hello everybody thank you for joining our next experience Academy today my name is Ashley Snyder I am on the platform web ux team I'm an outbound product manager for next experience products um including next experience UI UI Builder and configurable workspaces today I have a special guest uh samyuka Reddy from the conversational interfaces team she is a senior outbound product manager for a new product that we have coming out as part of store release for our Tokyo release called sidebar it is an exciting day today it is our Tokyo GA release so very exciting I'm sure you're seeing emails about that when you have time please go out and update a PDI so you can take advantage of all the new Tokyo features that we have coming out today just some housekeeping before we get started on our session if you have any questions please drop them in the Q Q and A we will allot some time at the end of the session to cover any kind of q a that you may have about sidebar we are going to have some interactive polls along the way as well so like I mentioned today's session is on sidebar which is a brand new product that we're launching it's very exciting before we get started I will just cover our Safe Harbor notice for forward-looking statements we are discussing a new product that we have coming out we may have some forward-looking statements that we cover in our demo in our presentation today we may have some board looking statements in the Q a so I do want to mention please do not make any kind of purchasing decisions based upon the presentation that we have today um just for an agenda before I hand it over um so we are going to go through an overview of sidebar um some features that are available for sidebar as of the Tokyo release we are going to touch base on connect support and connect chat since they are related Technologies and you may have some questions around those samusa will provide a sidebar demo towards the end of the session and like I mentioned we'll allow some time at the end for any kind of q a that you may have so with that I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to samipa today thank you Ashley hello everyone uh thank you for joining today's Academy session let's start with sidebar so sidebar is a new product which is released in Tokyo August 2022 as a store app so sidebar helps agents to make a real-time collaboration with other agents and subject matter expertise while working on any task-based record like case incident problems and the interactions with the end users as a live agents sidebar helps agents to improve their efficiency it helps to resolve customer issues faster with better outcomes and it helps to reduce mean time to repair an average handle time and it also improves a SLA compliance so why sidebar so sidebar is added as a menu option for the agents to see on their top of the menu as a small icon if you see on my on the screen on the right side there are two chat uh icons which is nothing but the sidebar discussion menu so agents can look at all the discussions that's been came into their sidebar discussions menu all discussions Android discussions they can also favorite the discussion so that they can refer the favorite discussions later there is a search capability in the sidebar discussions which uses AI based on the keyword that's used to search it will look at all the discussions the agent being participate the agent being participated so that they can quickly find the information for the previous discussions to solve the incidence faster agents can also work on multiple discussions simultaneously while working on other tasks sidebar is available in next experience so let's talk about the available features for side power so for Tokyo we have released record-based conversations which means that sidebar once it is activated in the configurable workspaces it will be available for the cases incidents problems or any kind of record-based uh record-based conversations sidebar utility menu and the discussion windows so agent can work on multiple windows that will be docked at the bottom of the screen and the utility menu helps them to look at all their discussions and search through their discussions activity stream any useful information that agents are discussing within their in within their discussion window they can add some of those messages to the activity stream which helps any other users in the future who can refer the useful informations to understand how the ticket is being resolved so that information can help them to resolve their tickets faster you can add any message into the activity stream you can delete message from the activity stream if it is not required and we have also provided out of the box quick actions which is search KB articles and you can drag and drop the files and also exchange the Emojis between the agents to go a little deep down into the sidebar features so record-based conversation so how this works so if you look at the screen I have like multiple instance it's been opened for the agent now on the bottom if you if you see there is a start a discussion when whenever an agent clicks on a discus button so the window opens up to start a discussion where they provide the subject and they add the list of the agents with whom they want to interact and send the messages that they want to ask once they click on the start discussion so a new window opens up in which whichever the record based that they need an help that particular incident or a case will be added as a record within that window so that the other participants can click on that record and understand what's going on with that particular record and how they can help uh the agent to resolve it faster there's a multiple docked Windows uh that can be at an agent can work on multiple windows all those windows can be docked at the bottom of the screen I will show these informations when I do the demo foreign as I said we have a quick actions so we have created search KB articles especially for the side part of for the side part as an out of the box where agents can search through all the available KB articles and they can share the KB articles within the discussion windows with other participants to take a look at and in sidebar utility menu an agent can dock the utility onto this screen are they Sorry agents can pin their utility onto the utility menu onto the screen or they can unpin so that the utility menu don't stay static on the right side of the screen whereas they can still look at the menu information by clicking on the sidebar icons of the