all right let's get started um a very warm welcome to our webinar on employee center the what the buy and how of deployment my name is puja gupta i am a staff product manager with the unified employee experience team and i got to tell you um it's so exciting to see all these different names uh and and different geographies being mentioned in the chat like it's amazing to see we have audience from all over the world um thank you so much for uh just just uh going with the flow and riding um where you are dialing in from so super exciting to see that we have a path agenda but we will be hopefully it will be of super use for you but before we get started like in any of these presentations you can imagine we can bring up some of the roadmap items or forward looking statements so just wanted to call out the safe harbor before uh before we dive deep into any of the content so please keep the safe harbor in mind as you are reviewing this webinar um to give you more context about this webinar this is part of live on servicenow series and we have webinars and meetups and even office hours as part of this and it covers all of our different products and and use cases and and challenges that customers would potentially face so i highly recommend this series and um um you're part of this this web event um but definitely browse others and you will see the link to all our events all our upcoming events mentioned in the chat so feel free to explore this while we are just getting started with our webinar today additionally just a few housekeeping things please stay on mute um we we will be taking questions um and and use the q a panel to post your questions we have people monitoring the q and a chat panel and not really the chat panel so if you please have questions and you want us to answer them live use the q a channel and feel free to introduce yourself while you're asking the question we would love to know who you are what exactly you're facing uh what is what is the context behind the question so any information on that we would love to get that and the session is recorded this is a webinar uh we record our webinars and share it with the community so they can benefit it later on um so i just wanted to let you know that um so the recording will be available as well as the slides so don't worry about taking notes please feel free to just use the session to absorb the content and ask your questions and clarify any concerns that you may have at the end of the session you will be prompted for a short survey we we always want to improve these and and make them better so please uh share your feedback we will really appreciate that um all right so before we dive deep into the agenda i want to start with a poll just so i can get a sense of how familiar you are with employee center and what stage you are in in terms of deploying or planning to deploy your employee center and this is a very important set of two questions because this will kind of give me a sense of where i should focus across across the presentation today so i'll just give you a few minutes to answer the poll questions i'm seeing quite a few people with somewhat familiar that's good a few with yes and uh some with no as well um i just want to let you know those who are still answering and and those who have answered no um we won't be diving too deep in like employ center capabilities but feel free to ask your questions we will cover a little bit of basics in terms of packaging and what it is um and all but i do encourage you to uh dive deeper into the resources that i'll share at the end but feel free to ask your questions if it is confusing um all right so let's open up our poll question two as well okay so let me just do that okay now in terms of deploying we will be focusing on um on the deployment steps so i'm seeing a lot of you are planning to deploy which is which is the ideal state that you should be those who have already deployed um we we can discuss um how you can you know further expand on it any challenges your face so feel free to post your questions with that lens it's good to see like you know almost 80 percent of the folks on the call today are planning to deploy so that's exactly the stage that we expect you to be for this webinar i'll give everyone a few more minutes all right okay thank you so much for answering these questions i'm gonna just share the results um just so you have it and let me introduce you to the agenda so um as you can expect um we are going to focus on why you should deploy employee center as the first thing so this is where i give you some more context around um what is employee center and what are the benefits around it so so those who are not familiar with employee center hopefully this section will be of most value for you and then we dive deep into what you need to deploy and try center what are the considerations you need to make what are the questions you need to ask what you need to think about before you get into deploying employee center and the last section is going to focus on the process steps required to deploy employee center so i'll introduce you to the steps i'll also introduce you some of the guidelines or leading practice guidelines that we have for deploying employees but things to keep in mind as you are in between that deployment phase for employee center all right hopefully this agenda is super exciting let's let's dive deep into the first one so employ center is servicenow's new flagship product for delivering unified and engaging employee experiences across department and systems so it's a portal that we have for all employee facing use cases and it is designed with a best practice experience delivered out of box and the best part about it is that it's designed to scale it's designed to move from a single department implementation to a multi-department implementation to even making it an enterprise portal or an employee destination site and the move from the evolution from the single department to multi-department and the employee