hello and welcome everyone this is platform academy this time we're at academy session number 22. today we'll be speaking about what's new on the new pla in the now platform for the tokyo reviews i'm very excited you all decided to join us i my name is lisa holmstein i'm an outbound product manager for workflow automation and now platform in general i've been working with with the now platform for over six years now and i've been uh working at servicenow for about three and a half today i have the pleasure to be joined by my wonderful colleague paige duffy please give a quick introduction to yourself thank you um so i'm paige duffy as lisa said um i'm a product success manager at servicenow i've been at servicenow for about three months so i'm still still the newbie um but i've been in this service now ecosystem for about 12 years so yeah you're not a nudist you're everything but in yugi and we also have our lovely uh colleague kiernan in the background he helps us cover uh chat a bit and just is here for moral support thank you so much for joining kiernan um a small spoiler for everyone who's here already uh be sure to sign up for the next session i will put up the events um soon as soon as possible because our next session is with kiernan and he will take you through what's new in the tokyo release for app engine so um be sure to follow the community post that covers all of the sessions for the platform academy uh so that you don't miss that all right before we get started uh same as on in our previous new release updates we'd like to ask you some questions about your upgrades so i will start the first poll right now um and i hope to see some numbers so questions we have we would like to know which release your prod instance currently is on how often you upgrade and then how long the actual upgrade process is for you so this is not uh specifically how long it takes from release date until you upgrade but we want to know how long once you start the actual upgrade process please put your questions that you may have today in the q a panel we'll have a bit of time at the end of the top the session to address topic related questions but we'll also pick up some of the questions during the session when they fit um and if we don't get to answer your question live we'd like to catch up and answer it on the community later and then the second is we'd also love to hear your stories and experience with any of the products that we're talking about today so if you um how what you feel about the enhancements we're presenting let us know that about that in chat and we have a couple of questions a couple of answers for our poll coming in i love to see that the majority is already on san diego with their uh pro incense that's really awesome and the rest is on rome i love that you're keeping current because that is how you get to use all the newest features and about half are operating with every release the other half is upgrading with every other and then the upgrade process for the majority is somewhere between two and six weeks so i'll share those results for a few and then dive into the first topic thank you so much so as i said before i am a product manager for workflow automation so we first cover my favorite topics and those are flow designer process automation designer and not on the title slide but still very interesting decision builder floaty flow designer for those who aren't using it yet is our low code way to automate your workflows so it's been out for several years it was actually introduced in kingston i think and if you're not using it yet you really really really really should we have had a couple of sessions in the past so check out that list if you haven't seen those um on how to use flow designer how to migrate what are good use cases for flow designers so i will encourage you to check those academies out and my the second big topic here is process automation designer which brings your flows and subflows together in cross enterprise workflows and services them to the agents to the process workers through a playbook for example in workspaces playbook so playbook is basically the visualization of those process automation designer executions and then third decision builder allows you to decouple conditional logic from your workflows and scripts so that you can edit the decisions in an easy to use interface without having to republish flows every time so some of the new things that we have in the tokyo release here those who joined jason the fever and me two weeks ago or watched the recording of the last academy on youtube we'll have seen these but just to have everything in one place also here are our improvements for pad and playbooks in pad we improved the right side config panel to now show general automation and experience properties for example under automation you can now see which flow subfloor action is connected to the activity and click the button to get directly into to it it opens flow designer just as you're used to from other places as well second we can now copy a process with directly with a button press either from the process itself or from the list of processes to quickly create another process definition for similar use cases and then you for playbook one enhancement that was asked very often and it just makes the agent's life a little easier every time the playbook component will now automatically advance to the next step or stage so you don't have to click as often and then second we've also introduced proxy data brokers to improve the performance and easier setup of your playbook component and its parts there's also a store app that contains several more process activities out of the box so previously only playbook experience was in store or delivered delivered through store pad has now uh