so with that I think we'll get started with this Academy um welcome everybody welcome to this 40th platform Academy session so this is almost an anniversary I'm very excited to have my uh co-speaker Adam join me um well my speaker so to speak um and we have a couple of colleagues in the background helping to field questions and chat and in Q a um I could see Ashley and Paige and a couple of other of our colleagues it's so awesome to see you all joining us for this session this is another installment of uh the new mini series within the platform Academy which is called better together and we're here to show you how you can bring together different platform products and platform features to work together to help you solve your use cases as best as possible and today we will be putting together uh the puzzle pieces of flow designer And subscribe scripture management and here to speak about subscription management is Adam Stout please give a quick introduction to yourself thanks Lisa uh I'm Adam Stout I made an outbound product manager along with Lisa um and we cover subscription management and all the fun excitingness that has to do with that and I can tell by the audience today that we have a lot of good questions in here um so hopefully we'll provide some good ways for you to think about how to apply it how to manage subscriptions today and I'm just supposed to introduce myself not the whole topic so I've been here 10 years uh and I love it every day um and these are two of the areas that I spend my most time most of my time in so I'm really happy to talk about these today awesome uh and for myself my name is Lisa hohenstein I'm an app on product manager I work in Adams team I live in Germany I've been with servicenow for uh four and a half years now in the service now space for about seven um and worked as a platform owner developer and all kinds of servicenow things before that um and with that we'll get into a couple of housekeeping sites uh well you all know this one and you've probably seen that uh just before as you all know today is Early Access day for the Vancouver release we may mention things that you may have seen in the tech now webinar just now so this is these are things that we might have planned for Vancouver that may be coming or will be coming or may hit on other future looking things please don't make any purchasing decisions based on that is our uh Academy overview page so it is uh amazing that you're all here uh you've probably signed up through this page but I still wanted to give a shout out to the other platform academy uh sessions there are more than just platform foundations we have academies about next experience about mobile about virtual agent that is conversational interfaces and what you're probably all very excited about is the artificial intelligence uh streak of things so there will be multiple Bank new and Vancouver uh academies later this year dedicated to the AI features on the now platform so be sure to sign up for their Academy and that's about all I have except for starting the poll so before we dive into subscription management and flow designer we have a quick poll with two questions and we'd love to know from you do you currently use a flow to manage adding users to group this is completely independent from subscription management so far and then for the second question did have you configured the groups for subscription management and the answers are trickling in we see some yeses a lot of no's this is good so we'll talk about as we go through we're going to be talking about subscription management of course in groups and using flows with them so understanding where you're at is going to help us to what we spend the most time in in the next uh 50 minutes or so so let you know get a lot of responses coming in that's awesome yeah so uh whenever you're ready and we have enough uh replies uh that came in we can leave this up for a second if you want to and if you like you can head over to the resources okay great so we have our both questions coming in we'll go review those um we're going to end with the resources the resources will be in the link but I'm going to bring them up now because there are going to be questions during this and it's going to be easier to know that you have some more resources we're not going to be able to talk about everything having to do with subscription management um in the next few minutes we're going to be focusing in on those flows so a couple resources that are really key there is a now learning training on subscription management this was updated about a year ago I think it still all applies through uh through Utah with Vancouver there'll be some new screenshots that come through the fundamentals behind it still apply so you don't need to retake it yet we'll go through and update those screenshots and I made it through the first slide before we get to this uh there is some news there's new subscription management uh Store app that's coming out with Vancouver a new UI looks it moved into an experience that looks just a lot better um and there are going to be improvements coming through or they're planned for the November store release and then in Washington and probably after that so we are moving a lot of the subscription management functionality into a store app so we can update it more frequently and then we can also make it uh Backward Compatible when that's when that's possible of course there are some things that require platform updates but we are looking to iterate faster and really improve the experience that you see screenshots what we're talking about today all applies today it applies to Vancouver and it's going to apply going forward what we're talking about are going to be Concepts um really key again take that training it's 20 30 minutes really helpful uh next a couple of other sessions where we spend a lot more time um with me talking one a subscription management overview um back in Academy Number Eight it's been a while you can reminisce about that um or we've spent a lot of time in there we're going to talk a couple minutes we have a couple slides from that we're gonna spend a couple minutes on that but there's a full hour really talking about all of subscription management what has to hand offer for you and then with subscription management we have to deal with mapping custom tables and we spend another 45 minutes talking about that in a number 26 you get those links here really important to watch those this is really the the third in the series of that um I'm hoping you've seen those and you'll get something out of this but you want to go back and watch those if you haven't watched those yet definitely um and and then as we uh other sessions that are useful to have when we talk about it because we won't go in all the details uh with subscription management and flows we're talking about approvals So Lisa and Andrew did a great session on approvals a little while ago a good one to watch we're not going to answer questions about how to do parallel approvals and everything that goes in but you're going to want to know those that's talked about in that session and then um at the end actually we had a special guest with decision Builder