destination site is so seamless that organizations would not have to redesign their portal or reinvent the portal at all along with that it comes shipped pre-configured for it sm hrst workplace service delivery legal service delivery procurement service delivery and i believe also risk um so if you own any of these products it the all of these are actually pre-configured out of box for employee center so it's truly our multi-department uh employee facing portal or the front end for service now for the employees the screenshot that you see on the left is what it looks like out of box so for those of you who are not familiar this is what we are talking about when we say employee center so whenever you see something like this that's employee center another thing to note about employee center is that um it comes with a native and consumer great mobile experience so we picked up the now mobile application that we had for employees and kind of married it with employee center experience so the same experience that is available on the portal view is also available on the mobile view and you can see a screenshot of that over here another thing to mention about both the employee center and now mobile piece is that they both are extensible so you want to add do more things change some of the things you want to add more widgets new use cases the portal is designed in a way that it is very easy to extend out widgets or pages or or even just just create something new last but not the least thing to know about employee center is that it has pre-built integrations and we have one of the deepest integrations with microsoft teams where um my the entire employee center is embedded within microsoft teams so a user who is on teams can actually just stay on teams and access the entire portal directly from there and we also bring in teams into the employee center portal view so there's a lot on that as well but deep integrations with different places where employees spend most of their time and and we may want to meet where employees are by embedding employee center over there so a very high level view of employee center that if you have questions please post them now this is another thing to remember uh and uh keep in mind as you think about employee center it comes in two packages it's a single portal it's they both have the extension slash esc if i can be a little technical here um but they come with two different packages employee center gives you all of the capabilities that you would need for a multi-department service delivery so um request um knowledge we it also comes with the curated taxonomy um personalized and and connected experiences and um and it is again designed to be multi-department extensive so the employee center piece is something that is available to all our servicenow customers so we basically want all our customers all organizations who work with servicenow to have a foundation that is consumer grade and sets them up for doing more and greater things with servicenow an employee center creates that foundation implant center pro is an extension to employ center so it's the same portal that extends with external extra capabilities and it includes a lot of cool things like targeted and actionable communications so running campaigns and you know targeting different messages based on the audience that you define enterprise search which is essentially a term that we use to describe searching for content that may be sitting outside of service now for example sharepoint and searching for it directly from servicenow so it creates an enterprise void search integrations with external systems um the sharepoint one is what i mentioned um and and we have something called app launcher in which you can actually integrate with your sso to highlight all the applications that you would need directly on the portal so um a lot of tailored and personal development experiences are also shipped as part of employee center pro so what you can see it's it's much richer than employee center and this is our premium offering it's available with uh customers who have the hrsd pro or enterprise license or it can also be licensed separately as a standalone scheme if there are any questions on licensing please please feel free to ask in the q a but this is an important thing to know because before you start deploying you would want to know what which one you have access to one more thing that i'll say servicenow allows all our customers to um to try different products in their software environment so if you do want to play around with employee center pro you can uh do that in your sub broad environment so cheyenne pro version is not required to integrate with microsoft 365 so the team's integration does not require the pro version itsm pro does not include pc pro it only includes the standard employee center can you provide an example of tailored persona driven experiences this is something new that is coming in august or it should be out it's called manager hub we have a separate experience tailored or focused on managers won't get too much into into the depth for it but search for the term manager hub and you will get information on this so um integration hub enterprise so if if the company already has integration hub enterprise you don't get the pre-configurations we we do the pre-configurations we make it embedded in the employ center pro experience and and we create widgets and all the other things associated with that so we have esc through hrst um will we be able to replace that with service portal mariah that's a really good question and it kind of sets me up for the next next slide so it's important to understand the origin of employee center and where it's coming from up till quebec forget about rome and after that and i hope you understand the family releases the quebec and rome are our family releases both of them are from our 2001 uh time frame so quebec up till quebec we had two portals one was employee service center it's also called esc and service