joined that so there's a bunch of actions that you can download and use like creating a child task creating a child case using the docusign or adobe sign activities or messaging activities like ms teams or slack those are now there for process automation designer out of the box and all you need to do is set up the credentials and you you're good to go so this is for playbook and i am and pat i'm really excited about those i really like to see how they're making it easier to get to things and and you see it slowly over time but like being able to click and open up flow designer directly from there it's the little thing to save you that 30 seconds that i i'm like yes yes is we have a similar effort on the decision builder uh front so our uh colleague julia perlis who's the product owner for decision builder has been working with different other product teams to surface the decision builder right from the place that people are building their logic so it's already available in flow designer but we're working on making it available directly in process automation designer maybe even from scripts or business rules from other places from it's now available for change policies change policies change approval policies have been uh using decision tables in the back end prior to tokyo already but it wasn't possible to edit those in decision builder this is a new feature in uh in tokyo for decision builder very cool for flow designer we added new roles so the read-only roles can now be used to better protect certain users from doing things they really really shouldn't i um there's always the possibility to work with access and content filtering but sometimes you have process users who just need to take a look at a flow need to know what it looks like they don't need to edit it so now there's a general role or you can even get more specific to only give access to actions or flows or operations more flow designer updates flow diagramming i did have a quick question are these read-only roles for flow business stakeholder roles i think is what they're trying to say i'm guessing this is a question about licensing to figure out if assigning those read roles if that incurs the license i don't know i don't know i would guess so because any permission on the database will usually incur uh some form of licensing but when in doubt speak with your account rep they have to know coming back to flow diagramming so flow diagramming is a new feature that was introduced in san diego it provides a flowchart view of flows so it visualizes your flows instead of the linear view that we are used to the generated flows are the same regardless where you create them if it's in the linear view or flow diagramming and you can swap back and forth for many people this graphic interface is helping them to understand the flow better it makes it more intuitive to understand where if than else or parallel branches go to and where they rejoin and you can also identify if a branch is maybe uh orphaned and the flow would never get to it so flow diagramming does not quite yet support all of the functionality of the classic view but we made some strides and some progress in closing the gap so right now we added functions to uh set flow variables and also executing flows in fair in parallel additionally we have more triggers that are not supported like inbound email service catalog sla tasks and we will cover the rest in future updates so we're really working on making those completely um what's the word to achieve parody yeah yes yes oh there's no starts with a p not yes [Laughter] um yeah i i don't know for me visually this is i've i'm excited to see where they go with this because it just does so much more for me visually than the original flow layout does yes yes it is it's the branches the branches do it for me and that you can just click the plus on any of those branches and lines and add new activities or logic is so so nice i don't know if anyone remembers workflow but you couldn't do that you had to like drag the box over and get it right on the line yeah and it had to be pixel perfect yeah it had to be pixel perfect to the line to be blue so that it actually gets dropped where you want it to go or pick up the tiny arrow and pick the tiny arrow onto the mini dot yes lovely um we have a question from the audience about flows building flow designer they have not been show approvers in the stage renderer so i believe stages have not yet been added to flow diagramming i'm not sure if that answers the question or if there's one more step that i am missing here so uh stages for catalog items or generally flow stages aren't there yet but it's coming um the other update we have for flow designer here is more relevant if you are calling flows and sub flows from other places through the flow runner api it'll now allow you to use the quick method with other things in in combination and most importantly you can now run it with roles or as user so previously if you uh ran a flow from script then it would always run a system um so one of the use cases that i had that i had previously before we got an out of the box function for it in virtual agent is to run the script api for flow designer to trigger a flow from virtual agent um that could now be done as user or running with roles so if a user is engaging with virtual agent you could have this script run in the user context this flow next up decision builder one update i already mentioned is that it now uh can be used to edit change policies but we have another feature that i'm really more excited about and it will be helping your citizen developers to get more engaged with decision builder so a very new feature is that in tokyo you can now export a decision table into excel and then import the crafted decisions from excel again