the Vancouver release is here at least generally availability and once again we have all four developer Advocates to share their favorite features from App engine automation engine and platform so come on along welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast hello servicenow admins Builders developers and of course all the Curious individuals that I always say with the utmost love and respect welcome to or welcome back to break point the servicenow developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and tradecraft to accelerate your career this one's highly focused on the tools if you might have missed that hint my name is Chuck tavasi senior developer Advocate at servicenow and I am joined by the lovely and smart always smiling senior developer Advocate Lauren McManaman how are you today Lauren I am fantastic and my mother who is my dentist will be very happy to hear I'm always smiling and advertising her good work and today we are joined by not one but two more Advocates Earl Duque and pranav bhagat to share all of our favorite features in Vancouver how are you today Earl I am doing well thanks for having me again and pranav I'm doing well too thanks for asking Chuck Brown I've got that awesome new mic yeah he's just coming through loud and clear now that's great okay we're gonna keep this simple we're gonna start with number five we picked five things each that we absolutely love about Vancouver in the app engine automation engine and platform space so let's start with Lauren's first pick so I really liked what Earl did last year he had an overall cohesive theme to his top five favorites and I will see if the listeners can pick up my theme by the end but I will start out with my number five pick which is the overall theming changes to flow designer I think it's very important to Showcase a mature product and part of maturity is cohesion so if something looks different than everything else it's gonna stand out and probably not in the best way so I'm very happy that now everything in flow designer looks and feels like the current branding standard that service now has no nice consistency is a good thing especially as you evolve over time Earl you have a pick I will spoil my theme this time at the beginning so you can all fall around follow along at home but my theme is all around uh I think I did this last time too things that make it easier and better for those that are in the platform day to day as developers as admins as people building and creating things inside service now my first thing that I'll talk about is the assist event priorities capability that was introduced in Vancouver so any of us that have done development or Administration insights servicenow knows how bonkers the sys events table can get inside servicenow and one of the things that they're introducing in Vancouver is the ability to prioritize certain events uh within a custom queue and so those events that need to happen first even though there might be hundreds of other events queued up can be actually prioritized now so we can move through the Queue at the way we want to now just curious Earl do you have any thoughts on what you would bump to the top of the priority things like that are critical for the system to know who a person is so anything that handles user or role uh Acquisitions that kind of thing anything that might cause an error if they are not handled first or may prevent something from becoming an error later so those are the things I always think about first anything that can lead to Mission critical situations and then downgrade things like notifications they don't have to go out right away things that are okay to be queued you know the things that hey if this if this can be sent out an hour later yeah sure why not yeah house isn't gonna burn down right pranav one from your list yeah so I'll be biased towards automation engine as well as platform security that's because that's what I have worked a lot recently so the first my first pick will be the access analyzer so this is something a really powerful feature like I can give you a bit of a context around it like in simple it's like who has access to what in the in the past like when I was working as a developer so I felt like I had a I had some incidents or something come up like oh why this person is not able to access this particular artifact and service now so I had to scratch my head and try to figure out oh how to debug this thing I had to go through roles and everything now we have this access analyzer which will tell you who has access to what you just go into the list view of that particular record and just right click on it and do the access analyze so you can able to see like which particular role is letting this user able to access this so see how cool this is and super powerful I feel like if it existed back in the day when I was a developer it would have made my job easier thanks servicenow a lot of these features would have made our jobs easier if they were around 10 years ago I was like say where was this when I was a child exactly my first pick is going to be the ability to edit data pills in flow designer so we've all built out these long dot walked data pills and go oh I accidentally clicked on the record instead of drilling into it and clicking the right thing and now you got to destroy the data pill and do it again so the ability to have a data pill on the flow in in one of the input boxes and and click it and be able to adjust it right there is going to save some time data pill editing you are so lucky that was very close to making