board so efc was the portal that was available to hrst and service portal was actually more like a demo portal that we had um available just in the platform not really a product but it was there uh to just indicate um what our poker capabilities are but since it was not tied with any license a lot of our customers ended up implementing service portal um as as a product and use that customized it to create their employee offering now the problem with that was it didn't set them up for success as they were growing into hrst or other things so what we did in rome we picked up esc so employee service center so yeah this is where you would want to see and we repackaged it enhanced it and rebranded it so employee center pro or employee center is nothing but an enhanced repackaged and rebranded version of employee service center so when you upgrade to rome or any of the other um releases after rome employee service center automatically converts into employee center pro and we will dive deeper into this like what that means and you know like what that upgrade would look like in in the future slides but uh just keep that in mind if you have employee service center you are already licensed for employee center pro because this is a power at our premium offering and we took a piece out of it employee center and made it available for all our customers just so that they have the right foundation as they grow into idsm sorry hrst or any of the other spaces our recommendation to all our customers even those who do not have an eec pro license is to always start with employee center because that will set them up for success troy i see your question we currently have itsm and are adding hrsd pro hdsm pro um i'm actually not sure what hdsm pro is but um htsm i i don't know if anyone in the call knows what is htsm and can just put it on the chat but uh it's only available with okay hrst is what troy was saying thank you troy for clarifying so if you're adding hr sd pro then you would be licensed for employee center pro for so it's a per user license um like employee center pro is a perl user license so you have to uh see the number of users that you're licensed for and it is multi-department so you can use it for ite and hr um both if you have both the licenses it just depends on the number of users that you can give access to because it's a per user license right i think i have covered all the q a on this if there are more please please keep posting on the q a panel can you please explain how employee center is different from service portal i so love this uh because that is very much my next slide um but before that let me just cover the benefits in general so i've been talking about it i won't like spend too much time on this benefit um um piece the main benefit is that you set the right foundation for enterprise wide service delivery and that is where um a lot of the organizations that work with us um are heading towards to simplify the employee experience in general so employees don't have to go to like multiple different places multiple different portals and systems to access the information they need or do the job we're also connecting all these system to consolidate access and we're creating capabilities and delivering capabilities that that provide intranet like engagement in communication so it's a very very powerful portal is what i'm saying now this question of how does service portal differentiate from your employee center comes up very very commonly so i built this extensive slide and did not want to like tailor it down for the webinar because you can keep this as a takeaway um for you later on one of the key things to remember is that employee center is a true product that servicenow is investing in and has built with the um with the with the modern look and feel um um and and the today's needs that employees and organizations have for employee experience whereas the service portal portal was was something that we had built years ago as a demo of what the portal can achieve the portal tech stack can achieve with service now so it was never meant to be a product there was never any investments in it to make it prettier to make it look more consumer-grade um so so what happened many customers would have to customize it to get the backlink now we have also done a big shift in terms of how content discovery works in service portal versus employee center the main thing i'll focus on what we did in employee center in in past most of the portals would have a separate thing separate page for catalog a separate page for knowledge and employees had to figure out whether they need to go to catalog or knowledge and in employee center what we did we created topic pages which are dynamically created based on content that is tagged to them and the topic pages actually have knowledge articles catalog item communications applications anything that an employee would need access to related to that topic so searching for content and browsing for content is a lot easier in employee center then a blog center is designed to scale um and and we that was not a factor that we had in mind when we were designing service portal this ai search this unified browse um the other thing i want to highlight is employee center is delivered by a store so we have faster renovation we ship quarterly updates there are also investments in things like personalization so we have a new capability called employee profile we have um favorites capability um so there are a lot more different things which are superior uh in terms of features and capabilities and are shipped out of box in employee center so it definitely gives you a better starting point the last but not the least is that it the player center is truly designed to be only channeled out of box and that is something that is never considered in service portal so if you want to have a mobile experience associated with the total experience you want to have the portal integrated in teams all of that has been really thought through