the servicenow native mobile apps have been out for several years so what's new in the Tokyo release you might be surprised to find out as my guest said I have some fun finding fascinating features welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast here's your host Chuck tomasi hello servicenow admins Builders developers and all of you curious individuals that I always say with the utmost love and respect welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and tradecraft to accelerate your career in this episode I've got the pleasure of talking to senior inbound product manager at servicenow Adam Golab how are you today Adam I'm doing good I'm doing good I'm excited to be here and I'm excited to have an opportunity to get to chat with you and all the developers I'm always curious when I get people on the podcast have you been on any other podcasts before uh this is the first actually I've never been on any other podcast before I've always wanted to I I've actually listened to a lot of podcasts but never myself have I been on a podcast before well there you go you know what to watch for and you know what to do and what not to do you're a pro this is just conversation between a couple of Geeks oh we'll see well before we get into our main content I always like to get to know our guests so please please share a little bit about yourself my name is Adam golub I've I've been with servicenow for about three years now I've had a lot of experience uh working on our mobile products here at servicenow I actually had a really cool experience I I was one of the first product managers um within the mobile platform product team I've been working on the team working on various different pro products and projects within within the platform um I actually came through the intern program at now which was um which was a great experience uh while I was an intern that was the time period of the Sky Drop acquisition so I've had a lot of interesting experiences throughout my time here at servicenow well I'm glad you mentioned the intern program because I was about to ask you did you come over with the sky giraffe acquisition but you were an intern during that period exactly you got to see everything all fresh and daisies and the opportunities that were in front of us that's cool so you've been on mobile the entire time yeah so uh not entirely on mobile but I've always been working on Mobile Pro uh products okay so I actually interned through now X which was the incubation Oregon servicenow um so we we worked on new um industry products that servicenow didn't already have a presence in um some of the products that we worked on uh were like Finance related products um one of those products that we worked on is actually one of our public uh products in the Creator workflows now today uh procurement service management um so under that org I worked on pretty much all of our mobile products um so for procurement service management I actually led the design of research and development of that that that mobile app that exists today um so that mobile app that exists today for procurement service management customers um was something that I got to work on throughout my internship um after the internship I started two weeks later full time um and and and owned that mobile piece under now X and then I realized I just love mobile so much so I wanted to make the transition from now x to the actual mobile core platform team so I can spend some time uh working on actual core mobile platform related items so I'm curious where did you go to school and what did you study yeah so um I'm a very native I uh I went to school at San Jose State University and I majored in computer science so I've always had some sort of technical aspect so you're in the San Jose area now so right now I'm actually I've been traveling these these past few months um I I'm I was born and raised in in the San Jose area but these past few months I've been in the Chicago area now I gotta ask a fun question if you had a million dollars what would you do it's a good question um I wish I could say I could buy a really nice house but that wouldn't that wouldn't buy me much in California I would say have some fun I would I would give myself maybe like five ten percent of it to go spend uh gambling whether it's at a casino or or going and buying a bunch of lottery tickets and then the rest of it try to figure out how I can be smart with the money to make it last however however long I can whether it's investing in real estate or investing in the stock market wherever I can put it wise man wise man some for fun and some for the future yeah I like that that's that's the way my dad taught me too and it's worked out so far there you go there you go now for the new listeners because some people may just be listening to their first episode of breakpoint thank you very much could you give them an idea of our current mobile offering and the evolution of how it came to be yeah it's it's a great question and it's a it's a really it's a really fun question to answer um so here at servicenow we've had a mobile app um the servicenow classic app for quite some time I think it was introduced within one of our very first servicenow releases don't quote me on that maybe maybe it was a couple of releases later but we had that app um up until uh just around around like 2018 2019 um which is when service now made the decision to acquire a low code no code um mobile app Enterprise Mobile mobile app company called skydraft um so back in that time frame around 2018 2019 that was that was servicenow's decision to move towards um a future where customers can use our now platform to