all right good morning good afternoon good evening from wherever you're joining us I'm the last message I saw in the chat was from Cincinnati huge win for the Bengals for those of you who followed football thanks again for joining us wherever you are for simplify how you plan and manage your upgrade on now support there will be a few forward-looking statements within this digital event so please keep that in mind and and uh please review this slide briefly thanks again for joining us everyone my name is Pete Withers and I've been with servicenow for about six years and I am a campaign manager here for upgrades family releases including Tokyo and customer adoption campaigns for a number of our different products and I'm presenting to you live from San Diego California um if you haven't already would love to see where you're all tuning in from today and today I'm joined by one of our upgrade experts upassini upassini could you please intro yourself as well hey everyone nice to have you all here uh my name is upasini and I have been with service now for close to one and a half years and work out of the Santa Clara Bay Area Office um that said I have one of my areas is upgrades and patching and I've been a product manager in that section trying to bring out the best experience um yeah looking forward to the session with you all thank you possumi I really appreciate that looking forward to it also uh just a few housekeeping items before we dive too far into this there will be time for a q a at the end of the presentation feel free to go ahead and text in uh some of your q a in the chat as well throughout the session if a question does come to you we'll try to answer it as best as we can and we will save time at the end to get to those questions as well the session will be recorded and shared on the servicenow community after this session and please fill out our survey at the end just so we can improve these sessions for all of you uh quick agenda for today uh we will be talking about how you can leverage now support capabilities for a smoother upgrade we'll also start off uh by reviewing the servicenow upgrade policy and the value of staying current we're also going to then show you all of the different upgrade upgrade tools and now support capabilities tips and tricks in a live demo of now support you also walk away with links to Central resources to make your upgrades smoother and once again we'll have time at the end for some q a gonna start off today's uh session with a whole question what version of servicenow are you all currently on just uh get a temperature of the room here all right thanks for casting your votes looks like San Diego has a decent lead here it's a great City got some folks on Tokyo and Rome as well I'm glad I don't see any not sure yet which is which is good just a little bit longer all right so it looks like most of the audience is on San Diego so this is a pretty timely live on servicenow event to um hopefully help hopefully help you all out just to make your upgrades smoother and let you know about the options that you do have when you upgrade and now support so let's quickly review the current upgrade policy that we have here servicenow customers need to be on one of the two most current releases to be on a supported version here support means access to world-class technical help 24 hours a day and seven days a week this help also includes patches and hot fixes it also means that you as a customer will upgrade at least once a year to stay current today the most current releases are Tokyo which is referred to here as n and San Diego which is referred to n minus one if you look at the chart at the bottom of your screen our customers with n minus one entitlement on Romer earlier were customers with n minus 2 entitlement on Quebec earlier you were due for an upgrade to Tokyo last month just as a heads up and for our customers with n minus 2 entitlement on Rome release or n minus one entitlement on San Diego you are due for an upgrade in March of next year uh just to put on your radar your calendar and wherever else you might make a note of it if you're unsure about your support entitlement if you're on n n minus one or n minus two please reach out to your SD or your servicenow account team and they can help you out uh we definitely encourage you all to uh to upgrade with every release so that you can access the latest Innovations and security enhancements just to be safe you may have heard that we had a May quarterly store release uh which was the first time servicenows giving you all access to new Innovations and a predictable Cadence before family releases and in between family releases new Innovations get released to existing products or net new products in the servicenow store four times a year roughly in February August uh we we just had one here at the beginning of November to get the May store release um you need to be on the prior family release of the platform enter n minus one and you need to be a current customer uh as a side note February is included with the March family release and August is included with the September family release every three months new Innovations will head your way or whether it's via the family platform or via on the store release with the store delivery mechanism we're getting Innovations out fast for all of you to use right away rather than waiting for the next family release which we're really excited about we're building on the Innovations from the previous family release by providing new features and deepening already existing uh features that we've released in a family release we're providing a predictable delivery schedule so that all of you can plan for your next product Innovations and updates now without further Ado I will hand it off to upassini or a live demo thank you Pete are you able to see my screen yes we can okay so this is our um service portal which is called the now support service portal and given the temperature check and knowing that many of you are on San Diego and few on Tokyo and I'm beginning to feel that you you folks use the um instance upgrade quite frequently and could be veterans here so I'm gonna try and uh deliver the same flu that typically happens when you upgrade an instance and for which this demo I'm using a demo account called Acme and I'm impersonating a customer uh user probably a customer admin called show Smith and what does Joe would come in and do is