welcome everybody Welcome uh and thank you for joining us today this is the 42nd edition of the platform Academy today I am being joined by my dear colleagues Kieran and Joe are from the creat a workflows business unit and we will talk about everything that is new for creat a workflows in the EV release today I am very very glad uh that you all uh you both could join me uh thank to everybody who joined us uh for this webinar and uh I think I'll have a quick round of introductions and uh so please Kieran you go ahead yeah hi thanks for having me Lisa I am glad that you are hosting this time and I don't have to um previously I have done this a couple times it's always great to be here hi I'm Kieran mcaro I am a principal outbound product manager with Creator workflows um focused on app engine um and uh yeah I've been here at service now for about two years and prior to of that I was in the partner space so um yeah really excited to talk to everybody about some of the upcoming changes in Vancouver for app engine awesome and Joe hey how's it going my name is Joe wilmouth I'm a senior principal outbound product manager for automation engine uh mostly working with integration Hub stream connect and our newest capability spoke generator uh this Friday actually marks my anniversary with service now at nine years and before that I worked for the same partner uh as as as Karan so I've been around for I guess about a decade which is crazy to say um and today we're going to learn a little bit about some of the new capabilities and features uh in Vancouver for automation engine that's so awesome and my name is Lisa henin I'm a product manager I work in the now platform uh business unit for uh at service now I've been here for over four and a half years now I joined from a customer and I worked as a solution consultant before and was an admin developer um almost all of the worlds that you could have on service now and I'm very excited every every time we get a new release and new features and new capabilities for the platform and our different workflows so uh release time is always an amazing time for me as well and before we head into things I'll go through a couple of uh slides for housekeeping um this slide is mostly obsolete today because uh Vancouver has has gone uh GA that is generally available already so all of you can upgrade your Dev test whatever instances to uh Vancouver patch one as we speak always a good reminder remember to also upgrade your store apps uh we will probably not go into too many forward-looking statements but if we do don't make any purchasing decisions based on what we tell you today and then as always this is part of a larger set of webinar series uh we have different kind of platformy and then before we head into the um actual content in the agenda I will start a small poll because I want to know what really is your production instan is currently on and then also how often do you upgrade your instances so let us know uh we will be starting with Joe uh leading us through the improvements for automation engine that covers the products of integration RPA that is robotic process Automation and document intelligence and then Kieran will show us some highlights for app engine and app engine Studio table Builder workspace Builder all the goodness in the Creator space and before I give this over and we'll take a quick look at the results it's awesome to see that many people are already upgrading every release which is amazing because then you get the new features as fast as possible possible and then there are very very few just one person who upgrades less frequently and I think that's really a good a good place to be and Utah more than or two-thirds are on the St yes Utah is the most recent one so that's awesome two-thirds of you are on the most recent release prior to this one which is amazing okay so with that I will hand it over to Joe so for those of you who don't know about automation engine automation engine is the combination of integration Hub RPA Hub stream connect document intelligence and automation Center which kind of brings all of them together uh today we're going to quickly learn about some of the new capabilities and features available with the Vancouver release and automation engine and as Lisa mentioned earlier first up we'll hit integration Hub so first up for integration Hub is something that I am excited about customers are always looking for Effective and efficient ways to create new spokes to connect to the now platform or connect the now platform to external systems uh a lot of our customers today rely on creating scripted API approaches or scripted Integrations using a lot of our Legacy platform features and capabilities to quickly create new Integrations uh without using integration Hub capabilities like our action designer so we wanted to take out a lot of those manual steps and reduce risk from approaching Integrations with scripted Solutions uh spoke generator enables customers to generate spokes with Advanced features without generating any code uh greatly reducing the implementation time and offering spokes at a lower cost spoke generator offers sort of a a guided experience for building spokes enabling integration developers to utilize open API 2.0 and 3.0 specs to quickly build Integrations with external applications and systems that support the open API spec next up uh one thing that we've found recently is is that we've had some limitations with our current uh payload Builder so we found that developers are looking to create Json payloads fast and with a little bit more complexity and as I said the current payload Builder step has some limitations it can only do flat Json objects and key value pairs with simple string types so Json Builder enables faster time to value with more expressive capabilities for creating and generating Json payloads with support for