so the uh process owner will create the scaffolding for the decision it will they will determine the inputs they will determine the criteria and the result columns then export to excel and whoever owns that decision whoever knows what are the thresholds what are the conditions specifically which are the people whatever they can change those in excel and send it back to the owner and they can re-import so if you have process owners decision owners that aren't working with service now directly and aren't working in the platform this is a very good option to include them and still use decisions in servicenow wow that's cool um i can't tell you the number of times that the people have sent me in the spreadsheet and been like here this is totally everything you need to do the thing and yeah um so being able to send them that template and then they send you back everything you need that'll it is that'll be cool it is so so helpful um i mean for pro coders we have another addition and that is that the condition builder experience is now also available to define the logic so i don't know if you remember the new condition um component that we're using all over the place now it's really useful it's really nice to use and you can also um like save condition sets and reuse them um so this component will be super helpful um the only downside to that is if you have been using those advanced decisions and those advanced conditions you cannot export that to excel anymore but it really depends on what the decision is and who owns them all right and my last slide for today a very very welcome usability uh improvement if you are familiar with creating um actions or custom actions yourself and action designer uh the modal to pick a new step has been redesigned it now has a search box yay and it's much easier to find the right uh step that you want to use so this is it sounds minimal but these things make your life so much easier it is the little things like it is definitely the little things okay um this is your part i think so i will hand it over to paige um yeah see what's new in development and configuration all righty so um prior to tokyo if you wanted to have multilingual support for notifications you really kind of had to build that yourself so you don't have a bunch of customizations or multiple notifications to support those languages and so this this should make it so you don't have to do that anymore so it utilizes some of those existing components to create translation translation request tasks so your translators can come in and create the translated notifications and then from there when a notification is sent out if the user profile has a language that matches one of your translations it will send that new notification in the translated text if it doesn't it goes to default but it's just it's automating all of those pieces so you don't have to sit there and you know 16 notifications oh yeah languages or or script it so yeah there were there were a couple of ways that you could do that prior to this i know that when i was a customer our partner implemented this by using uh script includes and then using running those script includes from the mail scripts so it was it was a whole or ordeal you'd have to like pour every string that does not come from a field in the task or whatever the notification came for you would have to wrap it in that function to call the script include to then translate the string so i am very glad this is now a thing natively in the platform um i did forget to mention on this though if you have if you're a customer with dynamic translation you don't necessarily have to have that manual translation piece so it does apparently play really nicely with the dynamic translation to create those notifications for you that is amazing one question we have in the chat in the q a is can notifications sent from flow designer also be translated uh yes and no so it will uh not work for the send email action so if you use the the uh old version the the one that was there first that won't be translated automatically however we want to encourage you to move away from that and use the send notification action instead and that will call a notification that exists in your system notification table and yes those will be translated translated automatically with this feature so another improvement to emails um we now support s mime for inbound and app on email so allowing you to add that industry standard encryption to your emails that one's a short one i mean it's it's like it's it's a standard we support it now it's there i feel like we did a lot of that with this version oh yeah standard all right so guided setups um so these were originally introduced years and years ago but they were primarily in apps that servicenow was giving out so if you get an app from from servicenow if you remember you can walk through and it'll tell you how to do everything but with tokyo we are actually introducing a guided setup builder so you can build those yourself now for your own apps um and it just allows you to create those setups to instruct admins how to get your app up and running do steps like configuring properties creating records and whatnot um and then one thing to note this is actually available through the store now for both tokyo and san diego if you're in san diego you can still use it that's awesome that is one of the bigger uh advantages of the store releases is that we can we can publish uh content a lot more often because store releases are four times a year not two times a year and they can be available to previous version of versions as well so you're not necessarily required to um to upgrade to use them so no more oh sorry there was a question so no more guided tours uh no this does not take the place of guided tours