in employee centered and and built pre-built by servicenow having said that both employee center and the service portal application is built on our service portal text app the terminology can be a little confusing so we have a text app called service portal um which is built on capability with angularjs and we have our own copy of angularjs so if if there are any concerns that you know um angularjs is is dying away it's not we have our own copy we update it we maintain it we bug fix it and we enhance it to to deliver all the different capabilities that we are looking for because employer center is on the service portal tech stack you have all the capabilities that were available for service portal for branding and customizing it including the service portal decider and then you also have the 200 plus widgets that were all available for service portal available on employee center so it's not that the widgets that we talk about for employee center and have like pre-configured are the only ones you can pick any of the 200 shipped widgets for service portal and put it on employ center if that's what you want to do so hopefully this clarifies let me just quickly pause and see if there are any other questions um oh so bruce um geneva is like really long time back um it that was that was when we like potentially spoke about it it was also that you know there are two portals one is employees service center and service portal employee service center was our product we were not investing in the service portal piece of it is there a migration path from service portal to employee center i'll talk about it um in just a few minutes pre-configured services for employee center employee center pro it's a good feedback we'll think about it and get back to you okay so all the other questions i think we will touch upon um when we get to the other section so the in the interest of time i'm going to move there so what do you need to deploy employee center um on the left hand side of this page we have the prerequisites of course you need to be on room release because employee center came out in rome you need to have access to servicenow store so employee center is delivered via the servicenow store so it's important to have access to it to make sure you're getting the latest with the greatest having said that if you don't have access to servicenow store employee center does drew up to the next family release so if you upgrade to san diego you would have the november store release that we shipped um as part of the san diego family release so it's not a show stopper if you don't have access to servicenow store we just recommend that you use that because store is always ahead of family releases in terms of capabilities and then if you are looking at employee center pro you need to have hrsd pro enterprise license or you will have to separately uh license employee center pro now that's in terms of prerequisites one of the main things when you start thinking about deploying employee center is to think about your organization's ex strategy like like you have to literally look take a light step back and i recommend doing it at an enterprise level not just your department and think about what are the different access points that a cust that an employee would need to access to get help what are the different portals do you want to unify them are there things that you may want to migrate into a single experience or something like that um so that's that's an important thing to think about as you're thinking about deploying employment that exactly ties with your employee experience vision now it i'm not saying that you have to deliver on the employer in your organization's employee experience vision but you have to have that vision in mind as you are thinking about your deployment and that gets you to the question who are the stakeholders so um i won't spend too much time on it because it is a little bit more in terms of business i i want to focus more on the deployment piece but this is an important thing to keep in mind like you're not making this decision in isolation and you should always think from an enterprise point of view now and next piece is you need to understand what are the different capabilities available to you so what are the different features with employee center what are the different widgets um same with employee center pro versus employee center so if you want to make any changes for licensing you this is the time before you start your deployment that you would make that um this slide is just a reference um i would say use our community employee center community and i'll share the link later on in the presentation uh use that to get additional details on what's available and also product talks so this is just to give you a sense of what you need to think about now let's let's talk about the deployment parts and there are some questions on this which i will address as we go through this now if you are using a service portal application deployment right now so let's say your itsm or any other customer with any other product but hrsd you are likely using the service portal application that slash sp so we recommend you to move out of this this experience and typically we have seen um a lot of customers who have uh the service portal portal just very uh out of box and and not much customization this migration is easy but there are also organizations who have heavily customized um the service portal application um we'll talk about how how you can migrate into um into employee center now i don't want to highlight we're not enforcing this migration we're not saying that you have to migrate it today and and we are going to decommission service portal next month or something like that um we're not decommissioning service portal this is a recommendation that you migrate um you can um you can time it as it works for your organization now as you're thinking about employee center you may also may be thinking that i have this external page or an external signup