Json objects Json arrays booleans numbers and nulls as well as more ways to handle those empty values for those of you that don't know about integration hub Port it simplifies the process of importing data from external sources and transforming it into service now tables you can configure run and schedule your data Imports all through a single interface in Vancouver developers are now able to add multiple Target tables to map in the uh map to Target page so before you could only map and import into one target table per integration and now you can hit multiple Target tables which is something that that I was really excited about next we have the all new check mark indicator uh prior to Vancouver developers were not told which source Fields were mapped so you had to scroll down the list kind of view and figure out you know if that field was mapped to a Target Field and whatnot well in Vancouver on the source field a checkmark indicator is added that clearly shows that the source field is mapped to some Target Field and lastly developers can now choose a sheet name from a drop- down menu that displays on the files uh contained within the uploaded EX file that you upload you now get the opportunity to just select all the sheet names or or the sheet name that you're looking to to import data from within a drop down menu and and before you know you had to go in and you had to type the sheet number sometimes you'd not get it right and then all the data comes in and you got to worry about going in and and changing it going back and finding the correct sheet name and and remapping and doing all that stuff so this really is going to improve you know the the speed at which you can import from Excel so uh one question about the integration Hub import uh Joe correct me if I'm wrong but if you use it to uh map Imports for Excel sheets or CSV you don't need the integration Hub uh licensing right you you need that if you want to do data stream actions import I believe yeah it seem it's it's hard for me to remember all of our licensing around this I can find out and come back to you on that leis out to that person and let them know for sure Joey also had another question in the Q&A um specifically about uh do any of these features need Pro license or additional module P module purchases I answered in the context of app engine but I wanted to pass it to you about aut automation engine yeah so any of the features discussed today are going to be available on our legal schedules uh servicenow.com for integration Hub and automation engine uh I can I can send out a link to that uh after I get done sharing and and and it'll it'll show everything that's available within each tier of of our SKS okay cool thanks dude no problem next next up and new to automation engine we have process mining for external data uh process mining on the now platform creates business process flows from the data and audit Trails for quick in-depth analysis of business processes armed with complete visibility into process flows and leveraging integration help spokes to access external systems you gain the ability to instantly Monitor and analyze performance find conformance issues and continually optimize and improve and process mining for external data uh currently support reps the following capabilities onclick process mining summary and insight dashboards AI powered root cause analysis automation Discovery direct connection with performance analytics automation Center and continual Improvement and automation inefficiency detectors and one of the products that I support uh that we just launched in Utah stream connect for apachi Kafka so we're going to look at what's new with one of our latest products and one of my favorite products in automation engine uh with the new stream connect enhancements you can now manage CFA topics directly in the service now UI so um what what used to you had to do is you'd have to use the command line tools to create and delete topics from the service now instance now in Vancouver you get to do that within service now and as you can imagine you're going to consume a lot of data from different sources uh with with Kafka so some streams of data will obviously have a higher priority so we've added a relative weight field to help you with your prioritization and tuning of the data in report uh one great thing about stream connect that that you don't get with a lot of restful Integrations uh is you know as far as bringing that data in from Kafka is you maintain the order of the data and the priority of that data as it comes in and goes out of the platform and that's huge you know when you're talking about realtime events and data streaming now let's switch over to RPA Hub a lot of organizations are facing a challenge of standardizing their bot development practices across all of their different projects um we're seeing a lot of inconsistent code quality and increased maintenance efforts to improve that code quality um and without a preset structure of rules developers May Overlook a lot of these crucial elements of code quality when they're building these Bots um and this leads to a lot of inefficiencies in error prone code so we've added code quality check and RPA admins can now create predefined rules with configurable severity levels uh standardizing the bot development practice within their organization and helping to enforce this consistency across the building of all of their Bots and developers when they're using the desktop Studio can view and follow active rules proactively check code quality and receive feedback upon the package publishing the package's code quality status and ability to be published is based on the highest severity rule status and and system properties set by the RPA admin uh and this ensures that adherance to establish best practices for building those Bots that sounds really useful is it uh so so that