to come in where we'll talk about how you can use decision Builder and decisions and subscription management as well great session on that uh not too long ago and a couple of questions that always come in sorry Lisa oh I just wanted to uh show the poll results if you want if you're interested yeah yeah let's let's go with that so just sharing this for a quick second uh we have about a little less than a third who have creative flows to manage their groups uh two more than two-thirds that don't so uh this is the perfect session for you and then also over uh two-thirds who have not yet configured groups for subscription management there's a huge amount of potential learning today yeah awesome we should have asked if that's the same group of people the numbers percentages so much match but uh where we want to get to as we come through here is that yes you're using flows to manage adding users to groups and yes we've configured groups we've done both of those things subscription Management's gonna really help us out manage our costs to give us visibility into our costs um but again more than visibility we want that that ability to manage them so great this session's for you glad you're here let's go through it and make sure you're asking questions along the way and then I'm hoping that Lisa or our pan or other uh people in the background will ask me those questions and interrupt when it makes sense okay a couple other uh important references to come through so if we're talking about setting up groups a lot of us haven't set up groups we talk about in that first webinar there's a KB article that walks you through it as well um it's good to read that KB article there's a couple little scripts and how to how to's to walk you through really how to do it in the webinar we explain it the KB article walks you through it whichever way you'd prefer um to to watch it to read it to do both that KB's there for you and then um currently currently we do have some differences between our use verification reports and what subscription management reports these are a lot of the improvements that we're making through Vancouver and Washington to align these we're we're working hard to do that and make sure we have the the right answer for you but today there are some differences uh the number you see but they tie out we know what the differences are we and they you can match them and make sure that we are getting the right number um this KB article is available to you I updated the screenshot at the end not this one it is available all customers when you log into support uh the KB number is the same it's been updated a little bit since uh in the last couple years um but then again it'll explain to you how do you tie the differences so you see what use verification has what subscription management has use verification numbers are our official numbers they come through um the vast majority of the time they're just gonna um lower the numbers that we see in subscription management subscription Management's a little bit more aggressive on what who needs a user and how we're counting those um so if you want to pay more then that's fine but if for right now you want to go with what use verification has but again you can tie out those numbers okay in order to get into it now as we go through uh so the first thing we talk about with subscriptions we're going to talk about the subscriptions and I'm going to bring up an instance with some subscriptions on it we're going to walk through it a little bit and it's a great time to ask a few questions about it uh when you look at subscription management so in subscription management you'll see the subscription overview dashboard you'll see four types of subscriptions there's a rare case you'll see a couple other ones but these are the main four ones we're going to see per user and per user is where we're going to focus all of our time these are the ones you need to manage this covers all of our per all of our fulfiller subscriptions they cover SPM SPM as well and the application users SPM user type things they are managed with groups that's what again we're going to be focusing in on and then they're audited based off of roles so our user verification team just looks at who has the roles and that's how we manage the per user these are ones you have to actively manage really really important the other three just so we know what's are in there are unrestricted user um they are also charged per user but we don't count those per user because we just simply look at the number of users and sys users in sys user there's a couple filters on that so we're not charging you for printers and conference rooms and things like that by service users and active users yes so we are looking for uh but there's nothing you can do other than half sys user you create a user it's going to be counted there's nothing you have to actively manage there then we have capacity capacity is where is our item products um automation engine anything that's transaction based subscription unit based uh where we're just counting what happened those are capacity again nothing for you to configure there it's just going to run and if you have questions about that there are KBs that explain how we follow those calculations you've seen in the last few releases we expose the definition number which is a query that we run or a script that we run to get that count if you go in through Utah and in Vancouver you can just click on that uh that definition number you'll see that you'll see the query that's being run and you can go look at it and slicing that I said however you want but again nothing for you to manage um and it's just audited by running a query or a script and then display only these exist for things that we don't actually audit in the instance so there's some if it's a custom SKU that we can't measure for something it might be marked as display only and then there's a few other things that um the instance doesn't actually know but we'll show it as a subscription that'll be display only so these are the four types you're generally going to see and we are going to spend our time talking about per user again per user being the the one that you do have to actively manage okay oh going over what we have um in subscription management we really want to make sure that we are managing our subscription and what comes through in the past what we've seen is just reactive subscription reporting I just want to report tell me how many I have that is and that's the first Baseline that's what we need to have that's what we get with the subscription overview how many am I using how many did I buy how many am I using great but then you just get a bill and we don't know what's going on we're going to talk more today about how do I make sure I know what number is there and how do I know that it's right we want to move to a proactive subscription management where we're using flows to make sure people who need subscriptions get them and people who don't need subscriptions don't get them not just how many do I have um with the size and implementations we have the number of users that are using it you simply can't just rely on a number and pay it we want you to know who's