use the instances Tab and the instances dashboard to come and verify and get a holistic picture of what the company's instances are how they're functioning what status they are and when it comes to patching what current version of patching they are on if anything has been scheduled to be upgraded if so it will show in the schedule changes and also if there's one there would be uh the one to uh show the date at which it starts and if there are any cases associated with any of the instances then that would be shown as well as you see the very first column you can have your preview to the production and non-production instances that your customer that your company owns at the moment um looking at the on the whole um I will move on to the actions button here which is listed against each instance which allows you to carry out different uh options or different activities on your instance that you choose and if you see the drop down menu you have uh bucketed activities starting from Administration leading to looking at reports and then something related to security looking at Administration these are activities that you will do on your instance and for the scope of this demo we will choose upgrade or patch an instance which is what we are trying to educate you all about so um when I choose upgrade or man patching instance it is one of the three methods of you upgrading your instance and this is termed as the manual there are two others which get Auto uh upgraded so we will start with the manual one and then move to see what the automatic process looks like so when I say upgrade an instance it usually brings out a fly out and I'm sure most of you are familiar and this is a demo instance which is being refreshed still with data please don't be put off by the dinosaur age versions that you're seeing here but um it is just trying to tell you what to expect when you click on the fly out so you have some notes about what upgrades and Patch instances are and also about how to prepare for an upgrade so it is vital to treat your upgrade process as a project and take all the necessary steps I'm right here I have in insight into which instance I am trying to upgrade and the name and the in current version that is it is on you should have a few options between the patches and this uh version and um also across families right now for the demo sake we have one available so I will choose that version because I choose to upgrade my uh instance once you click on that action you have some documentation some collateral that pops up for you to guide you through this process you're not alone here you have release notes your product documentation you have fixes noon errors so you know what you're bracing yourself for you know where it's leading what to expect and so on uh you can review these materials if you want to get more insights uh if you have if you do that regularly and um you want to continue with your update process you will scroll down you see that we help you with choosing a convenient day and date and time so that's it this comes up as a calendar request and so you can choose anything that is available here I'm going to choose Thursday 1 pm which seems convenient for me and I will hit the submit button so once I hit submit the process takes place to schedule your upgrade that is done through a change record and uncertain you're all familiar and the change number comes up here for you to track how the upgrade progress is going on so I clicked on the change and I have details above again with production what the start and end date are which I chose according to my convenience and also some notes here um another thing to do is there are a few options you have here you can reschedule and upgrade you you decide that is not a convenient time uh after some due diligence then you are allowed to pick another time another date day and uh choose that as your upgrade time so I decide I do not want 1pm on Thursday I have instead use 4 pm on Friday for lesser effect on all on the instance and so I say choose that so upgrade has been rescheduled you get a banner that confirms it and then you will see that the change of Time start and end date time so that is one way you can reschedule um other things that you can do uh you have a details tag where um there are details about all that is going to happen once you have this upgrade uh process um one ability we give you also again not just choose to reschedule but also choose to change the target version then you should be able to pick it up from here and save the um change record uh thus done I'm going to go back to the sorry I'm just doing huh a bit different one so I go back into the instances dashboard and I should be able to see that my production environment has been scheduled for a change so I have one change schedule and also it gives me the status it has changed it says upgrade schedule and it's on November 11th now you again have a change of mind so you do not want to upgrade for now so what you do you go into the schedule change and you decide to cancel it so we provide that option as well uh sorry to the instance so I have all the details here and given that um excuse me I have this I decided to cancel the upgrade I put it off for now so I'm allowed to do that once canceled the record is deleted you do not have a change scheduled in order to upgrade your instance so if you go back to the instance dashboard again you should see that the schedule is cleared up and you do not have any upgrade in the path so you back to your old self so this is what we provide in terms of a manual upgrade you are free to do uh what you want but for in order to further serve our customers what we also do is we provide two automatic ways as you can see here these are for select customers who've opted in who have signed up for this white glove support where you have one called the upgrade assist and another called the upgrade wizard so uh with the upgrade assist you can just get started and then decide which ones you want to enroll which instances of yours you want to enroll in this program and say there is a family release there's a patch release it is the the onus is on service now to get those instances that you've opted in for upgraded to the version of your choice so here you will either say off or on depending on what you want to choose and put into this program so once you do that as and when uh family releases come up uh you can rest assured that