my or I guess I'm very lucky that was the duplicate on my list it was up there what's your next one well my next one so again this is contributing to my theme my fourth pick is showcasing process automation designer processes inside of app engine Studio I don't like people ping-ponging all over the platform it's my major reason why I heavily recommend both studio and app engine Studio it's the consolidation of all of your work in one place and for a long time that was all of your work Sans your FL or your processes so having process automation designer executions visible creatable and editable in app engine Studio I think is very appropriate for what that is as far as it's technical difficulty compared to other things in app engine studio and I think it was a necessary step to make towards the cohesion of that product it's one of those things that you're surprised it didn't come out early here but it might have just been you know a developer bandwidth thing absolutely Earl going along with my theme of making lives easier for devs and admins my next thing I think I'm going to pick the the ability to add resources to applications and so in Vancouver oh well first let's back up story time [Music] this is a great way to introduce it because this actually came up from a a problem that came up for actual company one of our largest users of servicenow actually they have a multi-tenant instance production instance and in their instance they have a bunch of Dev groups doing different things and one particular tenant group was able to bring down their entire production instance because they uh hogged up all the transactions all the resources of their production instance all the nodes based off of just what they created and so servicenow saw that as a very critical item and so they created the ability to add resource limits on scoped applications and so now admins are going to be able to say hey this scoped application can only um take up this percentage of rest API transactions or this percentage of events on the sys events table or this many browser interactions that happen at any given time or this many scheduled jobs that are going to be taking over the instance at a single time and so admins have a little bit more control now over what they think different apps should be doing and if they ever uh get past those limits then it warns them or just simply denies it so that you can monitor it or you can take action on it so a little bit more control especially for people like my background who came from the University uh and did servicenow development for universities where we have I think my last workplace we had 26 different organizations operating within service now all with their own hierarchy all within their own uh groups and stuff like that so having multi-tenants instances is common for a lot of companies out there but being able to control how much of those resources they have uh is now something capable excellent I'm sure that'll save a lot of people some problems down the road even if they don't know they're going to have it yet brought up you got another one for us yep and I think like this feature this particular thing is there in service now environment for some time now that's UI Builder but I haven't explored UI Builder briefly like that's I have just seen it and just maybe seen the updates and all but but in Vancouver there are some exciting improvements in the particular in terms of adding pop-up models or all these things that you might have seen in the Techno episode till now which have ignited my eagerness to try this particular product so my pick will be going ahead to try UI building now it's it has made me excited about what they have done till now so thanks Brad and the team is working on it thanks and my next one is going to be around decision Builder it's been out for a few releases and we've talked to Julia Perlis from our product team on that we've got some videos out there if you want to watch it way easier to maintain those flows and even a decision criteria within other parts of the platform that you may want to tap into that let people manage the data Behind these decisions in your flows well now it's possible right from the decision Builder to test you hit the test button and it comes up and says oh your decision table needs three inputs please provide values for these inputs you can test them and check the outputs just to make sure that things are going prior to this you had to go into the flow and run it like five ten times depending on how many times you want to test it and with what parameters so decision Builder testing much easier now you have stronger validation stronger proof that your your decision table will behave the way you want it to especially tricky when you start getting in decision tables that are based around dates I've done that before uh the other one is and decision tables is publishing just like the old workflow editor for those of you that remember that you could check something out make some modifications tested before you publish it back into the the public purview you can do this with decision Builder tables now too so you can work on an unpublished copy then publish it and it's not available to your flows until it's published so give that you know with testing and Publishing you've got even more confidence that it's going to work the way you want it to when it gets to production I would Echo that point about the decision tables because half the time when I would be building applications I would be thinking about the concept of the decision table prior to