two chat icons that you see on the top uh right next to the agent image they can look at all the discussions and they can also look at the unread ones and if there is any discussions that's been favorited and saved they can look at all those discussions as a within that menu an activity stream interaction uh integration this is a unique feature let's say an agent and in a participant or exchanging some good amount of information which help the agent to resolve the issue and the agent felt oh this is a useful information and I want this to be added to this uh record so that whoever comes later into that regard to look for the historical information like how that record is being solved so and if they felt that that is any useful and benefited information they can right click on the message and add it to the activity streams so for the activity streams we do have to activate the post type filtrations and select the sidebar options within that as the majority is aware the sidebar Works only in next experience and I know some of the customers who are using connect chat they might have the cushion a sidebar and connect chat are they different yes they are different connect chat is our Legacy product which works only in UI 16 and it is not supported in next experience so sidebar it is our news so with no future feature for agents to make a real-time collaboration between agents to agents agents to smas it's available only in Tokyo for customers to install as a stove app but going forward in Utah we will make the store app as an out of the box as I said it is available only in next experience and sidebar can be used in alternate solution to connect chat once you move into next experience let's have those 13 13 person members also get the clarity that connect chat and connect support are two different products they are not same so to give a quick uh update about connect chat and connects uh support So connect chat is our Legacy messaging tool that enables users to chat with other users it's more like peer-to-peer uh chat conversations and currently connect chat is in maintenance mode means no new enhancements or no party box non-priority box will be considered to fix an alternate option for connect chat is to construct sidebar when moving into the next experience and next experience doesn't support connect chat we're going to connect support connect support is our Legacy product which is a real-time messaging tool used by our support agents to interact with the end users who are seeking for the support help and to track their support cases to find Solutions and get the problems resolved quickly the current status of connect support is it is already planned deprecation for Utah which means from March 2023 servicenow is not going to support connect support the best and alternate solution for connect support is customers to move to Advanced work assignment which is our intelligent routing mechanism and agent chat within the agent workspace which helps agents to interact with the end users in a much faster and a better way next experience does not support connect support if you want to know more details about our connect support applications I have attached some resources at the very bottom of this desk uh very bottom of this deck Ashley will share those informations with all of you after this session there is an FAQ also available in our community for connect support FAQ and also there is a article available how to migrate from connect support to agent chat and advanced work assignment I have also done the agent chat advanced work assignment two-day workshop I have provided those details in our community articles so all those links will be provided in the resources page for your reference all right so to install sidebar plugin all we need is Omni experience standard feature set you can log into your system and go to system applications all available applications and look for Omni experience standard features site and click on install to get it installed in in your system let's say if you did not find in your system applications go to store apps and search for Omni experience follow the instructions and get it activated in your system now for Tokyo Cypher is supported only in few workspaces which are CSM configurable workspace CSM manager workspace HR agent workspace itsm manager workspace vendor management workspace if any customers looking to have sidebar other than these workspaces we do have an option that you can manually follow the steps to add a sideboard button to your interaction records but please do follow up with your account Executives and the essays to know the roadmap for these available Works a workspace there's a common question that I hear from customers is when a sidebar available for service operations management the roadmap for that for now is uh undecided because of the other dependencies but please do follow up with the uh with your account team to get those details before you plan to add the money before you plan to add the manual button in your workspace in your instances I believe we have a demo coming up so I will stop sharing and I will hand over the sharing to you so for for the demo I'm going to show two use cases one is how an agent I'll bet Angeline tried to get in a hug while she's working on record uh task-based Records and let's say if she's also an agent who is taking the live interactions with the end user how she can help an end user getting a faster help from other agents or subject matter expertise so for the demo I'm using Beth angelen as my agent and I'm using thread or David Lu as in helper to her as an imparticipants and I'm using able as the end user with that said um and Beth Angelo's instance so choose your workspace which you uh the agent has to choose the workspace in which that she wants to be worked so for our demo I changed CSM FSM configurable workspace but again when the agent comes here uh she can work on the cases any incidents problems uh request any of the records which are activated for the record type conversational records let's say I'll go to incidents and pick the topmost one which came as a critical the agent clicks on the incident which says need access to sales DB for the best pretty bad is new to the team and she needs some more help since there is some system administration information is being asked and also but some information that's been mentioned the employee termination and she felt okay I'm confused here I need some help let me get help from David Lowe who is an expert in this type of database shall I give