you will have your instances upgraded automatically that is one thing then in the the second and the third and the last way is to use the upgrade wizard the upgrade wizard enables you to schedule your upgrade via a three-step process firstly we give you a recommendation where you can choose the version and this recommendation drives off the production instance version and then you can use what you want for non-prod instances as well so here you you either have the option of ignoring this instance in the upgrade or scheduling it once you say schedule it again gives you the same calendar for you to choose a date and a Time um so this is what you see again so given your focus given your needs you can schedule or ignore whichever uh environment needs to go into the um uh upgrade process then next you will select the next Target thing to do is you select the target version once you have that done you will be able to then manage your upgrade you are all set so once you have this uh Saturn you will uh you will hit the done button and once you hit the done button you are sure that you need this schedule for your instances and the tool goes ahead and creates change requests change records automatically in the back end and schedules all the upgrades according to your preference so should you should you continue to um ruminate over your selections you can just save and exit that will save your current selections which you can come back and always update later on but you've decided again not um upgrade at the moment then if you cancel the upgrade wizard then you're out of it and then new changes have been made you can always come back later and go through the process again so this is what we have these are three basic ways how you can upgrade your instance and um we would uh we would uh um tell you ask you rather request you to plan your upgrade process as a project uh it is imperative that you keep a dedicated time you plan a testing effort and then also the production go live and also we would request that you uh Try It Out On A non-production environment so there is not much effect on your production instance and you know what you are getting what if there are any issues you can solve them up front and then decide the whole process for your production instance there is a plethora of information documentation that can help you plan this uh entire process and I'm sure given that you're all up to date on your versions you use that resource and have having a smooth transition in your upgrades uh so that is pretty much it about the process uh any questions either now or we can reserve it for later yeah rupassini uh we had a few questions come through in the chat in regards to to some info you just presented and we'll get to a few of them right now and then the rest later one question came in and um this member of the audience was wondering well when they see the list of available times for the upgrade is that on our time zone or yours is what they're asking so I think they're seeing if it's in their local time uh I think it is in uh in the local time zone because it's where you uh service or probably it's in the Pacific time zone sorry because this is hosted and EMS it should be in the Pacific time zone and um it should be uh scheduled at that time yeah got it thank you one other question that that came in I'll read it as follows what amount of time can we push off the upgrade without being forced to upgrade uh I think um until it is end of life because if you keep pushing off your upgrade then there is a servicenow program that kind of sweeps all the instances to see uh if there are any end of life ones which in definitely have to be upgraded and then they are scheduled in the upgrades and uh your instances may go in there got it thank you so much we'll uh we'll answer the rest of the questions in the Q a session thank you Peter back to you thank you all right get back into presenter mode all right so time for our second poll question what is your preferred method to perform your servicenow upgrade it's getting a lot of responses here okay looks like there is a preferred method we'll share the results in just a little bit here got it so it looked like most of looked like the majority of the audience prefers the manual method the upgrade wizard is fairly close behind we have a we have a few members of the audience that prefer and are enrolled in upgrade assist so good to see a bit of uh a bit of a mix here a bit of a mixed bag thank you so much for uh sending in your your uh your polling very timely on on uh voting day too here in the US so thank you all for voting today um I want to be sure to also let you know about the now platform Tokyo release upgrade kit which will be available in September with General availability so it's live now um as of a few months ago please be sure to go ahead and visit the customer success Center where you can download the Tokyo upgrade release kit as either a PDF or in MS PowerPoint so that you can customize this presentation uh for your stakeholders if there's specific parts of the comprehensive upgrade kit that you'd like to share out with others today's conversation uh doesn't end here please join us on the upgrades and patching Community Forum to ask any any additional questions that you might have after today's session and your peers and different upgrade experts can go ahead and answer those questions within the community forum you can also learn about upcoming webinars and meetups just like this one get the latest best practices for upgrades and like I mentioned connect with your peers and experts I highly suggest you subscribe to The Forum to if you want to receive notifications about popular posts any new and Rising posts as well as upcoming events you can customize those notifications uh to only get notified about what matters most to you so go ahead and and uh check out that release and upgrades community that has just been recently updated one other thing that I'm excited to mention is that the uh now create upgrade methodology is available as well take a look at this step-by-step guidance on upgrading your instance if you already have a strong project plan in place we suggest cross-referencing it with the now create upgrade methodology just to be safe and have an extra resource we hope you we hope you all join us at Future community events as well we're constantly hosting events all about upgrades as I mentioned earlier