there we want you to know that they need it we want you to know that these people have these licenses and we're paying and will pay for not just there's everybody who got it so how do we how do we do it what do I mean like what are we going to do here so one is governance number two it's governance number three it's governance but I put in three slides because people don't like having that so everything we're doing is about using that flow using using a catalog item to manage who gets it we want a gate who gets a role which is then gating who gets a subscription once you already have the role you need to have this subscription it's in in the past we didn't have Security Management we just gave rolls out and we thought about it just technically we need to think about it understand if I give the itel role I need to know where that subscription is being paid for and if I have any more slots to give to that user so we're gonna we're gonna put in governance to prevent surprises we don't want to get a bill at the end that we weren't expecting we're gonna we're gonna recommend using a service catalog item to manage group membership in the past I have seen where group managers can just add users to it that's very scary from a financial perspective I can just yeah just give licenses you get a license you get a license we want to make sure that we understand there are some groups that are fine if there's no subscription that matters then fine I don't care if you give access to a group that doesn't have any Financial locations but we want to make sure we always go through that process and we're always checking if there aren't any let it happen but we want to use that flow using a service catalog to exercise the flow makes is the easiest way of doing that and then we need to figure out how we're going to enforce that that we're the model we're going to enforce it with the flow what the model is we're going to talk about some variations but for you and your organization you're gonna have to decide what makes sense for you for your governance what level do you need and what rules you want to follow so I've been talking about groups for a few minutes what do I mean by groups well it's a subscription Management Group it's a group and I'm not creative a group is a group as a group um and we use them all the same it assists User Group uh and it works out really well when we think about it it's I I get some people having some pushback about why are we doing this but we're already putting users in a group we're giving those groups roles and those roles require a subscription so rather than having something off way over here we tried this in the past where it's disconnected to succeed you want to pull subscriptions to the Forefront you want to make sure that everything you do when you're assigning roles you're putting users in them you understand what that subscription impact is so that we knowingly use what we have whether we're under using overusing and deciding what to do we're not going to block you from going over but I want you to know that you're going over and I want you to make informed choices so that's why we have the web where we're just using normal groups for this to come in um and why we use them again it's uh using groups rather than direct role assignments is a security best practice we're just encouraging that security best practice you don't want to give roles directly to people to users you can I have heard nothing that we're going to turn that off um and it makes sense for something like snc internal snc external there's a few other roles that kind of everybody gets with some HR stuff or some security stuff fine so I don't know that we want to block it but anything that requires an entitlement you definitely want to go through groups why we do that is that a role is just a role it's a string right you might have a description but with groups we get that additional context about why do they need ITIL why do they have incident read or or case read that comes through so it allows me to understand they need this because that groups gives me that and then the one that is my deal breaker that we have to do they don't have anything else roles don't have owners and groups too if I have 2 000 users that have a role I you there is not a person who can know 2 000 people and know that they all need that role why they need that role they still need that role and who's paying for that role right as we get bigger in departments and chargebacks what's going on with groups we will talk about this at the end we are able to use things like data certification to make sure that everybody needs it I can't know 2 000 people and if they need it but I can talk to 200 managers who have 10 people each you can go yes these are the right people in the group and these are the and these people do need this role which means they need this subscription and in certain cases when there's overlapping is it CSM or itsm they're the ones who are going to be able to make that decision so using groups and leveraging the group managers is really going to help me make sure that I'm not just throwing out stuff and having to clean it up later and removing extra stuff we can be very smart and not impact our end users I think this might be a good quick tie-in for a couple of the questions um and I think you may hit on some of these points so just let me know and to defer them uh one of them is is there a way to identify system or integration accounts users so they aren't counted towards uh unrestricted user subscriptions yes and and I will tell you right now there I I just don't have a thought in my mind for fulfiller users I think we don't count the integration users but I think you you we might but we're aligning that those are one of the things where we saw some inconsistencies and we're aligning it to make it clearer across the board uh but the way you want to do it uh and there is KBR to go on this there absolutely KB article on this you can ask your uh account rep and they can confirm it so you can get this in writing and see what's going on um but it is using the web service only field so there is I think I believe it see boots on so everybody has it if you have an older instance and you don't have it if you search for web service only um that that there's a plug-in that will turn that on and again all the all the new instances have it I believe but if you Market a user as web service only it will not let them log in through the UI but they can call through all the web services they can they can interact with the system so that's where we'll normally see those integration users and that's what we're trying to not uh count so how do we audit with groups uh to go through because we because we can so we have a thousand seats of license we want to audit through all of them we want to make sure that we're leveraging group managers to to get authorized to go yes uh these people are still in my group yes they need all of these roles yes this is the subscription we should be charging to there are cases when we entitle things if I only have itsm Pro it's pretty easy it's itsf Pro or not but if I have itsm and CSM and fso or FSM there's sometimes there's overlap of some