building the flow sometimes and so beforehand there was no way to test it so I'd have to like build half the decision table then build like a rudimentary flow just to test the decision tables so I I really stand by that decision to have a testing interface it's really nice I think I have a number of flows that are just like this is here on only to test this decision table I'll build the rest of the complex logic later background scripts for days yeah right background scripts for days well that again I really like that one it's on my list because I didn't participate with my theme but my next one will be flow designer home page revamp any user of flow designer knows when they log into it or excuse me if they go to that specific application they are met with a alphabetical list of every flow that has ever been made and the first thing I usually do is filter on application or just like get this list down to something more manageable even if you log in through app engine studio so you're within an app scope it wouldn't limit that list so a spoiler alert now in Vancouver there is a completely revamped home page that not only now matches the current brand as I mentioned before but it's much more user oriented so at the top of the list are going to be things that you have actually been working on so I'd say hey pick up where you left off um similarly it does the same with your team so I think servicenow as a company is getting better at including aspects of a team oriented developer unit versus which I think which was much more common as a business model of like one developer at a company being judged Jerry and executioner so it's nice to see that team model reflected in new things that we're creating as well so not only do you have pick up where you left off recent activity in general there's also a lot of execution statistics that you will see and also resources so similar to app engine Studio where there's embedded resources for help that is now being done for flow designer so I I really like what they they basically seem to learn from the changes in app engine studio and apply those to flow designer as well on to Earl my next thing is something that focuses around this thing that most Dev teams or devops teams try to achieve and it's this idea of unit testing and so this idea of instead of having so many manual processes of making sure your system is running well every time you do a new release there is a new feature coming in Vancouver called within the automated test framework that allows you to Auto generate ATF tests and this is very exciting because what if you're you're trying to achieve this autonomous way of making sure your system's not breaking down in ways that you weren't expecting hey I released this feature uh on this custom table and it somehow broke our incident table well you're supposed to be building automated tests to make sure those things are still working but one of the things is is it takes a lot of effort to try to get to that point of creating tests and making sure those tests are up to date and making sure they're run every single time a new release happens uh but in Vancouver they're introducing a way to generate automate um automated test framework tests and that's really exciting for the sake of trying to achieve That Pie in the Sky unit test uh the unit that kind of goal that a lot of companies want to try to achieve within their Dev space but um I need to I'm excited about this I need to read more about it because I think a lot of people will be interested in it yeah well I think I totally agree with you these are some of the great things in ATF if they can generate ATF test automatically my pick next pick will be something like part of document intelligence so you might have seen me playing with document intelligence in life coding happy hour even in life coding happy hour live in knowledge23 so there is some kind of an issue that was there for developers initially when they were getting the data passed from a document it was all coming in string so they had to do some post transformation on top of it and then they have to normalize it now we are giving it out of the box so how cool is that now they don't have to do those all post transformation on the data to convert them into string to date and all I don't even know how to do that to be honest revisit the JavaScript series or sometime later and if you don't know how to do it imagine what 99 percent of other people know how to do or don't yeah I think 99 person people might be smarter than me they might be knowing now now now all right moving one out of the ladder for me I'm gonna go into integration Hub where we've got a couple of features that intrigue me I love my Integrations I like making systems talk to other systems you're getting the compiled value out of all of them something I've been doing for decades and one of the things that intrigued me about integration Hub is the ability to do multi-target tables so you can do an import now this is previously available through some back end stuff with data sources and ETL transforms and it was pretty complex stuff but now if you've got incoming data you can say this goes to that table that goes to that table haven't used it yet I really really really want to dig into this soon I should note that this is recorded before Vancouver uh EA is available to us so we're doing some of this on uh blind marketing slides and what product managers have told us but by the time you hear it we will have had it in our hot little hands for a little bit a while the other thing is check marks so as your