so let's get started hello and welcome everybody uh Welcome to our 31st platform academy uh we are here every other week and we speak about platform Foundation topics we talk about um workflow Automation and other uh platform tools like anything for admins and developers today we have a special topic and I uh brought in outside help from my colleagues of product success and outbound in creator workflows for automation Engine with Daniel and Joe because today we'll be speaking about getting started with iterations on the now platform I'm sure a lot of you have already worked with uh Integrations I hope a lot of you have seen the amazing video series by Chuck tomasi on the developer program uh page if you haven't I've put a link in the resources and I encourage you to to check that out just to get that out of the way at the start because this is a big topic and we won't be able to address everything that is to do with Integrations on the now platform but we'll give it give it a good try so um to before we head into things I think we'll do a quick rounds of introductions um my name is Lisa hoinstein I'm an outbound product manager for the now platform as I said I specialize in workflow automation that is flow designer process automation designer decision Builder and we newly also took over advanced work assignment so that'll be a new one new thing uh then uh we have my colleague Daniel please give a quick introduction yeah thank you Lisa so hey I'm Daniel race I am a principal product success manager something like that it's what they call me I think that's what it says on this light here my focus is create a workflows similar to Lisa more on the building apps and things on the platform really strong focus on automation engine which is the core for integrating to other applications which we'll be exploring today awesome hey everyone my name is Joe Wilmeth I've been at servicenow for nine years now I guess and and have always specialized in Integrations and CMS portals way back in the day writing jelly and all that fun stuff so I'm happy because we are moving away from that now uh we'll talk about some of the newer options to integrate with the platform uh my role is a senior principal outbound product manager and create a workflows organization uh for automation engines specializing in stream connect for Apache Kafka which is a new product we're offering in Utah and integration Hub and document intelligence so we'll talk through some of those options today as well as some of our Legacy integration options find out what you guys have been using in the past what you're looking forward to using in the future and and go from there thank you so much thank you for joining us uh we may be hinting about things on the roadmap as always please don't make any purchasing decisions based on what we talk about today as this is a live on service now webinar we are consolidating the registration for all our platform academies I have more Links at the end of this presentation but you can also scan this QR code we have academies on uh conversational interfaces mobile uh next experience all kinds of platform topics that might be interesting to you or your uh or your peers and colleagues so I'll encourage you to check the other academies out as well if you aren't registered yet all right so to uh jump into the topics our high level agenda we're going to be talking about what are Integrations what kinds of Integrations are there we'll touch upon some best practices we'll probably not go into all of the details for those uh but we as I said we'll share these Resources with you so you can check them out later uh we'll talk some Q A's we have some resources and we also have a small bonus that Daniel prepared a tiny demo for us to show you some cool features um that we have um so without further Ado let's get into some definitions and terminology so that we all have a common language to talk about these things first of all what are we doing why are we integrating uh all of our uh all of our companies where we work most of the time we find there are many many disconnected critical systems we've all been there there's data that's being maintained uh in different places more often than not those are maintained in some Excel sheets or maybe in some manual or very simple data entry Solutions we may have siled finance and HR processes and Integrations help us connect those systems we often have Niche or isolated automation tools so uh having Integrations between all of those different systems require different people and different teams to connect different uh systems but there's no high level visibility on what's going on in terms of Automation and integration on in any given environment and last of all it is so tedious to copy data from one place to another sometimes it's email sometimes it's manual work manual data entry we really want to reduce this tedious and uninspiring human work and replace it with more reliable automated Integrations to make sure that no have no errors happen when copying and pasting I mean everybody has uh has probably noticed that when you copy from an Excel sheet you sometimes get a line break after and or a white space and then the text is not the same and things don't work so we want to replace that so quick uh quick overview what are Integrations and at its core an integration brings components or information from different systems into one single unit and these Integrations can be the part of or the end result of a process and this means that an action in one system can trigger something else in a different system so Integrations can be creating new records based on an email it can be creating records in a remote system based on an incident in your servicenow instance or it can be in a record update in your instance because something in a