could be uh used similarly like uh instant scan where you can uh make sure your service now side code follow best prac that's way I understand it y awesome I was gonna ask Joe with those predefined rules can you have specific rule sets for different groups of people or is the feature set right now just a kind of a predefined set for um everybody that's a good question and I can reach out to our RPA team and find it out for you unfortunately I am not the RPA expert even though I wish I was um but yeah I can I can definitely find that out for you that's that's cool I think it's a feature set that we see elsewhere as well so I'm sure if it's not there now it will be in the future but yeah and we could definitely put it on the road map awesome thanks dude no problem next up for RPA Hub we have our robot pool you can create unique pools of predefined robots uh Dynamic workload distribution and streamlined bot management uh which there therefore maximizes robot utilization and operational efficiency so you get to leverage the robot calendar to create and modify the Box schedules uh automate workload assignment by grouping these robot devices and specify allocation type between your slas and percentage reduction for load balancing of the robots and also new with robot calendar uh you get to create new schedules by double or right clicking on an empty slot in the calendar enhancing user interaction and schedule management so uh track the state of a maintenance request directly on the calendar with clear mapping between change request and maintenance requests more efficiently and then lastly create and modify schedules for pulled robots during ly from the robot calendar this Improvement not only AIDS in effective capacity planning but also helps optimize robot utilization and avoiding those potential issues that come along with over utilizing a robot next up from RPA Hub we're going to move over to document intelligence in Vancouver for document intelligence you can now access a more tailored experience with additional flexibility to classify incoming documents manage use cases and configure agent validation conditions so what we're doing is using AI to efficiently classify these incoming documents and Route them to the appropriate processing workflow uh to give you an example on how it will help you may get an email from your customer with an attached document which could be a form an invoice identity document or something else right now agents need to look into it and Route it to the white workflow with document classification we're trying to remove this manual step and make it an in to in automation uh which reduces that time uh in the process entire process and greatly reduces how how much interaction that agent has with the process and last up for automation engine uh in Vancouver for automation Center we've addressed the challenge of limited context for recommended actions and automation requests uh now you will see an allnew improved recommended actions capability for automation Center of excellences uh centers and platform owners that provides better visibility into the recommendations that are coming through on those requests and that is all from our automation engine I know it was quite a bit we've had a lot of improvements and capabilities we've got way more planned for for our future releases uh a lot of exciting stuff happening on the platform well it looks like I'll be taking over the share here awesome here uh got to talk about app engine today so thanks very much for that Joe uh it's awesome to hear about all the different automation uh areas so I just want to give an overview of what is app engine so app engine isn't specifically one part tool of service now um of our low code our no code platform it encompasses the entire set of capabilities that allow low and pro code development of custom workflows as well as uh ways in which you can engage and interact with those workflows so uh you have pieces such as mobile app builder Playbook experience flow designer Erp customization mining virtual agent uh predictive intelligence app engine Management Center app engine Studio these are all different con uh constituent elements of what the app engine is as a whole it's a set of capabilities that allow you to create custom applications so for our Vancouver release we have um a couple of different functional areas that I'll talk about um specifically around app engine uh and our app engine Studio including table Builder and our workspace as well as our Erp customization customization mining for app engine Studio some of the changes that we've had we have improved notification builders for easy access to email variables um we've added sorting to data experiences on Automation and security tabs so now you can actually kind of sort through and find the relevant data for you when you're looking through your applications uh another uh piece that we've added to app engine studio so in order for us to be able to deliver on a more flexible schedule um P pad has been added uh and moved into a store app it's now accessible from the logic tab within app engine studio so that means that the processes within a specific app scope will be shown and created uh within the context of aagen studio for workspace Builder um we now have unique URLs for workspace Builder dashboards uh we have improvements uh in the model for data visualizations for our workspace Builder uh we now at any point intake Point within workspace Builder we have hero tables so those hero tables are going to be relevant in app tables that you might want to have access to something that might be more contextually relevant admins will have the ability to also add particular tables so those can be modified to add when anything that might be specific to you or your organization also for table Builder we have reference Fields they Now display in app preferred