so guided setup um if you were to install a new app uh from from the store right now like a servicenow app a guided setup would take you through how to set that app up whereas your guided tours are more of a user interface how you're sorry user facing how to use the interface um there are two different things i can see this being useful in the app engine side of the house so imagine you're creating your custom apps from app templates and want to deploy those app templates to different departments who are using the same app but with some customizations each of them will maybe have to go through a couple of steps like set up some groups or assignment groups or uh roles or things like that those are instructions you can put into the guided setup to roll out rollout with the app it's usually like this one first time setup thing yeah that that would be really neat to go to pair along with the templates so if any of you have ever used atf um you know it can be a little difficult to set up the test time consuming um so at tokyo we've released both ai test generation and cloud runner um this comes from an acquisition of a company called dot walk um and so now that's been re-platformed into the actual platform so the first one the ata atf test generation it's generating tests automatically through ai and it reads the the data in the table and then it can generate an entire suite of regression tests for any table on the platform you know instead of that's awesome yeah create each and every single one of those actions you can just click a button and get you know 90 if not 100 of your test done for you i do not like creating atf tests i was not a fan the second new shiny is the cloud runner so prior to tokyo in rome we introduced headless tests um through docker but it's still required customers to actually set that up and you know they had a lot it was difficult we'll go with it was difficult so in tokyo we've removed the technical hurdles and we're now running headless tests by providing the hosting service to execute those ourselves so you can now run those tests but you're not having to be the one to set up the image to do so and this runs in the background so atf pre-tokyo without the headless you had to basically click a button and sit there and wait it was not a great user experience if you did anything wrong in that time your test would never go anywhere so this allows it all to run in the background you don't have to be involved yay one note on this though so for the the cloud run cloud runner um you can execute up to two tests in parallel at the same time for no additional cost but if you want any more than two or need any more than two that can be purchased but that's really just running them at the same time so if you need to run more than two tests you can have all the tests that you want that's just how many you can run in parallel a couple of other notes though this is not available yet it's one of the few apps that we've not that we didn't release with early availability so it will be released with general availability in september and then there will apparently be a dedicated academy session oh yes in september so yes so uh exactly just um so that fits the question that was just in the q a panel uh yes it is currently not yet available for pdis because it will be released with general availability and we will have an academy session on i think the current plan is september 29th so the third uh tuesday in tuesday thursday the third thursday in september and we'll be joined by our uh the product owner for atf and i uh hope that we get to see a nice little uh demo i mean demoing the cloud runner is just like demoing headless testing it runs on another system so you won't really see much but we still want to show off the ai um powered uh test generation i think that will be very uh interesting to see yeah we had uh we had talked about doing this like playing with this on um like coding happy hour last friday oh yeah but the uh concern was that we would basically hit the button and be done so um because it's it is that easy i've gotten to i've gotten to see it and it's it's pretty quick and easy so well that's what it's supposed to be right it's supposed to make our lives easier yeah i i really hope that it can help people to adopt atf oh yeah and i know the struggle is real admin center um all right so this is a new application it is built for platform owners and admins uh initially it's just going to focus on enabling enabling you to easily access platform capabilities discover new applications get insights and recommendations and then the first version will focus heavily on itsm and itom so it's really meant to help you see what applications you can install you know providing visibility into your entitlements and then making recommendations based on your instance um so it should be information that is specific to your instance and your needs and your licensing et cetera i think that's a really cool thing um also and i think i forgot to put in the notes but we'll also have a um an academy session on this one let me let me check my schedule so we will cover this i think in october we will have a session about better upgrades with upgrade center and that will also include the uh adoption blueprints and admin centers so we'll we'll do a a whole admin focused uh academy session uh probably the first session that we do in october right so this is actually one of my favorites so this is a this was added for app engine studio and table builder but you can actually still use it on the back end at the dictionary level so i test it i test it today it's there it is i've seen it too um it was created at the dictionary level so that it could be used in aes and the table builder um but what it does that makes me happy is it allows