different instance changed and that already gives you some idea of the different kinds of Integrations and use cases that we will be talking about there are UI level Integrations so that means some information that we need to display to one user in on one end and to support that end user uh in his current his or her current record we can have process Integrations uh connecting client-side or server-side logic and and then of course the most common thing to start with is data integration do we want to import or synchronize data sets between different systems do we want to maintain one system of records that is the source of Truth um what is our goal and for categorizing the different tools that we'll be talking about later the different Technologies provided and um available on the now platform we have come up with a couple of Dimensions or categories there are too many to uh there are unfortunately too many to make sure that we can build a proper Matrix we try I try to build a matrix before maybe you've seen my blog entry um on the community before but it's just too many dimensions to make it reasonably graspable so uh we'll just go through these um these uh categories and add them to the different slides so for Integrations types we'll find that there are replicated Integrations so that is some sort of sync of records from a gold source with one or more endpoints these are often one way but they Sim sometimes are bi-directional next up we have the bonded Integrations those are usually high level processes or workflows that work across systems imagine having one servicenow instance where you work your it processes and another instance where you work your customer processes you will have processes that span these Integrations and you want to make sure that the states get populated and info gets populated back and forth and then third we'll have virtual Integrations and then of course some hybrid versions of these uh the virtual Integrations are usually reading data from other systems and then display them at real in real time in your say workspace these could be in this could be info from workday just playing you know in an agent workspace or in an HR workspace without having to copy the data and make it available in your instance next up is maturity and this is basically your uh your known crawl walk run uh Paradigm so uh many many Integrations start out on the low level there will probably be little to no prior process documentation you'll have to start from scratch oftentimes you'll start with an Excel sheet or a CSV um there may even not be any API available at the remote system and Daniel has a perfect uh is an expert for a solution that we have for these types of Integrations and then lastly these can be ad hoc or manual Integrations ad hoc means you have an Excel sheet you want to import maybe you import it once maybe you imported recurringly from a data source but these are usually the low maturity Integrations in the intermediate category we'll put those where the processes are mostly discovered or documented they can these can be triggered or scheduled there's usually some form of information transfer happening there may be API available so maybe you can use a rest integration or something and then of course the high maturity ones where the processes are fully discovered and documented these are usually synchronous or scheduled and they mostly most likely have an API as well okay I told you a matrix wasn't possible because we have a third dimension what's the Frequency so connected to manual there's the ad hoc Dimension so ad hoc um ad hoc Integrations can be importing from an XML importing from an XLS from a CSV from an email from a data source and of course manual connections through RPA which is robotic process automation triggered Integrations can be for example data sources can be integration Hub scope spokes or also RPA these are usually triggered from some form of flow or workflow or business rule or whatever kind of trigger you want to make it and then third we have the near real time or real-time Integrations so for example uh data stream spokes that run incessantly whenever necessary to get the current data from the remote system IDR to keep your instances in sync this stands for instance data replication and then again RPA which is our cool kid on the Block because it can do anything okay so long story short these are the categories keep an eye out for those arrows so I've uh put those arrows on the different technologies that we're covering today so with that Joe please take it away yeah sure so we can quickly uh go through some of the options that have always been available and that may have you know some some that you may not have seen yet on the platform as far as Integrations go so if we look at what options are out there for integrating on on the servicenow platform you do have um as you can see here integration Hub everybody's probably familiar with import sets if you're on this call and you're familiar with Integrations those are very valuable to you uh spokes which are part of integration Hub as we discussed a second ago RPA Hub offers multiple ways to integrate and then there's some of the Legacy things in there like scripted web services uh scripted rest apis all kinds of unique ways to integrate really with with servicenow as many of you all know we give you one platform that almost any developer can build an integration or an application on uh so so we'll really democratized application development and servicenow platform really takes care of a lot of the heavy lifting of building these applications and Integrations by abstracting away that app Dev complexity that that we all know so well or some of us may not know so well uh and we really have a lot of full featured capabilities as you'll see here you have integration