Tables by default so this is similar to that kind of hero table functionality we have the ability to add uh placeholder text as well within table Builder we have Smart defaults so when you are creating a field it will automatically default something that's contextually relevant to that kind of field but theming is now going to be more consistent with the rest of the platform more consistent coloring so that you uh it is very uh much more resonant with the rest of the platform as well also when adding permissions new roles will display at top we have prescriptive directions so if you add a new field will have um directions such as enter a column name so these are all great enhancements to table Builder also within schema view one of the complaints that we had previously with schema view is that it would kind of take a little bit uh a little bit load the The Experience so they've it now loads significantly faster we have a new API that's been created that allows that streamlineed loading it reduces multiple API calls um down to a um single API call that improves that performance of uh schema Builder loading and functionality for app engine management center this is a really good one um app engine admins can now include any ATF or instant scan Suite that you previously created on a testing instance into your production instance so uh that allows any custom created Suite to be run during app deployments just how typically out of the box Suites are currently run um scan Suites can be flaged to provide warning or error uh when you're executing them and depending on the severity of an error uh that can terminate the deployment process so those that's another great uh ad to app engine management center uh to give you kind of confidence in your deployment processes ALS another big one that's been asked for for a while um we can now schedule um app deployments so if you have a window that's going to be external to your regular Work Week um you can autod deploy that application uh outside of working hours you can choose the schedule um and deploy your app on approval and then you can have it within production within 15 minutes so uh no more having to wait until 2: a.m. you can schedule this and have your app pushed over uh after having the ATF test weite run against it and have the confidence that it's going to be up and running by the time uh your staff gets to work in the morning uh this is another great one that uh really excited to start talking about so our Erp customization mining is essentially a scanner that can look at custom code inside of an Erp system and help create prioritized targets of apps that can be removed from that Erp system and rebuilt inside service now Erp systems traditionally require a lot of heavy custom code and Integrations within that within that Erp system those are very C uh very difficult to build time intensive and also maintain so a lot of the time uh Erp cores are littered with a lot of custom code that's uh very expensive to maintain and and and uh continue to build on creates a lot of technical debt uh a lot of costs a lot of time delays and so trying to really pull out relevant information from an Erp system is traditionally very difficult so Erp customization mining scans uh a customer's Erp system for custom code and it helps to list and prioritize candidates uh for pulling that customization out of your Erp system into service now so it helps to understand how uh what are the interactions of that custom code within your Erp system and uh what what kind of data it relies on flags it and gives you indication that hey this is a potential uh candidate for us to pull out from your Erp system uh give you a clean Core uh and then we can create those custom workflows with inside service now um definitely really exciting for us uh this is going to be a big feature moving forward uh the second part of Erp customization mining is our Erp canvas and the Erp canvas makes those those Erp data tables available to use inside of any service Now application or custom workflow so um you this will automatically create remote T tables that allow you to query data from your Erp system it allows you to join multiple tables uh required for a specific customization candidate that was identified using our proc uh Erp customization mining um into what we call an Erp data model uh you can then map fields to uh a human readable name something that's going to be uh relevant to you rather than having an esoteric Erp field you can nap it uh map it to something that's going to be more contextually relevant to you so that your non Erp users can understand that within the context of say a custom workflow that you're developing and then you can take those uh that that Erp data model that you've created and build it into a custom workflow which you can report on which you can really start getting relevant data out of your Erp system within minutes rather than months as with a traditional Erp system um so in Vancouver uh the Erp canvas app can't write data to an Erp system it only reads it so any updates to records in an Erp system would need to use an integration spoke so some of those uh integration spokes that Joe talked about or created custom integration spokes uh would need to be leveraged if you wanted to modify any Erp data um so with that what I will say um a lot of the changes that are coming to app engine are very much behind the scenes uh currently happening there there's a lot of exciting stuff that's coming both in Washington and xanadoo um specifically around uh having new experiences and new interactions for developers of all different skill sets so there's a lot of stuff coming really look forward to uh revisiting a lot of this with you all in uh hopefully another session with uh Lisa on platform Academy in the next year so thanks so much for that I am going to stop my share so with that I will