things and so we do need to understand which subscription should this be charged to okay and with that I did want to pull up we're going to spend just a minute we're going to go I'm gonna try and switch over on the hopefully my monitor Works through this uh we're going to bring up a couple subscriptions and I think we're going to answer a couple of those questions that we came in with so we're going to do a new share yeah there's uh the other question that just came in is uh how do I how do we identify paid roles from free yeah so that's yeah we're gonna click on that one that's a perfect question for this yes it is perfect question to come through here um so we're going to spend just a couple minutes clicking through this because I do want to make sure everybody sees uh what we're looking at so this is the subscription overview everybody should have this um I am another subscription management subscription overview I have a dashboard to come through this it's going to list all my subscriptions as a note it will list expired subscriptions as well today that's one of the things we're facing in Vancouver um the expired subscriptions you do want them on your instance because they're a reference and as as you renew and some skus change there's cases where you need to move from the old to the new if I'm mapping or with subscription groups so we don't want to delete the old stuff immediately today they're displayed once we get into Vancouver they'll be hidden so you only see the current ones and then if you go into the details you can still find them so it's getting a little bit better but don't be shocked if you see that what we're going to see is a list of my subscriptions mine are made up but hopefully they look reasonable enough my start date and end date that comes through the type so we talked about so my capacity um my capacity ones are run through via a script we'll go into that and just all right we'll see if my test one has that in here per user these are ones we have to manage and whether it's fulfiller or APM user or business stakeholder they're all managed per user they're all done through groups everything we're talking about goes through those and then we have display only like encryption I get this I get encryption there's nothing there's no units to do there's nothing you want I just I have encryption um and then again some more some more capacity we have what we purchased and what we allocated if you see something that's wrong here um put a case in you can talk to your your account team can put a case in if there is a number that's here uh we have a team that will go we'll go figure that out and resolve it there's nothing you can do about this this information gets uh your instance every night phones home to say give me the latest information that comes in so if it's wrong we need to correct it right this should be correct is what you see if there's should be no surprises and then allocated what we'll see here is that these are all zero because I haven't set anything up my capacity is because I'm not using them um yeah so what we're saying is I haven't I haven't run anything and so we haven't set up those per users out of the box per users are going to be zeros I'm going to go into my itsm standard all right when this when this loads up what we're going to see in here is the list of applications that come through uh and over the top we're gonna see the the basic things that are on here I'm going to call this out I I believe we're showing this now in Vancouver there is a field on this record where it tells you the measured role types it's not on the form I went in and added it added it to the form has an admin I can do that um this is being replaced in Vancouver with a new experience so if you do this on yours don't worry about skips you can do this if you have a Tokyo instance a Utah instance and you add that field it's okay we're not going to cause any skip issues that are going to hurt us because we're going to the new experience in Vancouver anyway um really important we're counting we're counting fillers we're Counting requesters and then down here what we see are the users that are that have this you'll notice there's no new button there's no edit button because we don't add users to subscriptions we do not add user subscriptions we add groups to subscriptions I come in and edit groups and I'm going to add a president's we'll save that to note the users won't be added immediately I'll show you where to click but there's a daily job that processes because groups members come in and out of groups all the time we're not trying to slow down your instance so just once a day we sync those up there's a button on the subscription overview to update the allocation there we go so we'll see the groups are added immediately the users are not uh key part about roles that came in so with its uh or sorry I'm on itbm standard with itbm here are all the here are all the applications that are included in in itbm and then the associated roles really key here is the role type fulfiller requester for this subscription we're counting for fillers and requesters so these roles require a subscription if I'm an itsm sold by fulfiller the requesters I can ignore but this is the list of roles that that comes in um if you have custom roles we need to deal with um then you talk to your accounting we can do an audit to come in this is another area we're working on uh very very very actively for Washington to be able to report into your custom roles look at the ACLS and understand which subscription they would map to which applications they map to and what level they are so you get that as you're developing as well okay so those are the the roles couple of key things that we wanted to go through and when I go to um back to the subscription overview I have a UI action to update allocation totals we'll continue it takes a second to run it's very quick and what we'll see then is that my groups my allocation for itvm is now six because I've added the distinct users again this is really important as we get into the flow if I have um problem manager and change manager and ITIL and I'm in four different groups that I got those it's one C it's all itsm right so we distinct out and what we're actually just going to show is this user needs the subscription doesn't matter how many roles you have doesn't matter how many groups you're in how many have subscriptions have that okay did we get all the questions related to the subscription stuff covered yep all right let's get back to the flows so let's uh a couple tips that we go through um in the on CIS User Group there is a related list it's not shown by default but there's a related list for managed it's called licenses it'll show up as many subscriptions I recommend everybody add this to the list whether you have a custom view whether it's default or whatever it's going to be if you go into sys User Group edit the related lists add manage subscriptions again I want subscriptions to be at the Forefront it's going to be really important and if I go into roles I'll it by default I believe it shows contained roles I show contain to buy as well and I also like to show subscription roles to the question about