Hub RPA Hub document intelligence and then there's automation Center and we'll get into some of these here in just a little bit but because of all of these features that are delivered on a single platform our built-in governance capabilities really ensure that you stay in compliance with the applications and Integrations that you're building so that's one of the benefits to building your Integrations on a servicenow platform and on our platform that your developers they really get to focus on creating and configuring applications and Integrations with low code and what that means is they're going to be easier to manage and a lot safer to scale if you need to add new features to those so the first feature that we'll look at um in automation engine is we can look at why integration Hub has to offer so you get to Value fast with integration Hub it's you're leveraging over 4 000 pre-built actions to use in your Integrations uh you you have the access to more than 175 spokes uh through the right subscriptions and you can get download and use most of those just directly from the store and then we have flow templates that allow your citizen developers to make the most of you know the common logic and integration use cases and they can use those to kind of see how those patterns get developed and learn how those patterns work so they can start building their own flows as well and anytime you come across a use case or or something that we don't have a spoke for um you can extend an existing spoke and use some of the creativity out of that to create your own and then all the connections and integration helper manage from a single dashboard so so you can view those directly all together and click into them and manage them and do all that good stuff of and then um you know really take advantage of building an integration quickly but also safely within the guidelines and compliance of your organization talk about RPA hub so this is new to me I I've not used RPA Hub Daniel is the pro here um I'm not going to take any questions on this because I may get them wrong but I will I will briefly discuss RPA here because I think it's amazing and I'm kind of let down that I haven't had the time to really dive into it yet but robotic process automation is a form of a business process automation or Bots or digital workers so to say are deployed as a substitute for humans in routines so you can think like the the swivel chair scenario where you have somebody going to this system and then they're they're like maybe even printed off on paper and then take an ad over here to this desk setting it down and retyping everything into this other system these robots can automate a lot of that and they can either be attempted or unattended and attended robots are really suitable for automations that there is no human interaction so it can automate the entire process through and through um they can run on a you know client machine they use a series of instructions called a bot process to to to process the tasks that they're enabled to and then they they also can um run alongside uh the user and support the user and execution execution to their work so so the user may be able to focus on totally different set of tasks well this robot's just over here rolling along and keeping the data populated form or something like that um unintended robots are suitable for processes that that need a little bit of human interaction so so you may get to a point in your process that you click a button and then that causes the robot to go pull data here do this thing and then all of a sudden you have what you need to finish your task so lots of cool stuff going on there I I would love to dive into that world and I'm hoping that I can dive into it a little bit more but for now we have Daniel that that gets to have all the fun there and then next we'll we'll discuss document intelligence which is one of our newest products as well um I love I love this thing one of the challenges out there in the world that exists today is um being very good at extracting data properly from documents that could be PDFs or semi-structured documents structured documents all kinds of different forms IDs lots and lots going on out there and that data input part you know if it's a human doing the data input that can there's a lot that can happen as far as air goes there so with document intelligence it's it's AI first design it it takes in and and and and really solves this challenge of of getting that data off of those documents into the servicenow platform and accelerates the document processing of these forms and IDs and and all that good stuff and and what happens is the AI continually learns and it models in real time so so you scan the document in a few times and before you know it you have many many you know documents running through this system continuously learning and there's not a whole lot of human interaction it really is learning how to read the documents even when they change and you can set thresholds and all that to to make sure that it's correct and what it's pulling off of those forms and it's a lot of fun I like playing around with it had a lot of fun with that one legally and it keeps getting better so that's always a good thing and that's all for me I'm gonna hand it over to Daniel so he can talk about integration Hub import which is another really awesome feature all right thanks for Joe um yeah we wanted to pick out integration Hub well I wanted to pick out the integration of import here and and also run a quick demo because we I believe it is really a cool great new feature to importing data to service now I guess everybody most mostly everybody has imported data from Excel files into the platform one form or another typically use the import set and while they still work there so so for a reason