mapping Fields back and forth and saying this goes from this Source field to that Source Target Field uh it'll sell you check marks so you know what you've used before just a handy little mnemonic to go wait did I did I already use updated or I've got two updated fields which one did I use so that'll be much much handier okay we're getting close the penultimate on each of our lists Lauren what's yours so the number two favorite in Vancouver for me is the overall performance improvements made to flow designer I think that that was always a little bit of a Grumble if it's a developer Community is that they really like flow designer but certain aspects of it could have been a little faster I think there has been multiple times during conferences where I've you know surreptitiously blamed bad conference Wi-Fi on maybe a slow product at times because hey I don't know it's you know Devil's Advocate so I'm very happy to see that there have been they went through an optimization exercise over the course of Vancouver and it targeted some specific things that had a lot of extra API calls in the back end that were just slowing things down some of them were removed entirely others were perfected to a point where the overall flow load time has been reduced by 60 so that's really great regarding subflows so if you were adding a subflow to a flow that time has been reduced by 98 percent and probably the most impressive was that the overall logic optimization time has been reduced by 99 oh my God so I'm extremely excited like Chuck said we haven't physically tested this ourselves yet I am extremely excited to see how much faster this makes the overall application absolutely that's super exciting especially because it I know we're talking about Vancouver right now but I was in some internal threads about uh they found certain things that were bogging down next experience stuff across the board and so in future releases what all the fast things that are happening or all the improvements that flow designer is getting um the Flow Design is going to get even faster along with workspaces and UI Builder because they found something that was uh making a lot of transactions a lot longer than it needed to be and so they're focusing on stuff like that and that's really exciting to me good but on the next one on my list number two uh would be the redesign the redesigned App Manager um we're gonna get into a lot of these things that we're talking about today um on our Tech now episode but one of the things that I really want to highlight about the redesigned App Manager um for this one is the fact that we're going to be able to queue plug-in installations and app installations in the background and let them run in sequence uh and the reason why I have to just talk about that one was because uh I somehow have come into ownership of more more than 200 instances of service now and um one ring to rule them all yeah anybody that's logged into support this is just a fun anecdote if anybody's logged into support.servicenow.com previously high.servicenow.com for uh for US veterans um when you load that instance people don't realize that that uh instance page isn't paginated it loads the entire list of your instances that you own and tries to put it all on the screen one um there and if you do have a page Nation it's already still loaded because it and so it's fast I don't think they ever accounted for someone like me that has that many instances assigned to them and um the reason why I really like this is because I had to go through all 200 of those instances and manually install um two or I think three applications from the App Manager but I had to wait each time for all of those things also imagine me sitting there with 20 tabs open at a time going through Each One clicking install and then going back clicking the next install button once that finished and doing that over and over again for all my instances so the fact that I can queue them up now in Vancouver is just a delight for me and I wish literally that was last release that I had to do all that and now it's here and it's just like okay well hopefully that helps somebody else out well hey it's also a great use case for RPA you could have made an RPA bot to go through them all oh snap I mean it was one of those analysis of like it's probably faster if I just hit the buttons at this point instead of trying to make something or trying to find a programmatic way of doing it so I um and I have the deadline so I just kind of bit the bulletin and did it American Hero that's not a short list but there's other cool stuff happening in app manager tune in elsewhere to find out all right of what's on your second best list that didn't sound right like this is my the features that I'm talk about is my top feature but I know some of you definitely would have picked it as first so that's why I put it as second so that nobody can pick it up so so it's it's about it's like the AI capabilities in RPA right so now in latest release of RPA in Vancouver you can able to invoke any cognitive skills like image classification or sentimental analysis from within the RPA desktop Design Studio how cool is that like and this all thing is supported by our servicenow AI framework so I can't talk much about it you have to watch a create a toolbox episode that would be coming up really soon to to know about all these AI capabilities my number two pick is the spoke generator in integration Hub again love my Integrations I've done some open API work where you go out and get the yaml file and bring it in and it does some