uh start another poll um because we want to know what was your favorite feature today so while you're clicking through this uh we are getting some more um questions that are coming in uh maybe we can get some answers to this what kind of access is needed to be granted on the Erp ends to mine or canvas that do you know Kieran um I will have to pull that out there uh we we do have a couple of sessions that are upcoming for some of our Erp customization mining um so I'll make sure to get that link to you Lisa so that we can share ites folks um that is a good idea but yeah we have a lot of different uh a lot of different sessions upcoming about that because um it's it's big there there it's a massive in impact on a lot of organizations being able to pull customizations out and create custom workflows and visualizations of data inside the context of your service now instance so yeah yeah I remember remember uh I I don't know uh what it is how it is for everybody else but I remember uh back in the day everybody and every every company had their own custom um local installation uh with whatever custom applications on their Erp systems that's uh those are quite crazy and then with the move to Cloud not all of them have been uh migrated or should be in that system so I think it's it's always a good idea to to distinguish between um systems of record and systems of workflow like the platform is exactly and and one thing that I'll also mention is if you do look at a lot of Erp systems their um their desire is to have a clean Core and and so pulling out a lot of U those customizations into a platform such as service now which is ultimately extensible allows you to really align with the the business need of getting your core clean and putting that in somewhere U system of record like service now that allows you to really leverage that data in a way that's really meaningful um for your organization and then there was one question about the data visualizations whether they do refresh data uh for themselves or not uh I believe they do not however I would I will recommend the um Academy series of my dear colleague Thomas who has a whole Academy about analytics and also goes through these these wonderful things like the dashboards and new workspace Builder dashboard Builder dashboards visualizations so uh be sure to check out that Academy I will put the link in the Q&A and also in chat so that everybody can see that we have already seen uh some of the links but I will reservice them right now which is an amazing uh segue uh there are Morey please sign up for them if you're in any part interested in next experience in mobile apps in an analytics or AI or conversation interface that includes virtual agent they all have sessions for what's new in Vancouver some of them have already uh run so you can find those recordings on YouTube and some are still scheduled uh and I will heavily recommend you check them out and I would I would say uh for everybody keep an eye uh in the coming year or fiscal year for potentially new uhmy here Creator we're looking at getting one off the ground so definitely keep an eye open for that as well well that's a that's good news we'll make sure to link to those when you start we have some poll answers and it looks like a pretty even field except for a workspace Builder who's a front runner together with integration H import so it's awesome to see that all of the enhancements and products are of some interest to someone which is always good to get a good spread over there and then I don't think I have many more topics I am very very glad we did this session it's an always a good opportunity to have you both as as guest speakers on this Academy so for upcoming platformy the next platform Academy will be on October 12th and we will be looking at the upgraded system clone interface which will be a brand new uh interface presented by uh some of my um PM colleagues and then I'll also have Ashley with us again who will uh speak a little bit about uh the atmin console updates in Vancouver and then the next session will probably be cancelled because I will be traveling end of October but we will have more sessions in November about uh securing workflow automation products that will be early uh November and then we'll Skip One session one week for the US folks who celebrate their Thanksgiving I believe in uh end of November but then uh to make up for that we will do two sessions in two weeks in two consecutive weeks and I will be joined by uh Jason Lefever uh to speak about process automation designer and playbooks we've uh already touched upon some of the improvements that we added in uh Vancouver but we really wanted to do a deeper dive and uh tell you about all the goodness uh that was added in the past two or three releases because it's it's been over two years since we did Pat and Playbook sessions there's another question just came in similarly to the other Erp systems staying pure to their core we want the service now instances to also stay pure that is a very good idea are there success guidelines for that for those migration opportunities so maybe there's a now create or something or podcast or something that you know of um yeah and uh I as I said we have a couple of sessions that are upcoming about the ins and outs um my uh coworker k b basavaraju uh will be leading those so I'll make sure that we get the links out there so that you're able to kind of join those um a lot of really good valid prescriptive guidance on how to start executing on that Erp so I'll make sure to get that link to Lisa and uh so that you get access to it as well perfect and with that we have covered everything we needed to cover today thank you Joe and Kieran uh for joining me today thank you to everybody who joined us for this Academy it was lovely to host you again and I will see you in two weeks thanks for joining everybody