build their own mobile workflows without without needing to understand how to write iOS code without needing to understand how to write Android code the concept was really a low code no code um experience on the now platform that allows you to configure experiences within native iOS and Native Android applications so really it allows customers to create a mobile experience within days um so that's that's the traditional mobile platform offering that that we focus on you'll find all that content on our doc sites you'll find lots of content out there that's what we call our mobile platform and and the beauty of it is anyone can build a mobile app we're talking people who don't know how to code we're talking people who are comfortable just kind of putting puzzle pieces together um it's it's a really nice experience and the best part is anyone can build a native first mobile application a lot of our competitors out there use web-based experiences and with this you have the power to build native experiences within a matter of days I always recommend to to developers out there take a look at our hierarchy guide our hierarchy guide is but it's it's the it's the core of our platform once you understand the hierarchy you're you're a pro developer in terms of mobile platform development just understand the hierarchy then you can build whatever wherever um that's that's our traditional mobile platform offering and that's what we we refer to um release over release we continue to enhance and and add um new features to our traditional mobile platform before I talk about you know what's new in the latest release I just wanted to point out that the native experience because it's a native application and you're simply configuring this on your instance it gives you access to camera location services a lot of these built-in services on the mobile device that frankly wouldn't exist or would be extremely difficult to implement if you were to try to do this through a web-based technology right so it just it makes it so much easier like hey I want to put an action here to bring up the camera take a picture attach it to this record it's like really I I'm not an iOS or Android developer but yet I can build these things in a matter of minutes it's it's pretty slick one example is I mean when you think about when you think about like all the employee workflow products so yes when you think about like itsn like when an end user and an employee submits a request or creates an incident let's say for example they're in the workplace there's an issue with conference room they they would want they wouldn't want to pull out their laptop take a picture attach it to their laptop up and then go submit a request no nah they want it they want to be on their phone they want to be able to pull up the mobile app snap a picture with their phone they're already used to how they already know how to use their phone camera they want to be able to attach an image to their incident and move on with their day with with our mobile platform you can build a workflow for that on your mobile device within a matter of days you just need to be comfortable with how the mobile hierarchy Works how the pieces fit together you can build essentially anything in a couple of days I think the most important thing I learned when shortly after we did the acquisition with Sky giraffe is the mobile experience isn't simply a shrunk down desktop experience it is its own experience as as separate as a web application is to a desktop application it's it's a I think the term I heard was you know those micro moments yeah if you need to hail a ride for example you don't spend 35 minutes you know looking through what's the best possible vehicle I could get yeah I need a ride I've got six people we're going here get me a ride you know it's a micro moment that you go in you do what you need to do and you get out and that's the way that mobile developers need to think about the whole mobile experience for the end user you got to put the end user first what are you trying to get them to try to get them a status on something they need to know are you going to get them to take action how do you get them to take that action as quickly as possible where do you present that approval or reject button it's or you said employee experience when you're doing an onboarding or something it can all be done there and if it's done right it's amazing if it's done poorly it's like any other system no one's going to adopt it exactly exactly and that's and that's really what we've been focusing on whenever whenever we we continue and expand on on our platform release over release we always think about how can we enable our customers and how can we enable our developers to focus on those micro experiences and really have it be a delightful experience that's going to make their users want to continue to use the mobile app um there's you can totally mimic a web experience on mobile we don't limit that if that's if that's your strategy if that's what customers want to do customers can totally do that um but we we always say we want to focus on micro moments because that will that will truly enable users to want to use the mobile app um and really Drive adoption so we mentioned that you don't need to be an iOS or Android developer you don't need to know the SDK but we were talking earlier and you mentioned something about a mobile SDK can you elaborate on that yeah um so this is this is a new Avenue here at servicenow so um we have our traditional mobile platform that we've been focusing on release over release we've been continuing to to enhance it since the acquisition of skydraft I'm back in 2019 