which roles does uh do are free and not you can put this in to say well if when I'm looking at this role which subscriptions is it available to me on which apps is it part is it a part of that data is it here it's a related list you just need to add them on and you can see it all right let's get to the meat building a flow so what we are going to be doing is uh uh going through to talk about what kind of flow do I need what do I need to think about to make adding a user to a group understand subscription management and management um and I hope uh so let's talk about what what it is so you need to understand or you need to decide consider whatever words you want we want to use who's going to approve using a seat who is it in your org that approves this person can have its an itsm license or an itbm license does the group manager approve before that person or after that person there's a financial input impact there's a security impact there's an operational impact group Managers generally are going to be operational maybe on the security side maybe on a license side but that's different in every org so you're going to have to understand what flow do you want to have we want parallel approvals we want serial approvals do we not need approvals we want some pre-approvals so things like um hey this person's in I.T so if somebody's in the I.T department and they want itsm just do it they're in marketing they want itsm we're gonna get some approvals for that and then what do I do if I'm fully allocated what happens if I don't have any more seats do I do I go over or not go over servicenow at this point in time in a very big proponent of this we're not going to stop you from giving a person a group because you need to work well then screw up we'll deal with it later I don't want to say you have to remove one before you can add one you know you want to add one and remove one that's fine not all organizations are okay with that you have to decide you have to understand what your organization's okay with what do you want to have you can go over by a couple but not unlimited what's going to go on again how do we prevent surprises forcing limits to come through again there are no hard limits in the system we don't count roles when you're adding them to a group we don't count subscriptions when you're adding users to groups servicenow doesn't but we can use the flow so that you can I mean we're going to get enforce with governance to get the right approvals what do you want to have happen and then that's what will happen talk again about some more use cases so a couple of examples that we're going to walk through and I want you to make sure you're doing this for your organization what is the person's what is the user's current group membership what subscriptions do they have today what's the user's Department um what's what groups are they in what subscriptions do they have if I already have an itsm subscription that it doesn't matter if I get another one because again we distinct out to be one subscription just because that problem manager and change manager still I still part of itsf the type of subscription really matters because if it's a capacity subscription it's an unrestricted usual subscription you're paying for them all you're paying for everybody in this user it doesn't matter and then the allocation that understanding how we check to go to are there seats are not seats again for your tolerance because there is no hard limits we're going to let you do it you have to decide if you want to do it so let's talk about some some uh sample users in these use cases so I have a roon who's in the development department and he wants to be added to the database Group which requires itsm Pro what do I want to do with my flow I want to have a runes manager approve it uh to make sure that that he needs to be in the in uh that he needs to be in the database group for being in development and then the group manager um and the reason sorry the reason we're doing that is because I a roon doesn't have itsm so there's a cost so I in this use case want the manager to approve the cost because we're going to bail back so prove the cost first and then approve the security that's what I wanted to do but you have to decide what your order is going to be I have Eric he's in I.T he's already a member of service desk which has an itsm subscription he wants to be added to the same database group now I don't need to ask Eric's manager because there's no cost implication but I still ask the group manager so different approvals even though I'm these two users want to be added to the same group and then if we go through the same thing Stevens and I.T not in a current group but he's in it and we have already put in a pre-approval list say if you're in it and you want itsm all we just need video is can I be added to the database group that comes through I don't need to get the manager's approval because we have the CIO approval for it I don't have to give everybody in it an itsm subscription if they don't need it I'm going to make them ask for it but we're going to make it really easy when they ask and then if I have an example with Lily Lily's in I.T the same thing she wants to be added to itsm which also requires itsm Pro but itsm Pro is fully allocated well now I have the subscription owner I've said if you're fully allocated you need to go to the subscription owner to go through I still need the group manager so she's in I.T I don't need the group I don't need her manager to approve it that's already been pre-approved again the same thing but we have Leanne who's going to do it but uh fully allocated she's in sales but she's really nice I know she's not she's nice I know um and now we're gonna require three approvals right everything we have to go through the same Gambit and if you notice all of these examples we're asking for a user to be added to the database group to the exact same group but the approvals are very different depending on other things we're going to look through in that flow um and then we have uh the last one the note here is that this was Enterprise it's a uu subscription I could have Pro as a uu as well I don't care there you can't be full you can't be over allocated there is no additional cost so we just need group manager we've always need the group manager that's what we're putting in place and you could even bypass that you might want to have a rule that says if I am the group manager just do it right if the group manager works for me for the requester right not the person who's being done if the requester is the group manager just do it that's not by default but I could put that in there if the group manager works for me just do it if I have some other role just do it again all very specific to what you want so um the flow I did I we have a lab for this to go through that we did at knowledge we're going to get the lab guide out there as a note it won't work on your instance because it requires a very specific set of subscriptions uh to come through but the concepts in it work we will get that out there I believe as a reference that you can walk through the flow for this does gets pretty big so you wouldn't be able to see it so we just