which is not service and even service now but i would like to move to employee center because now i have this nice product available from servicenow which looks good and kind of serves for the experiences that i want to create so one migration path that is into employee center is from external sites into employee center and again both of these could be employ center or representative when it comes to the customers who have already who are already using employee service center it's an upgrade because remember i told you that employee center is nothing but a repackaged and enhanced and reworded um rebranded version of employee service center so when you upgrade to rome you will actually see that rebranding happen automatically but the capabilities are actually in the store or the latest capabilities are in the store so you are essentially moving to employee center pro and getting the latest capabilities from the store uh applied to your environment um we'll touch deeply uh on what this means one thing i want to point out is when you upgrade we won't like wipe out your uh current implementation and move it to the new one so i just want to ease any any concerns of that uh we don't do that it's almost like any like any upgrade you opt-in to the new things and decide what you want to use let me um let me okay let me just cover one more slide and then pause for questions so um another thing that we highlight to customers pretty often is that there's a lot that you can achieve with employee center pro um there's this a lot of different capabilities and and we understand that organizations are at different maturity parts we actually did an academy session that talked about multi-stage deployment strategies and what you see on the left hand side these are all the different things that you could potentially choose to have a crawl walk run approach so think about that like what what are we starting with what is our crawl approach and you know how we will build into um into a run or like a more mature stage with employee center is something that is definitely an important decision to make in the picnic and i'm not going to go in depth for that because we did an academy session on it and i'd encourage you to go see that um all right so before we go deep let me just take questions we are doing an implementation of itsm module only the client is not interested to use service now employ center vision can we continue to use the service portal and not convert esc as you mentioned um [Music] so we recommend our official recommendation is to not do any new deployment on service portal um you can in you can always use employee center as your starting point and change it um the home page that is shipped with employee center is not necessary what you have to apply as the home page for the clients but we recommend that you use employee center as the starting point because that's where we are investing in terms of new capabilities in the service portal application you may see some bug fixes being made but we are not shipping like new capabilities for example when we ship favorites when we ship profile all of those are designed to work with employee center and it will take a lot of work to get them work to service portal so our recommendation is any new implementation should always be employee centered as the starting point if there is someone who is using service portal already and wants to continue using it for some time they can do that okay what is the difference in terms of functionality that we need to lift and shift from quebec to rome or tokyo in the future for hrsd so every release will have some some work but i want to say that the biggest left in terms of just the portal will be from quebec to rome because that's when you are deploying employee center for the first time once you have done that the other capabilities are incremental and and are not like a shift of paradigm in terms of the experience so it will be a smaller lift so moving to employee center the first time is probably the biggest lift and depending on your implementation that how big that left is will will differ all right um let's see the next question today we only have itsm insecops no csm or hrst and we use service portal and now mobile agent is so is it required to migrate to employee center so like i said it's not required but we recommend you to migrate to employee center especially if you're moving beyond rome um um it's it's it's where we are investing um and if getting the new capabilities work with your old environment um is going to be harder to deploy and like you know get that in your experience and if you move to migrate to employ center once then you don't have to do that heavy lift again is it expected that any atf test that we now have for service portal will also work for employee center i believe so it depends um the tech stack is still the same so a lot of it will will work but i think you should still also reevaluate just take a look at if you want to add or delete anything should we use new deployments for external facing portals so employee center is designed for employee use cases could you use it technically you possibly can but it's not designed for customer facing or external facing use cases there are some capabilities you may also feel a little challenged in effectively using with external users for example content targeting you won't have that data for external users to do the right content targeting and it's a little difficult to achieve on that so um just wanna keep that in mind and i do see some people raising hands uh in the interest of time i'm just taking questions in the q a panel but i'm trying to answer them live as much as i can so please please put your questions in the q a i'll try to save some time in the end for um anyone who wants to raise their hand and speak up um let me just take this last question and then i'll move into the migration steps so how does employee center work with msps that have multiple clients using the main separation so