integration integration of import is I would say just import sets on steroids right and uh it is so easy and fun to use that I think let's jump to a quick demo and actually they are import sets on steroids technically they are the technology behind will look familiar but the interface is so much nicer to use um so yeah to import something we need in Excel sheet so I have here an Excel sheet you can see it's just has some columns here and some data in here nothing service now specific I wanted to keep it really easy and simple so there is my data table that I want to import and I have here A pretty new service now in the PDI that you might be all aware of that you get a developer.servicenow.com brand new running the Utah release even though import integration of import has been around since a couple releases so you don't need Utah for it that's the instance I'll be using so I will be using I created a table to match my Excel and you see that table is currently empty there's nothing in there so we want to import some data and make them appear here traditionally with import sets you upload the file you do the mappings you run the transform and all these steps to go through now with integration Hub import let's see how that works integration not typing and talking at the same time is sometimes a challenge for me there we go integration of import is a new menu in your Navigator and it's there with integration Hub basic free of charge just to comment on that for example as we had that on the chat right um so it opens up a new screen and you know as pdis might some take some time at the moment to load it's just refreshing you see yeah that's that's a new interface for integration and import it's empty I didn't do anything yet so there we call them here Integrations yeah we're importing data so it's some form of integration you could say let's create a new integration and call that what's that invoice data invoice invoices import we just need a name and the description lazy just copy that as you see I created actually a custom application for my new table best practice good practice working in custom apps these days I'll save that and we say here we get another nice little view here okay what do we want to do how where do you want to get the data from we can see I actually can get it from a file Excel CSV I could actually also get it from spokes from stream action so we do have different stream actions to feed in data in the series now so if you want to do that like in an automated schedule session from somewhere else yes that is an option you can get them through the store for the sake of this quick demo just using an Excel file increase the option is new in Utah that is true and uh one more tiny thing because I know the question will come up uh this thing is called integration Hub import it only requires integration app if you want to make use for the uh of the data stream integration so if you want to make sure make use of the data stream action which would call a rest API for example of a remote system that's where you need integration Hub you can import from Excel and CSV with your regular platform licensing just to get this out of the way that's the only licensing question I'll answer today but I really want you to know that you can use this it's awesome building new apps and starting with data thanks for for that clarification there so yeah so we selected an Excel file in this case we need to select the file you can drag and drop it which I actually will do just drag the file here so I'm dragging my file which is drag and drop it's cool right we didn't have that in the past and now you see it already analyzed my file and brings me all the columns that are in the file so I can see the structure in that file and obviously looked at the first sheet that it could change like to a differentiate I can specify where is my header row if there's some stuff above the header or that I need so I can modify that but I already see the structure of my file which is awesome that's the first big step forward right um once I have that I move to map to Target and say I want to map it somewhere I want to map a table and I created a invoice table invoice should probably find that come on search there we go invoice item that's the one and like with Imports as we said they are running on on import sets underneath right we have the option of running business Rules running it synchronously asynchronously so we have similar options in here let's map that with the business all there is no business rule on that one anyway so I mapped this table and now we can go here in edit mapping and Define what do I want to map where I can see in the left hand side now my Excel sheet again on the right hand side where we'll see the table and I can basically just say add all Fields so I get all fields from my table listed here and in a very flow designer way I can just start racking and drop dropping stuff like a invoice number is my number field this kind goes to where is Discount Discount goes to this one comment I think I don't have a common price we get a price over here you see it's very simple to drag yourself there's also an auto map feature like we had with the old stuff right so you can also use that one if you want to uh customizing products products is this one um we have here the match column which is kind of our coalesce that we had before so I can say a match on the number and my Excel sheet didn't have any numbers that's just the way it is um on references I get these little gear icons clock Wheels I can click on that and say Hey how do I actually want to look up the information in the Target table is that by name by email by location like I'm pointing here to the user table so I go to name I can say create a new record yes now you see all these familiar options that