have this mock-up of it here but I submit a request I'm always in my case I'm always going to get group manager approval again you could modify that if that makes sense for those cases you don't want that if the group manager isn't approved we're done if the group manager does approve then we're going to look is this a per user subscription because again display capacity uu if the group manager proves that we're done if it's is a per user subscription does the user need a subscription uh do they need it or do they already have it if they if they need it then we're going to ask for their manager because I'm going to have some Bill back and make sure that manager is paying for it and then I get to approved at the use of the role and have that fully automated to come through so again it can be just a straight path and be automatic it can and then otherwise it can go through all the different approvals it needs to come through really basic you can do that but a couple things that that we go through that I just want to throw out to make sure we go back and look at are things like um through the approvals updating stages about which uh in my in my catalog flow make sure that I'm updating what approval am I waiting for what stage right I see these names but understanding we're waiting for a subscription approval or we're checking the subscriptions whatever needs to happen there I like to capture a bunch of additional information about this so if I go to the catalog item I understand where my request is if I don't then I'm kind of gonna send some emails or some slack messages of what goes on so we want to make sure that the catalog item we know what's going on we're updating those comments um and then at the at the end I actually might just use a decision table to understand who does own the subscription or do my pre-approval list I may not I can create tables I can do lots of things but a decision table makes for subscription management really really easy to manage because I only have six eight subscriptions uh per user subscriptions that's that's actually kind of a lot and I can use a table to just go this subscription gets this one this one gets this one if they're in this department and the subscription I want to pre-approve it decision table is an awesome use case here to make this flow really simple and very manageable and let your subscription user your subscription managers configure those rules as they want as they need to without having to reveal the flow or go do a bunch of extra work so an example I like to put in those stages for my flow about group manager approval subscription approvals some of those are going to be bypassed because there's no subscription impact but we are checking and we'll go through um and then the actual execution adding to a group is going to be the second more information this is one that gets me always annoys me when I somebody wants to be added to one of my groups and I have no idea the context of why so I like to add a justification in my catalog item to make sure that we're saying why does this person need this why does Leanne in sales need access to the database group um you can put other things in here important as well like which the charge code or whatever you want to have if there's a subscription that's needed so making sure that that catalog item everybody along the line understands what a security implications what are the operational implications what are the entitlement application uh implications and do we have all that worked out at the request level because it's not just I need ITIL because I need to do something we want to make sure we have all that squared away and then I do go through uh and add my comments again what's going on about what subscription did you need really useful if you're debugging it to go you already had itbm so we granted this this needs itsm so we need so we are so we're going to ask the itsm subscription managers whatever you want to have whatever it's going to explain again I really like those comments in there not just waiting for approval people seem to get frustrated with that and again that decision table uh decision Builder as we've gone through these are my slides that I stole from one of the previous uh academies as we click through really quickly it allows us simple fire flows absolutely true I don't have all these ifs for the different the different types whether I'm doing the type of subscription I'm doing the subscription itself again I only have a few choices of which subscriptions are going to come in allows me to build that reusable logic we can use those apis we can automate a lot of things using if we have that decision and calling the flows and empowers The Business smes I don't in my in my larger customers I don't see a lot of overlap between the people who understand the entitlements and the people who write flows that group is not overlapping at all I'm sure it exists I'm sure somebody on this call does both of those things but it's really nice to be able to separate that out to go you don't need to have somebody flow you can just tell me which subscription you want to have and the same way around we allow those smes to take advantage of that which we get with decision Builder and decision management okay the uh I think the last piece that I I wanted to jump into to make sure we talk about we talked about flows and building out the flows and making it really rich so we start with catalog item we have a rich answer but I want to talk about group certification there is an awesome feature uh well let's talk about what we do today today we go to subscription overview and I have a hundred subscribers I have 100 users in the example below and I apologize is a bit small I have 100 itbm subscription itbm users well I actually have 113. oh no what am I going to do um I'm perfectly happy with the responsive I'm going to buy 13 more licenses I have no problems with that highly recommended but before you do that we might want to justify these people are all active but do they all need it really hard question to answer a hundred maybe you can do it if it was if it was a thousand it gets to be a lot more challenging this is not that that big of an issue but even 100's a bit difficult to manage so am I going to email 113 people or 130 people's managers in this case I'm going to use data certifications so there's a data certification plug-in uh it's not on by default but you can go activate it it's part of the platform the general use case for data certification is cmdb and do you still own the server is this monitor still in your Cube do you need it yeah uh is it still there well we're going to use data certification to configure a group and we're going to Loop through our groups and have the manager of the group certify that yes I need these I do need these subscriptions um it only does one vector at a time it's a bit simplistic but it's very easy to use but I might do a certification once a quarter to go do all these people still need to be in your group do all of the do does your group need to have all of these roles and then therefore do they need to have these subscriptions you can also just say do all of that make sure these are right or