you to create formulas that are excel like so if you're used to creating formulas in excel it may be much easier for you i am much better at formulas in excel than i am formulas in javascript which is why i'm so excited about this you know as you're talking about in aes and in table builder it's meant to give citizen developers more of that that feel that look and feel that they're used to um but again because it's in the back end too you don't have to use that if you don't want to so it's exciting for me within the dictionary definition you'll find a switch to move from calculated fields to the formulas and then there is a full list of the available functions in the docs yes again uh we have content or we'll be having content out there covering this topic in this case the developer advocates will have a live coding happy hour this friday which is tomorrow so that the developer advocates will dive deeper dive deeper into formula builder and hopefully find some some awesome use cases to replace scripted calculations with uh formula calculations it is a fairly expansive list that you can use it's not perfect i know that you can't use like the regular operators so plus plus sign minus sign um but you can do all of those through like you can see on the screen multiply some so it's awesome it's very cool all right so much for this part we're about development and things we'll now talk through some miscellany's um and now platform enhancements and i hope i pronounced that correctly because it's a hard word for him one quick question just does formula plug-in automatically activate during upgrade i don't think so i upgraded my instances and i think i had to install it i'll be honest i pretty much get all of my instances and then immediately put a yes on it so um i don't know what i did notice no i it didn't i had to activate it on its own and then i noticed that it didn't show in a yes until i also upgraded aes so it was it was available in the dictionary and not yet in table builder so you'll have to update both of those now we've we will come into a few topics that are very specific and a lot of them are similar to the s mime support so uh many of those that are coming are there's a standard we support it now um but this one is a little different so there's a new plugin called protected tables and that allows you to uh set very specific uh prote setups very specific protection on uh log tables so event table or transaction log entries push notifications this audit and so on um so this is a new plugin to protect those from changes this does go beyond acls so which you know that from previous experience can be worked around with scripts but log protection provides the full trust into immutable tables on the admin panel so there are a couple of tables that you never ever want somebody to change and this is how you can do it now yes oh yeah um one more uh one more topic that was also covered by the developer advocates so this tuesday there was a curator toolbox session so if you're interested to dive deeper into data filtration i encourage you to check out that link so when it comes to data filtration this is a security feature obviously um this will complement acls so access control lists by adding declarative actions when to grant access based on groups ip addresses and more this does not consider a role or group inheritance and that is on by design it's very specific and there is also no scripting available for data filtration again on purpose um check out the recording uh the developer advocates had the product owner for this product on their show on tuesday so they go a lot deeper into detail about these things but the cool thing about some of the cool things about this is that existing apis like right glide records can read will also check the data filtration rules if they exist so yeah i think the ip filtration would have been very handy in my past oh yeah right you said so you did that in the past right you filtered internal and external eyepiece we had full-on ip restriction up and part of that was to prevent people from accessing certain tables off campus or you know off network um so something like that would have allowed us to remove those restrictions a lot earlier that sounds awesome yeah i think this is a very good addition to the existing acls this is a it's a standard we support it ifpv6 good morning german ipv6 is now also supported uh so you may have some some federal mandates or internal requirements to support ipv v6 traffic and now uh you can do that if you have ipv address fields in your database on your tables uh you will have to talk to now support to opt into this um but it is it is available now um onenote the old apis are deprecated but they're still functional so you're not forced to upgrade but it's recommended to upgrade to um the new standard another one is s sim system for cross identity management as i learned this is a standardized way of defining users and group information via http so as a client if a user is created or updated servicenow will tell other systems like word day zoom or your crm um what the user is going to be and it's going to be using a common user schema all right we have a question i think this one is about the lock protection so custom customers in the past had issues with uh pii data getting into sys audit tables and other system tables and required to delete that is there a possibility of changing those tables via support oh that is a very good question if personal data is getting into the audit and you protect those tables from changes you cannot remove the personal data anymore i can see that that can be a problem i think that's a very good question i want to take that and follow up you don't have to protect those tables this the log protection is an opt-in and not