you know from import sets are there in one convenient interface here not on different tables different records I can also have some functions in here to change if you scroll to the right to change the value if I want to basically regex replace trim replace whatever I need to modify the fields as they come in right so I have these features available but that's pretty powerful to Define my mapping I think if you're seeing here and there's the other map that I just mentioned you can all map by field names and stuff you get some options here clear unmapped and stuff so it's really easy to use once I have that I can basically move on to schedule to click save first yeah saving that mapping on a table I could add on a table so I can map more than one table in one go which is not possible with transform Maps right there's one target table per map so you could have more than one um let's move on to Imports and maybe just I could schedule it from here like a daily weekly you can the classical scheduling thing again it's import sets underneath you can do the same thing for the sake of the demo just click on run import and it will run yeah the job is there refresh the executions we'll see it popping up here there we go we get that import that I can look into the execution I get actually really nice statistics like say how many rows did we import what was pending skip so we get a nice little dashboard we get the data underneath and that's how easy you can actually run Imports if I know there are more than nine rows you can actually watch the number go up yeah it was really fast now right it's a short demo we we are kind of short on time let's see the data is here and how the currency everything is there it's just import nicely it has the references to users I can click through users and stuff so it's really really easy to use that is amazing that was fast thank you it was really fast yeah that is that part of the demo and now we'll have some more integration options that are not talking to remote systems different that are not serviced now that's coming back to me so if I want to stay in the first life for just for a second so the special case in integrating integrating two servicenow systems to each other a lot of customers hit that sooner or later right you might actually as a customer work with you with one of your partners or windows that also use service now it's getting more and more common which is good for us maybe also for you in that case or you might have actually more than one service now instance in your Enterprise in your corporation right we do see as customers grow and get large they might have Regional distribution of instances for legal reasons or whatever they might be uh so you have more than one instance and you need to start thinking about how do these instances talk to each other so there are special options special things right as both systems are services easier than building a spoke or writing some scripts and rest apis and whatever so it should be simpler than that right and based on what you want to integrate and how they are actually different options which might be frustrating as we have too many of these I guess and sometimes very briefly touching which ones you have for service now to service now instance data replication is one which is kind of if we come to the type of integration a replication data you would use that in-house for more than one instance and maybe synchronize Foundation data user records Arc structures departments things like that that you actually need in all instances maybe even CI records maybe right or certain CI records IDR is yes it's a it's a paid for product it's a separate license SKU I guess so far not every customer needs it right but it takes away the pain of building you kind of have a subscriber pattern and in the data basically is automatically synchronized between the different instances so if you have that scenario check it out it's really valuable to do that and much easier than building your own integration it also keeps your sys IDs the same yeah right right function that you have is n't about your data that we want to move or we actually want to do uh or full tables that we want to move over let's say IDR is really for a lot larger volumes and volumes of data that where you want to synchronize certain information if you have smaller subsets that you want to push over or read from another instance we have the remote instance bow which is part of integration Hub yeah it is one of the spokes I'm actually not sure in which package the remote instance spoke is in something we can probably clarify um but that is where you can use Flow Design and Build Your Own integration saying whenever A change is created you raise a change task in another system for example or when a CI of a certain type is created you raise a fulfillment task somewhere else whatever your integration might be you can build your own logic around that building your own process so that's probably the most flexible one if you need to build your own things right um then one level further is what we call remote process sync which which talks about synchronizing a process maybe a change process maybe an incident whatever approach process it is we're actually bonding the two systems together for certain criteria you might have maybe a CSM customer case flagged as ID relevant and then it has to trigger an incident in the it instance that's where you can use remote process sync and we will make sure that these two process records are synchronized including the relevant reference data that is tied to that like CIS and other stuff so that's one level above the data really on that process layer to synchronize on that one this is also a is an awesome tool if you're if you're working closely with partners and they're doing some Service