um and it's it's it's something that we're going to continue to enhance um we've we've had a lot of conversations recently with customers and uh there's a new market that we're we're we're trying to explore um so there's a whole new market for customers who already have their own mobile apps let's say if I'm a customer I already have my own mobile app for my employees or uh let's say I have my own mobile app for uh customers of mine and I want to pull in aspects of servicenow into my mobile app um we don't we don't we've never we've never been presented with that use case before and we we our mobile platform doesn't support those use cases today our mobile platform is really just our low code no code tools on the instance and our two mobile apps that we have on the public store but for those customers who already have their existing iOS or Android app they already have their existing IOS and Android engineering teams within their own companies we're introducing this new product through the Innovation lab on the servicenow store called the mobile SDK so this is this is um an additional offering uh under the servicenow mobile offering Cloud um so we have our traditional mobile platform and now we have the mobile SDK for our more advanced customers or for our our more complex uh or more our customers who have more complex use cases with the mobile SDK think about being able to pull in any and every data any and every piece of data from the servicenow platform and being able to mutate however you'd like being able to use native virtual agent being able to use native push notifications triggered from the servicenow instance and being able to leverage uh service portal pages that you configure on the net platform so if you have any service portal pages that you've configured let's say if you have any virtual Asian conversations that you've configured you can now drag those components through the SDK and render them within your own app so it really gives power to to those complex customers this is a new new product that we're exploring through the Innovation lab and it's it's an extension off of our traditional mobile platform offering oh we may have to have some additional discussions about that I can see some developers salivating over that yeah it's a it's it's it's a very fun product it gives full flexibility and full customization to the power to the Developers our modern mobile experience started in Madrid so m n o p q r s t t we're up to T Tokyo this is Tokyo season what's new in Tokyo yeah uh we have a lot of we we had a lot of exciting features um come through the Tokyo release um the release focused on on FSM um these these past few releases we've been focusing on our field service management um priorities um so pre-tokyo we uh we had some gaps with our offline experience um so we we made some some really good strides towards having a best-in-class field service management experience within a mobile Agent app um so in Tokyo we we released two features um that are very powerful for um the field service management experience um So within our offline mode we now support the ability for mobile agents to create and edit records offline as well as utilize reference fields in offline mode so pre-tokyo all of our FSM agents that were out on the go whenever they're working with uh with work orders when they would go into offline mode they wouldn't be able to create or edit records offline think of it as only a read-only view sure and we we've had lots of we've had lots of questions and lots of asks from our customers around how can we enable a more seamless offline to online experience so this was a huge effort for us um so now it's no longer really read only you can configure the ability to create records offline you can also configure editing and there's no real limitations with editing records you can add all types of fields Choice Fields string Fields number Fields including reference Fields offline as well wow I you're right I could see a lot of challenges with that just just from the standpoint of creating a new record on your mobile device and when you get back to sync what's the CIS ID of that while you're editing well it really doesn't have one we have to wait until it syncs to actually assign one when it gets created in the instance like wow that that's that's a crazy challenge one of the actual key challenges with that was think about when you're offline when you create a new record you need to also understand what is the display value for that record so when you're displaying that record in other places you're not displaying assist ID you're displaying the display value and each table can have its own unique display value so it gets a little tricky but you did it yeah so that was that was a huge feature um a lot of our FSM customers are are going to be really happy and excited about that one um another feature of the release which is really exciting uh is adaptive authentication so this is under our mobile infrastructure key initiative that we focused on this release in Tokyo um adaptive authentication is a really cool feature for for customers who have complex security requirements um so for all of you that that that uh that have very strict security protocols we've had a lot of customers come to us and basically explain that they have their instance behind an IP uh behind an IP firewall um their instance is only accessible um by their users when they're either on the corporate VPN or if they're within a specific range range of IP addresses sure but the challenge is for those customers um a lot of the times they have those vpns installed on their computers on their work machines but they