you can find these on the servicenow community once again so please go ahead and check us out over there um we actually have a very comprehensive series of digital events called live on servicenow which are upgraded events fall under so we have different academies we have a ton of events just focused on itsm I Tom itam and a number of our other products so please go ahead and check those out if you're interested your upcoming upgrade focused events if you find these of Interest I mentioned the November uh quarterly store release earlier to all of you so we do have we do have updates to innovations that were released on Tokyo as well as new Innovations and we'll be talking about those on November 15th um 16th if you're an apj but I'm guessing most of you all are are in the Americas so it's going to be on the 15th so here's some resources which we're going to drop in the chat momentarily I mentioned a number of these earlier and and here are all the links uh in the chat just in case any of these are of interest to you please go ahead and check those out just a few takeaways and before we get to q a wrap things up a little bit you know I hope all of you are more prepared to start planning your upgrade on now support um we showcased a few of the ways that you can upgrade and take advantage of now support you all have a few different options so I hope you found that you know that demonstration useful be sure to take advantage of more platform capabilities through our quarterly store releases by subscribing to the servicenow store to stay up to date also check out the community and we'll uh we make key announcements like our quarterly store releases there all right so I think I saw a few other questions uh come in and so hope to answer most of these for you right now all right let's see here so I'm just reading through a few of these questions so upasimi is the white glove they the white glove upgrade method a a paid service that we alluded to earlier um you need to be a role enrolled in the program and how is it the upgrade assist yeah they update us it's you need to be enrolled in the program so in case you want to know more about how to enroll I think you ask your account executive uh whether it is a paid service I'm not sure how exactly you're entitled to that is something I have to check but it does need enrollment yeah sure okay I think we can um we can try and provide more details on the chat in regards to upgrade assist I don't I don't believe that specific uh I don't believe upgrade assist is but we can go ahead and gather more details and hopefully drop that in the chat momentarily uh for our next question okay so we did answer how far um upgrades can be pushed out earlier today let's see here reading a few of these other questions okay so it looks like uh Timothy you just confirmed that the upgrade schedule is your company set time frame shows the EST time frame that I select eastern time okay so it sounds like that when you do schedule your upgrade it should be in your local time based off of um this answer so thank you for looking into that Timothy all right this is another question for you um Catherine Rhoden we upgraded to Tokyo in production last night and Devin test Devon production are not Auto scheduled for patching and tests and test is still listed as a Rome patch schedule do we need to submit a case to fix this so how exactly did they enroll in the upgrade is it a program that they've asked for or are they doing it manually it wasn't mentioned but Catherine if you want to um if we're able to maybe if you're able to chat with us we can then you can you know let us know if you're enrolled in a program or how you upgraded we can we can try and help you out here foreign more information may be may be helpful in this case okay so Catherine mentioned uh it was a forced manual update as they were still on Rome so it sounds like it was the end of life up uh upgrade okay okay and there are some discrepancies in the scheduling yeah then please uh open a case and uh we should be able to address it awesome thank you so much yeah Catherine if you could please open a case that that would be great and um yeah sorry sorry to hear about that we'll be sure to help you out quickly yes I do all right so thanks again Lucas um let's see just confirming that support portal should always be in your company's time zone we appreciate the the crowd's help on that one another question that came in how long does it take for a new release to go end of life well it depends on Greg it depends on if you're on a n minus 1 or n minus two entitlement once you are if you're on an N minus one entitlement um correct me if I'm wrong upassini once your two releases behind an N minus one so right now let's say since we're on Tokyo um if you were on Rome you would have been forced to upgrade when uh Tokyo came out if I'm not mistaken okay so I hope that's helpful Greg um it is if you're on N minus one uh it's when your two releases behind the current release you have a 30-day grace period where you can still uh ask to reschedule your end of life upgrade and um I think if it needed beyond that you request an approval and can push it out uh 60 days so there is something about uh so we have that accommodation for all end of life upgrades uh we can help you with resources later to look uh deeper into it that's right all right just uh looking through the chat uh please go ahead if you have any remaining questions go ahead and submit them now I'm just double checking to make sure that we got to all of you as best we could it looks like I'm just scrolling around here so if I didn't answer your question you typed it in go ahead and resubmit it just uh put it first in the queue and would love to try and help you out well upassini it looks like you answered everyone's questions and everyone is good to go now and if anything does come up later that you meant to ask please go ahead and ask it in the in the community Forum love to answer it there at a later date and so I would like to thank everyone once again for taking time out of your busy days to join us here and we hope it was helpful and productive and please fill out the short survey that you're about to receive um thank you again upassini for your help and demonstration here and just sharing your your wisdom with our with our customers and our other guests that attended thanks again everybody and have a great rest of your day thank you