um i believe the employee service portal tech stack does not support domain separation so whatever like we we haven't touched anything um on that piece so however the msps over with multiple clients did that they can continue doing the same thing dave employee center pro is that what enables integrations with teams no there is uh there are different set of licensing requirements for teams i would encourage you to go check on uh portal um on so product docs but employee center pro is not required all right so let's jump into the migration steps now these are specifically for service portal to employ center migration steps you could also think of this for um for someone who is trying to migrate from an external system into this the way you see the color coded um the light green ones um are the ones which um which will be required for all ac deployments so it's not something special that you're doing for migration i thought that would be interesting to know that you know what how different is migration over upgrade or a new deployment and the red ones at the bottom are the ones the reddish ones are the ones which are things that you will have to think about for the migration specifically so let's start with number one you of course have to upgrade to rome or any of the above family releases we encourage you to take the latest one as much as possible and then you get the latest toy release um from the get the latest employee center app from the servicenow store now good thing about servicenow store is that most features are backward compatible so even if you are upgrading to rome and uh let's say there is an august store release a lot of the capabilities that we are shipping in august this this month essentially will also work with rome so like that's that's an advantage of servicenow store so upgrade getting to the right reasons is important second piece and i think this is the biggest lift that you would have as you deploy employee center across all organizations so those are not migrating also like this is an important one for you to listen um you have to set up curated experiences now for those who knew curated experiences is that new content discovery paradigm that we have on employee center where you um set up a hierarchy of topics um so think of it like it hardware computers um is it could be like a set of three-tiered topics and you're connecting all your content to these topics so identifying what these topics will be for you and how you what content will be connected where and actually connecting that content is the biggest lift that you have to do to ease it what we recommend as you can see in the first bullet in number two over here is to clone the out-of-box taxonomy so we actually shipped an uh a widely researched uh taxonomy that that we see working across all uh industries um as a starting point for you so use that out of box taxonomy as a starting point modify it um that you that you would need um and and add content to it now the way to do this is not necessary in the system i would say take the taxonomy in an excel and i now create capabilities um you can just use our community to get there um actually provide you in excel with all of the out-of-box taxonomy topics listed use the excel to actually create a taxonomy structure that works for you you can do that by mapping the taxonomy topics with the catalog categories or knowledge categories that you have and actually see if all the categories that you have created map into the new ticks on the the topics and you would want to modify and iterate on the topic structure in the exam don't do it in the system and in the system once you have come up with that taxonomy structure clone the autobox taxonomy add the new topics that you have decided and then you do the content mapping um into it you have to associate the new clone dictor and the new taxonomy that you have created to employ center so that means you can actually maintain its separate taxonomies within um within the the taxonomy module and actually have only one of them back to the employee center so you could have one tag which is your current a live taxonomy and you could have a working taxonomy which you are iterating for like a futuristic we did a deep dive on curated experiences which kind of showcases how to do each of these steps as one of our academy sessions so i'll give you the link to it later on but i highly encourage you to go check that out to ease the number two here now once you have that set up you know what topics you are going to have in employee center it's it's important to kind of compare what your existing experience is heavily customized or not customized however whatever it is compare it with where the employees enter out-of-box experiences and the decision you want to make is what what elements of that old uh experience you want to pull in into the new experience so to give you an example one of our customers they went live with pretty much an out-of-box look and feel for employee center um now this was employee center pro for it only um and what they did they liked the my assets widget which was a custom widget that they had on their portal they pulled it out from there and applied it on a glow center homepage another customer did something like they had um [Music] my most viewed knowledge articles which was a heavily used widget almost like widget by their employees so they pick that up and put it on employ central home page so you want to do things like that uh to um to just know which pieces you want to bring in but definitely keep in mind that there's a lot of experiences that are new in employee center so you won't need to bring in everything we actually did an academy session that walks you through this um as well so i highly encourage you to see that step four is to set up the new capability employee profile this is not a lot of work it's just that you have to opt in to it and create the profile which is like clicking a few buttons and you create it then ultimately you're making