the access to this user Joe or not to start a sidebar discussion that clicks on discuss button so when you install your sidebar uh Store app you will see discus button for all the out of the box workspaces record based by clicking on discuss button it automatically copies the subject of your records for this one need access to sales database for the West now coming to the participants we have a prefill option if the admin wants to prefer the available or suitable participants into the sidebar discussion so your admin can make those changes I'll show this at the end of the demo but for now let's say the prefill auction is not available but path can always go and look for the participants that she wants to add into her discussion now in this case she's aware that they will do will have the good information and she's going to add him as a participant and asking for the help foreign you'll see a new window opens up for that particular record every uh every record type incident will have only one sidebar discussion button let's say if any other user comes into the same incident and try to create a new sidebar it will not let it will open the existing one and ask the new user to add Inc as a participant to interact with other users and here that can exchange Emojis with other agents which you can also attach files for other agents to look into it you can look for the quick actions for Tokyo we provided search KB articles as a out of the box and she can use a keyword and search for any available any available KB articles that she wants to share with other participants now in our case it is not required so I'm not sending any KB articles to David so other than that if you look at this window so if bet wants to make this discussion as her favorite you can click on the star and make it as a favorites and by clicking on discuss information it shows how many participants are being involved into this discussions if anybody wants to leave they can click on leave discussions and leave this and move out of this discussion let's say if Beth or David wants to add somebody else into the discussion they can click on ADD participant and look for other agent and him into the discussion let's say for example I'm adding Fred into it now Fred also sees whatever the discussions that's been exchanged between path and Davey from the beginning and for every agent whichever the record that's being open whether it can be an incident case problem or any uh even the live agent interactions a attached as a record for the participants so participants can click on this record and get the CL get the information like what exactly better is asking and what the uh what the details that's been provided into that instant now if you want to minimize this window you can click on minimize button and and bring it back by clicking on that particular window now once you close it close the discussion the discussion still exists uh uh for that record but once you close it the path has to re-add herself as a participant into the discussion to start a conversation for now I'm not going to close it because once I close it our discussion is going to end now if you see your bat is also has other discussions with other participants on other topics going on parallely so she can finally work on other issues as well uh to get an help so all those sidebar discussions will be docked at the bottom of her screen now let's get into her sidebar menu so this is the icon that you'll find at the very top as a sidebar icon so whenever a new conversation new discussion comes into her menu there is a patch count that displays to her so when she clicks onto it she can see all discussions that she's been involved she can if she wants to quickly look at unread discussions she can find all those unread discussions under unread time and if she favorited any discussions for her future reference she can quickly take a look at all those discussions which are being marked as star let's say if Beth decides the she wants the menu to stay on her screen she can Pin It by clicking on pen the sidebar menu will stay on the right side uh to right side of the screen and if she she wants she can unpin it now let's go back to our sidebar discussion that Beth has initiated now I'm going to log into David Low's instance because he's the participant in this discussion and Beth has asked for help now I logged in as David blue here so if you see here on David's cream the Cyber discussion menu it immediately came with the batch count too uh since he had two new unread discussions in his menu list so by clicking on Android he found those two now let's click on Beth discussion here so when he collects on the discussion so a window opens up for him again it will be docked for him as well at the bottom of the screen now for David he wants to know like okay what's happening on this one just give me one minute this is a different um give me one minute I'm just trying to sing where the incident has gone okay so there it is I'm sorry I was in different instance let me uh initiate a new one from birth from the other instance I'm calling the same steps going to choosing the workspace that Beth wants to use when going to the record-based types and out of cases case task knowledge instance for today's demo I'm choosing an incident let's say I picked the one foreign starting a new com new discussion using sound bar here so Beth clicks on discuss button to get a help for this particular task and she is aware David can help her she adds David to the participants and send a message to David clicks on start this question a new window opens up here in which David is added as a participant now let's go on David's side so now on David's side if You observe here there's a new discussion that came into his uh in his sidebar menu so he clicks on that discussion which opens a new window for him and talks to his screen the bottom foreign as there is a opal record sorry as there is a record that's been added into this discussion so David can click on open record [Music] which opens the same incident with Beth is in and trying to get help with so he can take a look at this incident so what's going on what is the work notes and what activities is being there and based on that he can understand what information he can provide to back to help her let's say this is a net effect so he gives in a helpful information about saying that it is in defect and team is working and it will be fixed by tomorrow based on this information now that can handle this incident better and updates the status of