you can do those separately however whatever makes sense whatever your organization will take but we want to periodically do this so that we're always able to reclaim licenses that are not needed anymore you know I don't want to have to update a update an incident one time and pay for it forever right or or get into or cover for somebody in a change they're there forever um if we have great automation when I change teams you know all my roles change but a lot of times there's a crossover period And I change teams I got all my new roles they took away all my old roles but I still had to go look at some changes for the you know for six weeks of the transition period so they manually gave me a direct role assignment which would be really bad or they manually put me back in that group using data certification allows us to sit to sit on top of that make sure we're good we also then can put flows on top of that to say well if they say it's not needed we'll then go remove them right put a create a removal flow and whether you have whether you have approvals or not or they have to acknowledge it data certification can help us drive that event not just if I need it or they leave but do I still need it have that periodic quarterly uh semi-annually annual review um get great little app with data certification we're seeing the old the existing version right now I believe say Farber that there's a new version coming out either in Vancouver or November on the November store release uh with some improvements in there but great functionality and then we talk about Better Together where we can apply what we have in uh we're using for CIS use that for groups and may better manage our costs um when we do it we're going to be looking at we're going to be certifying the assist group has subscription or sorry license group has subscription all the data we have about the licenses the roles the users in the license the groups that have the you know ciscoop has roles this user has a role since user has license this group has subscription all that all those tables are there you can go look at them if you explore via the uh subscription overview you'll find the table names um in our Labs we put the table names in there as well um but we can go through really quickly just say I want all the groups and this group has subscription everything that requires everything's per user subscription certify those each manager gets one email says you own these six groups do you are they all certified and they can say yes or no and then you can take action from there really great really quick you can have this running in 15 minutes um it's more important to think about how often what you're going to ask and how often you're going to ask it uh the technical side of it is really really easy to do okay and a couple other useful tips that I have in here um so one we talked about this before but go to sys user has group add the licenses which will show up as manage subscription uh again there's a little if you put in licenses you'll see the related list licenses you'll see managed subscriptions we want to make subscriptions and entitlements at the Forefront when I see roles see the subscriptions when I see groups see the subscriptions don't add ITIL to a group and not add a subscription for it every time we do that it's a problem we talked today about adding users to groups adding roles to groups I would actually go through a catalog item as well these are things we do in fraud don't let your admins just do it don't let them do it make sure we go through that catalog item and have what's on there and again we have a record of approvals everybody understands you said what's going on you can display the right information however much you want to say about hey we're going to charge you back uh 50 per user 100 per user five dollars per user whatever it's going to be there's a bill that all that information is there and again work governing we're managing those subscriptions every day every change not just an audit where one person which might be you is responsible for answering why do these thousand people have that it's an answer you question you can't answer but we can do it if we instrument these flows again add the contain Buy in the roles because understand that this role inherits this which inherits this which has requires a license inheritance matters it's not just the direct role stuff um and then understanding the subscription rules going back to the question how which which subscription does this role need does it need a subscription you're going to see that by adding the subscription roles that's in there all this metadata is in your instance take advantage of it and as we come back uh we can answer we can answer questions I have the resources again to go through um do we have questions to answer uh there were a couple uh in the meantime we answered some uh and we'll follow up with some others uh one just came up that might be interesting how is it counted if the user is in more than one group I think you uh uh talked about it earlier is they will only be counted once if for the same time yes so I'll tell you it gets a little weird with it because we'll say which group does this user have that's counting them and you can find some of that but we distinct it out because then the day doesn't matter whether you have multiple roles or they have multiple groups we have a job that runs every day that says all the groups that get give me all the distinct users that have this subscription and reduce it down into sys user has license I believe is the table name yeah but I have a sister's license that is the list if you go look at this in in the subscription overview and you see the list of users that table is the table it's just user as license again it's distincted down so I want you to use groups I don't want to have one group that is all my I tell users that has a thousand people we have what's the point we want to make sure we understand we have it manageable groups entitlement security really really similar when we they don't they kind of start over here but the best practices for security and best practices for entitlements really overlap that you want to know who has who has access who has an entitlement you want to know why they have it and you want to know if they still need it right and if they if they do need it to make sure that we have the right approvals if they think they need it we want to make sure we have the approvals to confirm that so whatever you're putting the lens of uh entitlement just use security you'll get the right answer then there was one question uh Jose was considering to create a new group type to I more accurately identify ITIL groups uh will that have an effect on this uh system or it's the the group type is a field on the sys user group so that should be no yeah right so yeah it's not going to be a problem it's not gonna be a problem at all um and one of the things you could do is to run a job that says well give me all of the roles that need licenses and then tag those groups so that you can filter them out because there are a lot of groups that don't need any that don't don't have any roles groups that only have um they're only used