configurations you want to brand it you want to you know configure the experience to match with what you want to provide which is um which is all configuration driven is is one of the next steps of investment so after you're done with this you're pretty much done with like the the definition of employee center or deployment opens by center the things that are important are the two ones over here first is you would have to think about the url change like when you're moving from like employees are accustomed to let's say going to slash sp now they'll have to go to slash esc so how do you do that so if you're just by creating one portal it's actually pretty easy um because you can just rename it in the service service portal um module and just go to that portal and rename these portals and i've given an example over here if it is more than one then it's it's a little bit more tricky and we recommend that you you invest a little bit more in ocm you educate cust employees on the new url and put actually a banner in the old portals that direct employees to the new pool so thinking about their ocm impact is essentially number six is everything wrong similar to that is actually number seven is you may want to redirect some of the legacy pages which people might have booked up and you have created new new space for it in employee center so we actually have a page route max which you could use to do that let me compare this with the upgrade and then i can just pause for questions now like i said the green ones are are something that would be required for any employee center pro deployment now this is focusing more on employee service center to employ center pro upgrade so let's start from the beginning step one two three are something that are exactly the same as the migration ones so um so you still have to set up the curated experiences that's one of the main things if you're using the app launcher feature um then you have to set up that configure the sso integrations and add any of the non-sso applications um it's just setting up that that configuration to work once you've done that um you can set up the profile as well but number five over here is what i want to focus on for this upgrades so what really happens is when you upgrade to employee center pro you don't um you won't see any change in your home page because we are shipping employee center pro with its own home page which is not applied to your environment even though you have all the capabilities that uh are shipped with employees and the pro so all the new widgets all the new back-end workflows that we have created all of that will be automatically applied to your portal but the home page that the end uses these is does not change so um because we already have the new separate homepage you have two choices you can choose to retain your homepage um let's say you want it you can manually add all the new widgets and the experiences that you have been provided to you into that home page uh for whatever reason if you want to do that and you can use simply the service portal designer the other option is which is on top of this box on number five is to actually run the easy install strip and once you do that what happens is that new employee center pro home page is applied to uh the slash esc body now if you're making changes to um like if you want to use the new home page but actually have it slightly modified you can do that before you run the script and like you know um um and make the changes accordingly so the main point to remember is that you still have to do all the configurations um and the profile the setup steps are still the same like the number two is what requires you the most investment picking up like what taxonomy you want and how and what content you will make everything else is is pretty straightforward in my opinion and i've worked with a lot of customers the only place where i've heard most questions is is round number two now one more place where i hear a lot of questions is ai search um i do want to highlight that um you don't need like we recommend ai search because it creates the best experience but you don't you're not mandating it as a requirement to move to employ center pro so you can move to employee center pro and then and then choose to get ai search um type t day not tiger and later on okay before i go into the let me just take questions uh ketan how does csm total itsm portal and pc portal tied together so csm portal is separate because it's an external facing portal now the itsm portal i believe you are talking about as service portal and ec portal is essentially a replacement for service okay they are technically separate portals but like i said um pc we are recommending customers to move out of ec uh sorry sp portal and move to employ center portal can you have external service portal but also use employee center for internal users yes so so the service portal can be confusing we have a text app called service portal and all these portals are actually built on that text app you can have multiple portals in that text app so one portal could be external um which could be based on the csn portal or a custom portal that you create um and you can still have employee center can we both have an i.t service portal and employee center idea wants to remain separate and not yet ready to migrate so um yes you can you can have the service portal uh slash sp separate and slash esc which will be employee center deployed separately but that's an interesting conversation and if um if you would like to discuss with the account team we would love to encourage id to get into a single portal and there are a lot of capabilities we're shipping for that the search is not currently correctly using ai search and is using the sp search um i would say raise a request um and and uh we can dive deep into it it's hard for me to like debug right now on that employ center can work as a unified portal like service portal i mean can we configure idea portal hr portal knowledge portal yes that