this incident and add in a work node saying that come back tomorrow to to see the incident is being resolved and on David instance if you see he also uh have all those multiple windows that's been docked and he also can see his menu he can pin and pin he can do oh you can read all these questions unread and favorite discussions now let's say the other use case is we have an end user Abel who is trying to get a help from a live agent so so able goes to his service portal and clicks on chat icon here to start a conversation now let's say on on the other side I want to make I want to see if bet Angeline is available to take those interactions so we can we can go to agent workspace in path Angeline's instance and look at the status she is available to treat the end user's live chats and going back to able to start selecting live agent support So able is the end user he wants to talk to a live agent so please stand by while the chat connects currently live agent now let's see on Beth's side who's an agent receives this request in her agent workspace yeah she got a request she clicks on accept [Music] and start interacting with end user [Music] foreign has some issue with his uh uh server down issues let's say he he wants to know the status of the server down issue and he wants to know when it will be up for him to use again so going back to bed Angeline let's say she's new to the team and she is not aware about server down issues and she wants to get in help with other agents or in this subject matter experts who can help with server down issues so in agent workspace path also sees in a discus button since we are in CSM configurable workspace so it's uh sidebar does work in the CSM agent workspace too so click on discuss button here If You observe here the subject is not automatically populated for the uh for the active chat because we don't know what the end user's question is so agent can provide a meaningful subject based on the questions that she received from the end user now let's say there is a prefill available for agent workspace based on the agents who are available in a particular set of groups so that's the reason you are automatically seeing a list of agents who are being added into the participants so Beth if she decides she doesn't want any of these agents to be there in the participant so she can remove all of them and she can choose the ones that she wants to have a conversation with let's say she decides that she wants somebody else into the conversation that she feels they can help her so she can add them as well so again a new window is being opened for this uh interaction record and for other participants to look at the chat so and a record is being added into the discussion now on outside let's go to the participants who've been there in the system okay let's do this one let me look into the participants we want to see who else out there so there is a system on me if you want the same system at Lincoln he also gets in a message from that [Music] yes so admin also got the discussed discussion into his sidebar menu now admin clicks on server down uh status discussion and he tries to help that So based on this information Beth feels comfortable and she confidently provides information to the end user to help him to be aware that please wait for five hours the system will be up again you can reach you can reach out with me after five hours if he still see the issues now to go back quickly on the admin side so admin when he clicks on open record and if you see here Beth and Abel's the live conversations are all available for him to take a look so what is happening between uh both of them and how he can add okay huh that's all about the demo perfect um so we do have quite a few questions that have come in um Tim you guys know I'll let you kind of look through the questions real quick I want to make sure we get to you know the ones that would enter some basic questions for a lot of folks um and I know that you know we'll have to take these offline and answer them afterwards like I mentioned there is an event post on the community linked to our Coe and we will put the questions in the comments and try to get the answers afterwards um but let's just go through some of them I know we have about 12 minutes or so and try to answer the ones that we have um we get a lot of questions this is a very exciting topic and folks want to know a lot of information about it call it actually so I'm looking at Q a here uh do we need to do any configuration to enable sidebar or will it be available automatically after upgrading in both agent workspace and configurable workspace uh you need to have this suitable workspace installed in your uh in your system so for Tokyo we are only supporting few workspaces please do be aware and have those installed after that once you install the sidebar app sidebar will automatically be available and there is an admin setting which is provided um in my in my FAQ I can also post the information what steps that you need to follow to activate sidebar but you don't need to make it activated it is defaultly activated unless you want to deactivate the sidebar then you would go to that particular sidebar admin page configurational interfaces settings and then you will travel off the sidebar to not use it my experience with chat systems has been that teams get a little clicky-ish what I mean is they start to think that group chat should be private and it's it ends up defeating the purpose do you have thoughts about it uh as Travis mentioned it is contextual and uh any record that you specifically wants to have a set of users you have an option that you can your admin can add those access or remove those access to a sidebar conversations uh as well so only the uh users who has those access and roles can be participated inside bar discussions will the activity stream is not next experience still show all of the data that is posted from sidebar by people using next experience just in case so every record we have an activity available in it but specifically for the sidebar activity stream feature will allow agents to post the useful information into the activity stream so you'll also see the activity stream the other information along with sidebar information sidebar messages that's been posted in it we had some questions about that in the chat as well so um just to kind of reiterate will sidebar information go into the work notes no we don't have that feature yet then sidebar be configured to use desktop push notification similar to connect chat we