pretty cool stuff this makes it even easier because it will create those actions and steps and whatnot for you out of that yeah just to create an entire spoke by importing someone else's open apis back is is phenomenal to think about the only thing I can think that would make it better is if we could export an open API from an existing spoke that would be super awesome and then we'd get anyway I'm I'm off off Target out here but I want to take somebody's open API spec bring it in and just create it all the input parameters all the steps and actions that go into building in action and just come up with a Spoke I'm I'm still curious because I haven't touched this yet how it's going to handle Authentication but we'll find out and maybe make a video for you oh okay it's up to the top of the list we're on everybody's number one and I think I know what Lawrence is I think everyone knows what mine is if they know me well so I guess I'll clarify at this point my overall theme has been objections I heard commonly when I was in sales so objections mostly with regards to flow designer but also app engine studio so all of my picks revolve around objections being cleared right no longer being a uh an issue and I think the number one on my list was always the biggest objection I ever heard to Flow Design it was the fact that there was no action or logic that allowed you to elegantly jump back earlier into a flow if a certain thing happened right that could be done workflow out of there was one of the last vestiges that had not been fully made feature parity and I am so relieved to announce that in Vancouver there is a new go back to logic action within flow designer so not only does this allow you to go backwards to basically go back in time without having to use do until Loops but there's also certain protections made that make sense for the logic that you have created so for example you cannot jump into the future because you could be clearing actions that are necessary for your process you cannot jump into other branches of logic that have not been cleared so if you're in an if else statement and you use the do or excuse me use the go back to you you can't use that to jump into the If part of the statement because obviously that was false when that happened so I I'm so excited to get my hands on it and test it out because that was always one of the biggest objections so now everyone's got a useful designer and or come up with more creative objections good one I love that one it's a good one to say for number one Earl what have you been holding out on us number one okay so my number one I always have a little bit of context of why I choose these things so uh I know knowledge 23 was a million years ago at this point it feels for us but when knowledge23 happened we returned in a big way and had our first in-person hackathon that we hadn't had in a long time because of the pandemic because of virtual hackathons Etc but this was our first one back in person and we mixed things up a bit and we had different categories based off of features and one of them was that we surprised everybody and said hey these Vancouver this Vancouver feature that isn't released yet we're going to let you all use this as a potential category to compete in and half of our teams participated in this category so it was very exciting for people to see what they built with our new generative AI controller the generative AI controller think of it simply as a way for you to connect your servicenow instance to a third-party provider like open Ai and then the controller has built-in functionality that you can utilize throughout the platform of servicenow to basically start making generative AI controller stuff um and the reason why this was exciting for me and I know gen AI is the talk of the challenge that we can talk about everywhere and some people are already like well oh AI this here that's like what what's going on with it but I want to tie it back to what I saw in the hackathon because it excites me because the Gen AI controller was so easy to use that people were building um the most ridiculous of stuff in only eight hours just think about that like yeah it eight hours feels like a long time at a conference but eight hours in development is not long at all and so to take the Gen AI controller that servicenow is releasing and be able to get up and running so quickly and start building things like uh for example um one of the Gen AI gen AI category winners uh yansa um they built a way to automatically summarize their sdlc stories so um all their software development stuff to be able to quickly summarize and categorize and do all this cool generative AI stuff within their sdlc app was amazing and then we also had another team uh team 42 who they made vital assist and that one was this like workspace workplace health and safety management application that would quickly try to provide first aid guidance in in during the initial case creation inside virtual agent to actually try to address common things a person can do while they um file for like a workplace um safety incident and so there was really cool stuff that people were making all within eight hours and that's why it's exciting for me and why I'm okay with all this talk of generative AI stuff across the platform across Vancouver it's because this stuff will only make our jobs more enriched and we will be able to get to Solutions faster we will be able to make things that we've never really thought we could make in such a shorter amount of time and that's just really exciting to me and so that was