is the whole point of actually employee center you it's a unified portal for ideas knowledge catalog in fact it's unifying the browse across all of these it's it's meant to be a single portal for all service now use cases that touch an employee so workplace service delivery knowledge hr communication journeys ideas communities forums all of these are on employee center and we literally work across different teams within servicenow to make sure all the workloads that are being shipped that touch employee are on employee center so it's literally our flagship employee now i do see the time um and i don't see any open questions and i want to quickly touch upon some of the best practices that you should keep in mind now this one is focused on designing you of course want to work with your marketing team to ensure the branding color palettes and everything and the images that you are using are according to brand standards and this is an important one to highlight because you will see that employee center is very visual so um you you would want to think about that the second one over here is you should have a consistent experience across employees and converges you can do a lot and as we are shipping more capabilities we're providing you more capability or flexibility to design your own experience but you should ensure consistency taxonomy structure is important we'll i'll have a slide on that in just a few minutes but um having a good taxonomy structure will make a huge difference in terms of how people are spending time that's why the number two in these steps that i mentioned where you're setting up the topics is the most important piece then as you're thinking about the widgets it's important to think about the library of widgets that we have before you create news don't customize too much we'll spend some time on that too for the taxonomy design definitely use the out of box taxonomy as starting point we i've worked with so many organizations who are trying to redesign it without actually taking a good look at the out-of-box taxonomy like it is the best starting point you could potentially have it it's an employee voice um and and uh generalized enough for like across industries you i'm not saying you won't have to make changes just use it as a starting point the number two is avoid creating a sprawl of topics you may have like in your organization that i want a separate topic i want a separate topic you can't have 100 topics for employees to navigate and the general recommendation is don't have more than three tiers of topics so um you're not flooding your mega menu you're not like you know also um creating a long list of topics that the employees would have to navigate to and then it's a good opportunity for you to clean up your content and you don't really have to tag everything in your taxonomy structure you can choose to just have the most important pieces and still make the other content that is available to you searchable so think about that as you're thinking about the taxonomy design and important to have the user criteria appropriately defined for accessing and managing content yeah and a lot of people make it a blocker like i we were not ready to build a taxonomy we're not we we just don't have the buy-in for it you can deploy employee center without actually doing the taxonomy in full you can start with two or three topics and slowly build it in fact service now internally did the same thing we started with two or three topics and we like slowly building our taxonomy um guidance for modifying pages this is this is not new this is something that is applicable for any of our portal implementations um you should always review what's available out of box um and review what's what's available in the widget library when you are placing it you ensure you are placing it in the right way using the service portal designer think about the intent for that widget as you are um applying it and then modify it in a or customize it in a scoped app on customization one thing to remember is that you have to evaluate your customization based on the value and the technical risk associated with it and and make it according to that you shouldn't customize too much because that makes a great heart um all right we're running out of time and i don't see any open questions right now so that's probably a good thing but here are the top resources um that i would highly recommend you to so the main one to remember over here is the one in the center is the employee center community and uh um you would see you would see that added in the chat soon um um and employer center academy are monthly training sessions that we do and now create is is a self-implementation content pack so um uh you will see that okay i'm gonna take a few questions uh if you wanna hold and just like keep asking i'm just gonna answer those but otherwise thank you so much for everyone else joined to join this um um meeting just to keep you just to remind you we do have a meetup coming up on the same topic where we can dive deeper into some of these things all right your question is what is the difference between employee center and employer center core uh plug-in so impressive core is essentially a back-end plug-in which which you don't need to deploy you deploy employee center and employ center core is automatically um um downloaded as part of it it's um like they're just capabilities are shipped into different apps for some technical reasons as we were enhancing esc it was required and especially because we also moved employee center out of the family release and into store release so we had to you know make some changes like make some um trade-offs in terms of how we do the plugins but you don't need to worry about employer center code you only need to worry about employ center and download that so the recording of this copy this slide deck and this webinar will be available right i think i've covered all the questions thank you so much everyone and have a good rest of your day you