don't have those vpns installed on their mobile devices yep so so employees employees don't want to have to install a VPN have to worry about is the VPN connected is the VPN disconnected it's a huge pain in the butt um customers have told us like it doesn't make sense for for for for them to maintain documentation for how to use our app but then also the virtual private Network and how to configure it all um so with adaptive authentication we worked with various different teams at servicenow to create a way for for customers to maintain their IP Access Control configurations on the instance but in addition to that enable an extension to allow end users who are using either our mobile Agent app or now mobile app to connect to those instances and without having the virtual private Network installed on their device so how it works is there's still a handshake that's being made don't think of it as don't think of it as the instance is just open for users to connect you on the mobile app there's still there's still a protocol that's that's being met there's still a handshake a user essentially is going to attempt to connect on their mobile device to the instance and then they'll get a notification saying that this instance requires you to register your device to be used with this instance that's behind this firewall and then when we guide the user through a handful of steps to explain how they can establish trust register the device to their to their account so they can continue to use the mobile app they go through a series of steps um essentially what it requires is it requires them to be logged in on their corporate machine as well so they can verify their identity once they do that everything works seamlessly it's a beautiful experience and users will be able to receive push notifications we'll be able to access content on the web we'll be able to through them a mobile app they'll be able to use any of the the the features that are configured in the mobile apps just through the mobile app if if the user tries to go through their Safari or go through Google Chrome they're still going to be kicked out unless they're on the virtual private Network so this is a really exciting feature a lot of customers uh will will be really excited about this customers who are using IP Access Control they'll now be able to extend um their servicenow workflows on mobile as well that's cool I mean the financial customers the government customers they've been looking for something like this and you don't want to alienate your endures is because you've got restricted security it's it sounds like it's as easy to set up as two-factor it's like hey here's here's something I do on my instance and here's how I register my device boom done exactly exactly it can be done within a matter of seconds it's really easy and really intuitive really excited about this feature there's some really cool UI in it too but wait there's more there's more we uh so in addition to that we have we have some minor features but one of the other highlights is uh mobile app builder so in mobile app builder we continue release over release to enhance and add new features mobile app Builders now on the store um our continued problem state with mobile app builder is we need to we we need to make sure everything is is configured in Melbourne Builder we hear all the developers we hear all the feedback we hear you guys loud and clear we want one tool and we want everything to be configured in mobile app builder we're we're focused on that and we're making it happen um in our upcoming August release and we're adding even more feature parity or I apologize in our previous August release we added feature parity with our San Diego release and we're working in February to have feature parity with our you uh our upcoming Utah release um we added some additional functionality to mobile app builder including being able to duplicate specific records and then uh we also added additional support for configuring custom maps deep linking and push notifications um that's that's that's a super exciting call out for all you developers who are used to configuring push notifications and deep links uh it's a nightmare it's been a nightmare um but a nightmare no more it's in mobile app builder and it's a really nice intuitive um an easy to use experience um so if if you are familiar with with configuring noted push notifications and deep links I really urge you to give mobile app builder a try see how you like that experience I myself have configured a lot of push notifications and deep links when I was working on all the mobile experiences during my internship under now X it was an awful experience really hard I had no idea what I was doing 95 of the time but with mobile app builder it's it's it takes away a lot of that complexity it's a it's a really pleasant experience excellent glad you're making things easier it means I have to learn less as we go now something I've always wondered and I'm sure I'm not the only one is I was just looking on my phone why do we have multiple apps we get now mobile we got servicenow agent we've got now support I think there's an onboarding one too is why do we have multiple apps yeah it's it's a great question and it's a question we we get a lot actually we try to focus on personas here at servicenow um so so every every workflow um is is meant to be for a single Persona um so our now mobile app uh is meant to have tailored experiences and tailored workflows for the employee Persona our mobile agent application is meant to have tailored experiences and tailored workflows for the mobile agent we have a similar Paradigm for the platform um