delivery for you and you want to synchronize those requests properly or maybe um have these things work more seamlessly I think those are really really handy awesome and we'll get more specific then we get even more specific with a product called service Bridge which I guess most of the people have not yet heard about that's uh similar like RPA the news kit on the Block been around for I think two years something like that however it comes from the Telco space or from our TMT Telco management technology something like that I think it's it's the workflow abbreviation um where we have seen that Telco providers to really provide a service catalog to their customers which they can use internal like if say you're buying from Vodafone right they have a big shop of phones that they can sell to your employees and you want these phones to be available in your internal service catalog that's the intention for service Bridge we can select or synchronize these catalog items from this Vodafone instance into your internal instance and we also synchronize the processes of ordering between the two instances aside so if you order a new iPhone in your instance we the so the instance knows oh this is coming from Vodafone I actually need to request it in the other instance things like that are available with this service spread so it's a very specific Telco use case for service request fulfillment technically can be used outside but it's currently been licensed and productized within that Telco space that's just where we have seen it so far next we'll get into some honorable Legacy or whatever we want to call those options they're still around we won't get rid of them anytime soon uh and if we were you would find them in the deprecation process but uh these things will most of these will stay around um of course we have manual or email Imports you just saw uh Daniel manually import an Excel sheet uh before we had the import tool we would do that either very very very manually by downloading the import template from a table and then filling that with data and re-uploading that spreadsheet it still can be very handy if you only need like five records um if it's more we'll go with import sets so using a data data source creating an import set creating a transform manually however I would recommend to go with the import feature we saw earlier I think that it's a lot easier to um to do the transforms you don't have to worry about writing code you can just drag and drop you can just do apply the transforms and decide what is the coalesce it's a nicer interface and it is much easier to use as well then email yes email email is a form of integration when you are using inbound email actions you can actually parse the email subject and or sometimes content to update fields in records and yes I know that from my painful personal experience we did that we actually updated records we actually tried to have a data driven support integration solely through email with a service provider it was painful parsing the subject and I would not recommend to do that but it's possible uh and then of course it's creating when you're still in an organization where people send an email to support this will be your main driver to create cases to create incidents uh and then you'll want to process these that is also a type of integration uh mentioned before import sets but also export sets it's possible to uh simply import a flat file of data and it's been there from the start it's robust and it works and you can use it similar for export sets you can push data from an instance to an external file uh upload it to either a Target system or through a mid server or something it's usually more of an ad hoc or triggered thing and um I would recommend to consider using rest apis or even RPA if possible today his favorite process is a scripted wrist or scripted so apis these work by calling the remote system sending an HTTP request getting back an HTTP HTTP response that is coming back you can create your own if you need to for specific things in your instance for if the table API is not enough if you want to specify certain access you can do that with these scripted rest configurations there's also for inbound Integrations the option to use the inbound rest flow trigger where you can also determine the request you can determine what kind of response you do and what you do with these so uh it's possible to do error handling in that case and it usually also supports versioning for that and then lastly uh orchestration so a couple of notes I said we're not deprecating any of these soon and we don't have any concrete plans people are asking all the time considering that integration Hub has been around for a while I do want to recommend that anytime you create a new integration to do these inflow designer and integration Hub um and not use the Legacy technology anymore they do work and they will still receive bug fixes but we don't have any Innovation around these there's no development they don't get any new uh features so all Innovation happens for automation engine specifically integration Hub and the cool thing really about integration Hub and we have a slide at the end just to give you an impression there are so many spokes there's a whole discussion to be had for the whole uh build versus by conversation and for the most part I think there's some argument to be had for the actual actions to be maintained by us for you so whenever there's a change to the API version change to the remote system you don't have to think about that you can just upgrade your spoke have the latest version have the latest functionality and you don't have to worry about keeping them up to date so and with that we have almost 20 minutes left for some best practices that makes me very happy now we have we had a good pace awesome