an opt-out so you don't uh you're not barred from using the system that you're using now to remove the personal data but i could see that there's um there needs to be some form of loophole for this this kind of data really good question very good question uh we have another improvement on the graphql front uh graphql has been supported by servicenow for a couple of releases a few releases we've now added a streaming directive to the tokyo release to improve interaction time with the system and it's no longer necessary to fetch the entire payload before displaying information and this is a little better better than other directive using the add deferr upgrade plans i touched upon upgrade plans shortly when talking about upcoming academies upgrade plans are there to make your upgrade lives easier and even quicker and what this does is it helps to plan and manage the applications and customization when you upgrade so for example you upgrade your death instance you go and check all of the uh entries all of the what are they called page skipped update records oh yes the skipped update records you go through all of the skipped operate uh upgrade records grade records i said update sorry [Laughter] and uh if you go through them and decide what you want to do with them if you go back to baseline or keep your customization those decisions will now be saved to an upgrade plan and this upgrade plan can then be built out on your instance on your dev instance and published to the app repository and be consumed on your test uit and prod instance so those are like simple scoped apps and they can be published through the app repository and install so you don't have to do the same work two three four times i think this is a really cool feature and i'm excited to see how this works in real life me too because i i love talking about upgrades you see how well it goes yes and then uh the last big thing um again there's a developer blog and a live coding happy hour going through this uh enhancement so in the past i think uh es four three uh an earlier version not yeah an earlier version an earlier version of this has been has been supported but we are now supporting ecmascript in a version that we call ecmascript 2021 we will add to this in further release future releases it'll now uh support many of the modern features from es6 7 and 12. check the docs about the specifics or watch the recording of the live coding happy hour linked in this qr code and the link there's also a blog article with all of the code snippets that earl decay was using in the live coding happy hour this is currently opt in via the app settings page on the sysap table so you decide per application if you want to allow um this these scripting options for your app and it's for that scope only at that time and that also means that this is currently only available for scoped apps not global but that is on the roadmap so each application developer can can decide for each of their application if they want to use this or not uh so my second poll for this one is i want to know uh which of the features we shared with you today are your favorite features this is a multiple choice choose what you like which which enhancements are most interesting to you it's a very even field yeah let's see i love it all of them getting picked yeah everybody likes everything that's great job well done yeah achievement accomplished for this release people like what we do i love it um i think so let me see the so we have upgrade plans we have atf tests in the front uh decision builder upgrades flow designer updates those are the most liked ones before we head into our closing remarks i have a last poll and that is my academy feedback poll i'd love to hear from you how you like this session was it short was it concise was it too long let us know so if you have more platform questions check out the previous platform academy sessions look in the community for the other academy formats that we have we have a next experience academy if you're interested in the new ui and learn how to use it best and how to implement it in your company to learn about ui builder and um and workspaces we have a performance analytics and reporting academy we have one for process optimization mobile academy virtual agent like almost all of the platform topics are being covered by different by different teams and they all have an amazing archive of sessions so i highly encourage you to check those out you can find them on the community or also on the now community youtube channel where this is also being posted um so i hope you will check out the other ones do we have one for csm i think there is a csm office hours so it may not be called academy but look in the now community channel for office hours i know that there's one for hr at least really good questions today thank you everybody thank you so much thank you paige thank you so so much for joining me that was a really cool session i am happy that everybody joined us for this session um i will post uh the recording early next week uh be on the lookout uh be sure to join us for our next sessions we will be covering uh what's new in app engine in two weeks uh the session after will be about adoption services a product that you may or may not have heard of yet it's a very interesting topic we will talk about things like guided setup that we talked about today guided tours help center and onboarding models the session after that end of september as i said uh will be about automated test framework uh the product manager dinesh will join us to lead you lead us through uh automatic automatic test creation and cloudrunners and then in october we will be talking about better upgrades with upgrade center and adoption blueprints thank you everybody for joining have a great day bye