the web-based platform so when you think of workspaces workspaces are for agents and fulfillers and then we have service portals service portals are for employees um so there's different there's different experiences and different um entry points for different personas so we followed that Paradigm on mobile we have a different app with an optional different experience admins can configure that for agents and then a different app potentially with a different experience for employees using it now mobile app um we did have a third app called the onboarding app that app is being deprecated communication has already been sent out we are migrating that all those experiences that lived in them in the in the onboarding app Into the Now mobile app so we basically Consolidated those two personas we Consolidated the pre-hire Persona with the employee Persona and all of those workflows now live in the Nama block so would it be conceivable to say if I'm developing a mobile app and could I put it on one single iOS or Android app say everybody go download now mobile and then I as a developer constrained that by roles for example yep yeah absolutely you could totally do that um so that's that's honestly the power of the platform so you can configure however you like some customers really like the the strategy to go forward with Persona focused apps they want to have their they want to have their external or they want to have their employees download one app then they want to have their internal fulfillers download a separate app they really like that so they take advantage of it but if you want just one app for Simplicity there's nothing stopping you you can either pick the now mobile or the mobile Agent app configure everything within that app then restrict everything by roles all of your users are going to have different roles so you can totally do that flexibility exactly in addition to that we we also had the classic app which I brought up a little bit earlier the classic app was our first attempt at mobile here at servicenow it was one of the very first apps that was introduced it was a fully web-based app it essentially mimicked everything that was on the platform it was slow it was dated felt like you were using a legacy application as soon as we acquired skydrop we stopped all investment into that app obviously because we wanted to move in this new direction of low code no code configurable mobile platform so these past few years if you've been working to slowly deprecate it and remove it um I'm excited and I'm happy to say as of uh September 15th the app is officially removed from all public stores it's removed from the IOS app store and it's also removed from the Android Google Play Store um so are we we are now focused on the two mobile apps a part of the mobile platform we have the mobile Agent app and then the now mobile app um onboarding app is on track to be deprecated and will be removed from the stories around March of 2023. you may still see developer you may still see vestiges of it out there as you develop for example you create a table there's a checkbox that says create mobile menus and you'll see under navigation in studio it'll say modules and menus there will be mobile menus for some of your tables that is not now mobile or the servicenow agent it is for the Legacy app so completely ignore it don't bother creating them they have no use really at this point they're they're frankly annoying that that brings up a good point we should we'll definitely we we have we have a list of items that we need to kind of address as we're cleaning it up um we'll go back and we'll make sure that those are those are included in those lists to clean up part of our new releases so there's no confusion okay lightning round you ready ready lightning round of features you don't have to configure tell me about multimedia yeah multimedia is an awesome new feature part of Tokyo um we enhance the full activation experience um so we we redesigned the experience of uploading uh and and modifying attachments so you can now end users who are using our mobile apps can now upload multiple attachments and also have a really nice experience to be able to track how their attachments are being uploaded they can track progress see what's going on and then they can also cancel individual uploads as they're uploading multi multimedia next one map wise integration map wise is super exciting um servicenow acquired map-wise a couple of releases back and we've we've we've worked to update all of our workplace Service delivery flows to now use map wise which is the new mapping company we require excellent notification enhancements notification enhancements also pretty cool um pre-pre Tokyo we had some gaps with our notifications when you log out all your notifications to disappear you would have no access to them ever again and they would be deleted um now in Tokyo when you log out or if you were to log in on any other device you'll always have access to your notifications and you'll be able to actually mark them as red or unread which is super cool let's say if you read a notification on your iPad at home but then you will later want to read it on your iPhone when you're in the office you can Mark a notification as unread and then you can read it again later when you return to the office a little bit of customer feedback on that before we fixed it yeah yeah that one was a rough one all right last one light step what is this light step yeah so this is actually really really interesting it's a new product that service now introduced um we recently acquired lightstep a bit ago and lightstep is a brand new offering for servicenow so