there's as I told you there's just so much to cover this is such a broad topic and this presentation won't be uh I won't claim for this to be exhaustive at all so there will be more to talk about um as we can see from chat so some guidance and best practices that we want to give you when you start creating Integrations uh one of them I mentioned at the start single source of Truth whenever you do any kind of data replication be sure to specify which system is the single source of Truth which determines what state of the data will be on all connected other systems so you could even consider to make the imported data from the single source of Truth maybe your HR system of record maybe your cmdb may be your I don't know other systems that contain records you want to make sure just one of them is the main source of Truth info uh database and then all others pull their info from there know the data owner this one's a process thing but it is important to know who owns the data who's responsible for keeping it correct and up to date when you do integrate make sure you only synchronize the relevant data so whenever you create new ones you don't most of the time you don't have to transfer all of the fields from a table for your process maybe it's just a subset of these that are needed on the remote system maybe you don't have to pull all of the data from the remote system maybe you only need like 10 fields to keep your info up to date when you do a large integration loads you should start to consider performance so if there are huge in Imports try to have those after hour or during non-peak time of day if your organization is global and you have customers and and users logging in at all times of day there are options to have your instances in several data centers and then these could be rolling around the globe so speak to your account Reps for these things and then lately lastly take advantage of staging tables if real time is not required this also helps with performance uh one of the aspects that were mentioned on some of the slides previously consider data security so it's very important to adhere to any security policies to ensure the compliance with your organization's guidelines uh try to use ACLS wherever needed and to limit the access to only be as minimal as it is required you can also assign roles and these the access for those should also be minimal and then lastly it's always a good idea when you sync records to have a correlation ID and the correlation ID is actually available I think on all servers now tables uh it's been an addition a couple of years back and what this does is you can store the record ID in the correlation ID of the remote record in that table so say you have a case on your customer instance and you want to connect it to your incident you can store the other tables table name and the sysid in those correlation and external record fields uh part two of best practices goes over to Daniel yeah thank you Lisa so part two and that and you the slide right um important when you build Integrations same applications here I start on top right corner I would actually recommend build your application Integrations to it again build your Integrations as a scope application why do I want that on the one side if you do a spoke for integration up that's one of the conventions anyway and the other side is if that integration for whatever reason might not be needed anymore down under six months 12 months down the road you can easily find everything that's tied to that integration right even if it's a global application doesn't matter it is an application and everything is kind of contained together so that's a very really would urge you use these sculpt applications to manage your development that's what they're there for as you build another thing is testing these Integrations for performance right quite oftenly developers they test one record five records maybe seven records but that's where you stop and say it's working and you hit then production and suddenly you get hundreds or thousands of Records it's like oh my God that takes hours why right so make sure you test for the load that you really expect to be there maybe a little bit more uh than expected just be in the safe side um that really helps to make it more robust for some it might be helpful to create properties right as you maybe want to store some parameters uh settings maybe credentials are mentioned here and with integration up you shouldn't have credentials and properties I guess but for the old rest API one that's uh the credential itself this is for storing maybe the CIS ID of the credential record yes you shouldn't put your credentials in in plate things like that right yeah great property pages so it's much easier to find them and maintain them keep these property Pages part of your scoped app right again keep it nightly together so that is uh just how you create and maintain the content as you've seen there's lots and lots of different options that you can use make an informed decision of what makes sense for that use case not everything has to be a fully automated flow driven rest API maybe a flat file once a week is good enough right make that decision really based on the requirements you have plan for non-profit right uh your build Integrations to our Target system if you update another Target system make sure you have also a test environment or at least test setup in place I do remember a case lots of years ago where somebody made a change on the test environment and suddenly the automation run forward and they change all passwords of all users in active directory and production not very happy for the service test the next Monday morning right and it took like two hours to figure out what happened and I was too late right like thousands of user passwords reset