don't have that feature available for Tokyo yet but when it is available we will definitely inform those details uh we did receive some customers asking about notifications or inborn product management team is aware about it how about branding and styles applied to sidebar is this something that can be configured at all so the in the demo what you have seen the menu so those are the options that's available so we don't have a separate branding or styles to change for the sidebar if that is important and critical uh critical use for the customers please do send us an email with your use case we would uh we will discuss with our teams and see what what options that's available and whether it can be possible for us to walk to fix it or maybe uh next experience team or the workspace teams like they may have some custom options so we can try to help you I did want to mention um we do have some roadmap items coming out for Branding for next experience that we've discussed in previous academies we do have a roadmap for further branding um so I know our teams will be working closely between next experience and sidebar on future roadmap items I would just keep an eye out for that foreign who can see sidebar messages uh is it only or end users too so sidebar messages are only visible for the participants who've been added into the sidebar discussions the other folks who who don't uh I mean who are not added into the participants list will not see any of the discussions that's been exchanged are all the sidebar features API enabled supported as well can you build or interact with the systems via client or server website apis uh for Tokyo we don't have this feature activated but we do have this in our roadmap so we might be coming up to enable the option for API can we integrate sidebar into the custom built workspaces using the same workspace app shell let's say if any if the workspaces that we have provided out of the box for Tokyo is not the uh is not the workspace that you are looking for and you still want the sidebar uh to be available on other workspaces there is an option available we do have a documentation on that how to add a sidebar discussion for the non-supported workspaces so take a look at uh look at our sidebar documentations which we provided for the Tokyo release it gives a very good uh clear steps how to follow and if there is any questions please feel free to reach us out does sidebar provide notifications to the browser tab we don't have this option as of now uh right now the only available option for agents to look at their sidebar icon batch count which displays on the right side of the top menu but we have the notifications in our roadmaps I hope that might become planned soon in upcoming releases I am struggling to customize workspaces and integrate chat and agent support on those it's so complicated are we going to have a proper approach to make them compatible with custom workspaces uh I like to have more details on this particular question because it's it's it is more about workspaces and integrate chat uh actually is it possible to connect with ashtosh and get more details on it to give him the proper answer yeah we could take this offline so now we are looking at not only you know custom workspace technology but then we are working with a couple different conversational interfaces products right like agent chat um and then sidebars we are kind of balancing three products here so we'll take this question offline for you as soon as get back to you on that thank you because sidebar chat is paid but a user navigates Elsewhere on the platform does the chat stay pinned if the page changes so the sidebar pin yes it does stay uh if he pin it is there any desktop or email notification available for invited members in the discussion as of now we don't have this feature but this is in our roadmap uh soon it might be available in one of our upcoming releases for now agents can only see in their instances in the inside Bar menu can access to the sidebar be limited to certain users what sort of configurations can we expect in this component your admin has to assign the users to provide an access to be added into the sidebar discussions with the pre-fill option I will provide the link for the available sidebar admin settings so Ashley can share those informations with you I do that I want to use this as kind of a segue I know we have a few more questions left we got about two minutes um so I did want to start wrapping up everything um and like I mentioned we will be taking these questions offline um and Sam Houston I will take a look at them and get back to you on this if it's something that we need to post in our larger Community sites we definitely will um I did want to thank you Sandy for joining us today in introducing sidebar um you know it's an exciting new feature I know we have tons of questions just because you know I don't think anyone's had a chance to really see it yet and then we'll get more questions once they start getting in and playing around with it um I did want to mention our next experience Center of Excellence site where we do have a lot of answers to the questions that you guys were asking this is more next experience Focus but I do want to kind of mention we have our next experience Academy link there um and we do have we'll post a session here and we will follow up on some of those questions in the comments so bookmark this or just know where to find a Coe and it will be there for you we have another next experience Academy session coming up on October the 19th at 12 p.m Eastern Standard time we'll have another guest speaker from the performance analytics team coming on and he will be discussing inline dashboard editing in next experience we have made some changes between the Tokyo release and the San Diego release so feel free to register for that and like always we'll have this session posted on YouTube a few days after we'll have that session posted but definitely bookmark the resources here we'll have them posted I did want to mention if you go to the next experience resource Hub on the Coe we've already linked out to some of the FAQs that samusa mentioned on this call regarding sidebar and connect support and agent chat so probably a lot of the questions that we had today are found there and I do want to thank everyone for doing today thank you samika for presenting I really appreciate your time and I appreciate everyone's questions and we look forward to seeing you guys on the next Academy thank you so much everyone have a great day