without going into too much detail lightstep is is different from the traditional servicenow offering you don't have to pay for a license to the platform you don't have to pay for apps and for products lightstep is a pay as you go think about social media where anyone can sign up you can sign up for a free account if you want to upgrade you can upgrade pay for premiums pay for upgrades for different for different functionality lightstep is exactly the same anyone can sign up anyone can use it you pay for there's there's different tiers let's say your first month is completely free you have access to all the workflows then the basic tier could could basically provide access to certain workflows Advanced will provide access to a different set of workflows um so this is a brand new app that we introduce more info uh can be found elsewhere around the new lightstep offering now it's my favorite part of the show can you give us a hint of what's on the road map Safe Harbor Safe Harbor yes of course um so in the upcoming releases we are in the past few releases I guess providing some contacts uh we focused all an FSM related part is we focused a lot on becoming uh the Best in Class FSN mobile app um going forward we're focusing a lot on on client related ux enhancements um we we want to focus a lot on having um performance at scale we want to focus a lot on on good user experience and that initial piece we were kind of talking about the delightful micro moments we really want to focus on how we can drive continued adoption on using our mobile applications we want to see end users happy using our apps and most importantly we want to see end users coming back to use our apps regularly so there's going to be a lot of focus on client enhancements um ux performance related items next question what words of advice do you have for any new developers that may be listening to this yeah it's a good question um I always recommend whenever whenever I'm working with new developers on the team or new uh a new mobile enthusiasts start with our hierarchy our hierarchy is the most important thing um so when we're talking mobile you're not actually going to be coding iOS and and Android you're going to be building on the servicenow platform you're going to be putting puzzle pieces together so it's really important to start with that hierarchy it might look super confusing at first but if you start with the hierarchy continue through through the documentation through the labs that we have on now learning and you'll really start to understand pretty quickly and you'll go from being able you'll go from pretty much knowing nothing to being able to build a mobile app within a week that's that's the true value of the now of the mobile platform um so always recommend starting with that hierarchy that's that's the most important thing to start with we're could they find that hierarchy yeah it's a great question on our Dockside so if you go to our documentation.servicenow.com there's a product called mobile configuration and navigation tap on that there's a section called building building and navigating the mobile platform if you were to click on that there's a highlighted section for the mobile hierarchy and there's a nice image that we worked with our content teams to produce that explains the hierarchy that's rather scary how you knew to navigate that without even looking yeah I've I've gone to it too many times don't quote me on the exact words I'll include a link in the show notes so that people have something to click if they wish there you go there you go thank you for so much advice and information Adam can you let the people know how they can get in touch with you should they have another idea or suggestion or just want to talk yeah absolutely um I can be reached on LinkedIn my LinkedIn um is Adam Gola um and then I can also be reached through my email I'm happy to take any emails any feedback we love feedback obviously we're with lots of customers at a time um my email is just first named last name at servicenow.com adam.goalbetservicenow.com I'd love to hear from you foreign thank you and thank you wonderful listener for joining us today don't forget you can check out the other servicenow podcast you can find them all at servicenow.com Community under the events menu pay attention that changed in the last uh upgrade to the community you can also subscribe to this podcast for free get it automatically delivered to you oh you can still use the old link to servicenow.com podcast we'll get you the list of all the podcasts in the new Community page so you don't even have to remember something new there breakpoint is brought to you by servicenow executive producer is me Chuck tabassi video and captions by Earl Duque to find out more about the servicenow developer program you can head over to developer.servicenow.com and again thank you so much today Adam for sharing with us of course thanks for having me please let us know what you think about this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the servicenow community for more great information on servicenow development check out the servicenow developer portal at developer.servicenow.com thanks for listening you don't go into Amazon and you know do the same kind of things you would on a desktop experience well maybe that's a bad example you don't go into you know let's let's back up why do we have more than one application yeah and that brings up a good point uh-huh get jury duty I tell you that's funny I think I would like to be a part of that that sounds kind of fun how is this how is this even happening how do you feel that was fun that was fun it was it was good