for reporting right sharing dashboards and things like that or assignment groups um so if you want to if you if you use group types and you have assignment groups and security groups you can certainly flag it as entitlement just make sure you have something because even though you may not want it to be this type of group we're not stopping it from we don't stop groups from having roles so you need to look at the roles see if those roles are are I do need a an entitlement and then flag it and then you could you could optimize this I mean it could that would be good to show you uh in the catalog item only show me a drop down of groups that matter right only ones that have entitlements I I don't want to be added to it an assignment group that we do a different way but is that good right or should I be added to assignment groups the same way um then we had another question around the subscription management you talked about enhancements coming in Vancouver um so there are enhancements that are in the family release but there's also a store app that people can install and update or is it all in the store app and how do people find that so there's part of it that upgrades on uh to come through so with subscription management there's a lot of apis right when it comes down to it this is built into the system pretty pretty tightly and what we've done starting in Vancouver and it'll continue out is to break that apart so that particularly the user experience the UI part can be in the store and we can upgrade that as needed we can make again make it Backward Compatible so you don't have to upgrade for all these things so uh I believe you need Vancouver and then you need the store release to come in um it will true up so as you upgrade you'll get the releases but there will be uh there is a planned store release for subscription Management in November you have to go get that um in Vancouver I believe you have to as well to go up to go turn it on um and and I'll say in there and get into Vancouver we have the new experience there there's some really nice things that come into it fundamentally it all works the same the group assignments we are working to fundamentally change it so that you have to do less work that you have less thinking to do and more automation more recommendations that's the big push we have today when you put flows in with flows with data certification you can get the right number right you have to tie it out to these verification but it is the right number it is it's a right number it's very close you can make decisions on it if you just let it go and you don't have it you're you have to kind of play catch up all the time um to go through it so well everything we talked about today applies to Vancouver go check out the new UI give us your thoughts on it um Academy on this later this year Academy on that that we'll go through the newer stuff um but uh the latest series you're gonna see a lot of improvements we're not done right we get into Vancouver it will look not I mean it's gonna look it looks amazing the absolutely looks amazing we're not done there right that's not enough and we're going to continue to improve this for you okay uh there's one more question uh and I think you hinted at this also earlier is there more info about how we can or should leverage decision builder for the approval processes I believe there's an exercise in the lab that we'll share right yes we go through as an exam kind of kind of Base yeah a pretty basic one um the example we use is um subscriptions don't have an approval group by themselves and you can add it if you want but there isn't one there we just had it as a decision to say its we created uh in the lab we go through and we create itsm subscription approvers itbm APM what happened in my example I have lots of per user subscriptions I just put a record in for each of those and then have an assignment group that says this is these are the approvers um I hate having one person approve I just it always will bite me but we'll do approval groups um and then we'll and then one of the things we do is go have a default in Utah we added a new default field so I go hey if I add a new subscription if it comes in and I didn't add who the approval group is go to this super approval group yeah right that's the default result in decision Builder the bottom most row which is really handy yeah it's it's awesome because in the past it'd be a complicated flow on what you want to do a bunch of if else things I'd have a table I have a script on my decision Builder it's itsm is this group APM is this group otherwise go to subscription managers group all done it's guaranteed to work you know I mean it's it's just so easy we'll put that lab in there again that'll go work on what you have on a PDI there's no subscriptions so you can build it you can't really test it if you do it on a subprod that you have access to there should be subscriptions in there if there aren't subscriptions on your subprod uh put a case in we'll get them on there they're on the vast majority of time but there's some use there's some issues where we can't get them on there and in Vancouver actually one of the back end changes is to make sure we get all those subscriptions on there on your subprods um but you can go build it on there right it's like we're talking a catalog item a pretty basic flow uh decision table if you want to none of this stuff is is super hard and that's the point it's actually not really hard we don't be afraid of it we're just going to use the same tools we have to solve problems like we do all the time all right I think we're at time and I will do a few more uh shout outs to Future content we have a lot of new content coming because of the Vancouver release uh we are looking at a whole range of pro uh platform academies in the next couple of months uh we have started uh starter starters early starters in August with the process optimization next experience and platform analytics academies who talk about what's new in Vancouver that um I will share an overview on the community as well so be sure to to check the now platform part of the community um so there are academies for AI a lot of them for task intelligence the New Gen AI controller news about UI Builder creatorworkflows platform document intelligence now assist research and mobile apps so um please uh make sure to check out the other Academy series sign up for this series join if you can um all through August September and October we'll talk about all the new goodness in Vancouver uh remember to upgrade your uh instances early and often and then also update the store apps because there's more and more awesome goodness hidden in store apps and we want you to have the news features so much from my site thank you so much for joining us thank you so much Adam for this presentation I think it's uh it's good content it gives people an idea of how to bring together our platform products and then uh this Academy will have some some break for the next couple of weeks we'll be back in September on September 14th and when we talk about what's new for the now platform in Vancouver thank you everybody for joining thank you Adam thank you Ashley and everybody bye