not what you want to do on a test system so half these separation make clear test is never writing to a production system right and last but not least all Integrations will produce errors one day or another something is just not as expected and that might be the silly things like networking up there into data issues you get some stuff you don't expect so plan on how to lock these errors and raise maybe incidents or tickets to somebody to check them out right if they are silently happening in the back end nobody noticed them oh that is piling up and suddenly you might have a much bigger problem so think about how you handle these errors and maybe build a framework around integration up can help but if it doesn't do it all for you so build that frame around how to report and how to get back to a break fix or a remediation about these some tools in place in action designer one is mentioned here try policy for the next steps new features in I believe Tokyo it was San Diego or Tokyo we added error handling in action designer error handling in flow designer so you your say subflow that does the integration or handles the integration has error handling and third we have a new flow logic that is called try logic so you can try to call an API with a flow action for x amount of time so you can say run this five times until it succeeds and if it does fail after those this number of repeats you can also add a wait for duration in there uh then it'll go into the error handling part then you can can for example in the flow error handling send a notification raise an incident or lock something I think that those are really good improvements for uh for inflow designer and an action designer to handle those errors awesome uh and then uh lastly one of the main things for uh keeping your automations great and valuable is to measure them because you won't be able to know what your value is from things like integration Hub unless you measure it properly and we're working on a product called automation Center and Joe will tell us more about it yes sure thanks Lisa so so looking at automation Center um you know there's a challenge out there that we've identified where organizations are struggling with all these different islands of automation multiple disconnected Point automation tools that are not integrated at the cross Department across Enterprise level um really a fragmented automation governance policy uh and the oversight you know really siled views into these different areas or islands of automation automation Center is a centralized workspace that gives you that single pane of glass for automation opportunity intake and workflow and vendor agnostic business and operational oversight and all these analytics um and and really what that looks like is if you look here on the right you know you have your automation Dev manager your COA Coe leads executive leadership they can all look at this dashboard and and get insights into like business goals and progress time and cost savings on your automations um we can compare performance by Source you know Department lots of different ways to filter the data there uh you can you can see the automations that are deployed in their success rate and how how often they're failing future automations by intake Source goal expected time and cost savings lots of really valuable analytics for multiple different teams in one you know one workspace so so really a lot of value there um and and one thing that we focused on for Utah is if we want to move the next slide Lisa um the ability to also gain insights from some of these third-party systems so in in regards to RPA here you'll see uipath automation anywhere blue prism uh we have we've added a value dashboard that provides real-time insights across you know all of these different vendors and helps track those business goals as well so you have kpis into not only what's going on with your automations in the platform but also some of those outside of the platform awesome thank you so much yeah I think I think measuring um automation success is very important because that is something that you as developers or service owners platform owners can use to justify those extra costs for those licenses uh automation has definitely its benefits especially if you re if you use the pre-made spokes if you use a pre-made flow templates if you use dock Intel to scan these documents instead of having somebody do a data entry manually those are valuable hours and and not so much personal costs that you can save with these and making use of the tools and the analytics that we have on the platform absolutely helps you to improve on these and to measure them and justify them Upstream all right uh we have had so many questions and comments I am very very uh grateful to you uh we will check out on some of the things we couldn't answer directly I will leave you with a couple of resources uh as I said this uh presentation will be linked on the community if you have a few minutes I would love for you to answer these questions uh that we want to get um our make sure that our academies are getting better and then lastly I promised you some links to other platforms so we have a bunch of more platform academies thank you everybody again thank you for joining us uh thank you for being on this platform Academy I hope to see you again in two weeks I don't think we have the session posted yet but the idea for the session in two weeks is to talk about upgrades how to make use of upgrade plans to make your upgrades better and faster and more specifically uh know how to best upgrade to Utah once it once it goes ga next month this month later this month awesome thank you again everybody I hope you have a wonderful time and a wonderful day thank you Daniel thank you Joe thanks everyone for being here enjoy the session