next thing i'm excited for is a little bit more of a nerdy one um hold off on that one that one's not public blah blah blah blah blah bye go upgrade your pdi