why my number one is about the Gen AI controller good call good call all right pranav what's on the top of your list from top of my list will be from the RP Department it's the code quality Checker that's I'm really excited about because I have worked with customers in the past right so one thing that they all have concerned is like the Health Scan reports that service now sends them maybe like oh you are using hard-coded Societies or hard-coded passwords something like that in your environment now with this code quality Checker in rpau will be able to set guard rails for all the code that's that is in your RPA thing so no bad code and sometimes we intentionally or unintentionally use some non-standard stuff in our code so now with this thing it's not possible to do that yeah it's possible if you ignore it but yeah that's a good way to improve your health scan score so that's my topic good stuff Better Health Scan scores for Everyone is always a good thing my number one drum roll please is text to code this is using the generative AI stuff to create script and which is really handy because in the old days you had to go to the wiki the docs whatever it was code sample from somebody else and learn from their example this lets you get that in a faster more real-time uh way much as as you would start up a document or get a basis for a letter of recommendation or something from catch EPT you simply type slash slash all active incidents and hit command enter on a Mac control enter on a Windows machine and it will generate the Glide record query uh I did one for an example and I said give me all P1 incidents by assignment group and return an object that's that was my prompt that I put in a comment and I hit command enter and it did the Glide aggregate I did the Glide record it created an array of objects it was like wow this is really powerful stuff I'm I'm very happy now you you still want to inspect it make sure that it's going to do what you want to do and obviously test your code write things in functions all those good things but for the for somebody who needs help with some of the basics around scripting this can really get a long way is it going to solve all the problems that everybody has when they need to write code probably not but it will get you started and in some cases you know maybe you want to be writing smaller functions to break your code down into smaller testable pieces and do things that way so text to code I've tested it out I'm going to be doing more testing I think this is going to be a fun one uh maybe we do a live coding happy hour in this one we want to leave you with a quick call to action if you're listening to this first check out our content calendar at devlink.sn Vancouver it's got all the stuff we're planning to do for August and September videos podcasts live streams blog articles even some I don't know there's all kinds of stuff out there so go check it out devlink.sn Vancouver and if you haven't already done so claim a Vancouver PDI personal developer instance over at developer.servicenow.com or upgrade one if you've already got that go and upgrade it to Vancouver may take a little while for you to do that upgrade nope it was getting faster all the time but it does take some time so schedule it accordingly you can do your own change request if you like of course check out the release notes at docs.servicenow.com also invite you to follow all of us on social media Lauren McManaman Chuck tomasi Earl Duque and pranav bhagat because you never know who's going to be socializing what we are running these all off an individual our own individual accounts on LinkedIn and Twitter X whatever we're calling it today if it exists tomorrow did I say that out loud uh threads well we're even posting stuff out to the newer newer social medias as well so follow us we'd love to hear from you and hear your thoughts thank you once again for joining us today wonderful listener and don't forget we have other podcasts that you can download listen to on the airplane wherever you like you can find them at servicenow.com Community under the events menu or go to devlin.snpodcast and find them there's lots of great information about Innovation training and Federal just I think they're releasing like four at a time every week it's very bizarre uh breakpoint is brought to you by servicenow executive producers on me and Lauren videos and captions by Earl Duque and to find out more about the servicenow developer program I mentioned it before you can head over to developer.servicenow.com thank you so much pranav Earl and Lauren for sharing all this wonderful Vancouver stuff thank you as always yay 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 foreign let's get started shall we hi everybody get started you're first or Earl do you have your top five list about five oh man I barely got up to like four what do we do what do we do we're gonna go five four three two one the lovely immutable are you immutable I don't know we'll go with that it's just an adjective that I picked at random can I do that part over don't you dare Obi-Wan did someone say Obi-Wan weird I smoked a power supply in Scotland that'd be so fun no yes I mean sorta I I mean sorta it's time to play name that power adapter no I was like I forgot my adapter where am I great point is brought to you by yeah yeah I'm getting there I don't have to pay attention yes yes yes yes yes yes okay man do I wish Earl you were not on mute when that spider came up I don't like spiders okay what is happening what is happening this might be the end it's a good thing