Washington DC is available in Early Access so get your personal developer instance upgraded and start exploring because in this episode we're going to share our top five favorites from our latest release welcome to breakpoint the service now developer [Music] podcast hello service now 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 back to breakpoint the service now developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and tradecraft to accelerate your career my name is CH tasi senior developer Advocate and I am joined by the one and only Posh programmer senior developer Advocate Lauren McManaman how are you today Lauren I'm doing fantastic Chuck and it's not just me as the additional developer Advocate today is it true to form and tradition we have our entire team of developer Advocates here with us to show off the latest stuff in our release first up let's introduce or perhaps reintroduce service now senior developer Advocate pranav pagat all the way from India how are you pranav hey Chuck hey Lauren I'm doing good how are you folks excited for telling all your features whoop whoop yes let's get going but before we do that we have to bring in our final player of course this lineup wouldn't be complete without service now senior developer Advocate Earl duk what's happening Earl oh yeah hey everybody I'm sorry I've never I've always wanted to do that on a podcast or a radio so why not we can have fun on here thanks for having me now I don't know about you all but I have been having a lot of fun exploring and learning about the Washington DC features for app engine and automation engine and platform over the last couple of months it's been some challenges finding some of these nuggets but we've done our homework and we're ready to share with you all so let's go down the list from our number five to our number one where number one is that thing we just the most awesomest feature we can come up with we're going to go in reverse order from the introduction so beginning with Mr O yeah Earl there you can have a new hashtag or something what's your number five Earl uh I think my number five will probably be oh we're okay we're reverse order so let me jump down my list uh one of the things I'm excited for just for the sake of the things I get to build for myself and for my family on uh creating fun apps and stuff like that is offline mode for uh all client apps on mobile so on usually uh before when mobile first was getting started we there wasn't really an offline mode you you had to always be connected to uh the server to get anything done and um which was unfortunate especially for our field service workers and stuff like that but in a previous release they added an offline mode so you could do stuff on your app uh on the service now app on the agent app uh before and then when you finally get to uh internet connection it would sync back up and it would it would do it cleanly it was really a great feature but it was only for agent and so now that it could be on client apps that means my silly apps like tracking the food we like when we go to restaurants that mean my my partner use a lot to see what food we like at different it's like our own personal yel basically like that kind of stuff I could do offline and stuff like that and let it sink back up and so that little addition to bring it up to parody is really nice for people building fun stuff you may have some requests for that app it sounds like a very useful app that I could use or convert it to beer or something well yeah our problem was we always would go to restaurants and we would say everyone would like oh I really like what I had or oh this wasn't very great and then we would come back a year later and we had no idea what we would what did I order yeah yeah I I know we got this but did I like it now now I don't know if I should reorder it so we made this little um app in service now that tracks all that and we made a little interface for us and now we can have an offline mode for it instead of having to always load the app in a browser you see people you can make an app for anything we might have to do an episode on just fun custom use cases like that too oh yeah oh yeah all right Prav so for my my fifth bake will be like undo feature undo and dedo feature in flow designer because I have worked on Flow designer I like to just remove certain things I don't like to click on these things like buttons to delete all these things and uh this feature will be really interesting it will make the flow designing process a bit faster so I really like the feature that we are adding to the release which are Developer focused and uh I don't know but it's very tough for me to select to rank these features because all these features have something like they all deserve to be on number one so maybe we should put like we should do we shouldn't be doing numbering and all we we just do bullet points going forward all right this is like Whose Line Is It Anyway at this point the numbers are of no significance the points don't matter yep so that was my number fifth that's a good one I like that one except I never make mistakes in flow designer HH must be nice now there was a way to do this in code and say just go back and fix that Lauren what's on your list to start us off so someone that usually picks all the low Cody features I wanted to pick something that was a bit more Pro Cody to start off my list this year um one major change that's made in Washington DC I have to get in the the habit of saying Washington DC not just Washington um is that we've changed the way that log attribution is appearing when making logs so essentially each log line will have some additional Fields being added added to it the first being an attribution field which will tell you what type of object has created that log and the CIS idea of CIS ID excuse me of that object there will also be a transaction log line kind of attributed to the transaction type Etc so by just looking at the log without adding an additional text it'll be very easy to see the story of what is being created and from what type of activity on service now so I think that'll help a lot with debugging without having do a lot of extra work to see where things are coming from my number five is around access controls couple of things that we've changed here one is you now have the ability to temporarily assign roles for specific users in groups so if somebody needs maybe delegated development rules or something of that nature for a few days you can apply that and their acl's apply it it really cool I wish this was around when I was doing more of the practitioner stuff and then when it comes to access analyzer which we introduced in Vancouver you can now compare to people and say what roles do you have what groups are you in and just take those users and dissect them because if somebody's claiming they have different behavior on acl's I see this you don't see that and you could you can nail it down with the access analyzer so very helpful stuff when you're doing acl's so if you've heard me on any of these episodes of uh breakpoint when we're all together I tend to have a theme on my stuff and this year's theme for me or this releasees theme for me is stuff that I know I would have used if I when I was being when I was an admin and developer yep that's simply what it my theme is this year and Tim limited temporary roles was something we always dealt with especially with team members that needed access to sub prods um instances and always wondering and forgetting who had access to what and having to have an entire process for that but now we have something built in so that was one of the things on my list too o sweet and on top of it like I built the same requirement for a customer when I was doing consulting so one of our customer wanted a Time specific role so what we did we created a table like which was storing all the data which was running a schedule job and just removing the roles from the user after a specific time so finally like after like four or five releases it's in the it's in the release itself I'm glad I I was just thinking about the architecture of building that I would have taken a different approach I would have had a table with an expiration on it and they use the expiration to fire uh GS event Q scheduled so you could schedule an event that runs a script action that then revokes the role so that's the way I would have built it but anyway a lot of people forget about scheduling events you can do that too are we are we boomeranging this are we going to stay in this the same linear order I think we should be right I think it makes it more fun okay then it's back to me for number four my number four should be no surprise it is the fact that we now have a builtin graphql Explorer this was a main only plugin in Utah which is how I got away with doing a lab at knowledge twice and it is now built right in like the rest API Explorer you can find it under the graphql menu option help you build those graphql test those apis put in your queries see the results it's way cool and it is very familiar to anyone who's used the thirdparty graphical Explorer uh only now you don't have to put in all the credentials and whatnot you can just run it like the rest API Explorer and say here we go let's let's see how it works and test and it's got the history and it's got the beautifier and very very familiar interface with a couple of nice sweet things for service now of course it does the introspection right right into your API so it knows what the what the different I'll call them functions are in your schema so I have a lot of fun with that over the last year year and a half and I we now all get to enjoy it you mean you don't have to shove an entire graphql cury into one line and no throw it into the rest Explorer anymore oh nice no well my number four on the list is similar to pronoms with a kind of a simple change but I think will help people tremendously is the pad field list picker so previously when you were configuring an activity if you wanted to add in fields inside of a dependent table you had to know the name of every field and add them in separated by commas so it was very prone to use error uh I misspell stuff all the time so I always was messing it up so now we actually just have a simple SL bucket to select the fields that are available versus manually typing them in which I think will act right I got that one always trips me up when they ask for field names is it CIS updated by is it CIS updated on who is it just updated I can't remember some of these field names so that's a nice one but I have to call you out you said pad which is an acronym you have to get the uninitiated the point process automation designer so process automation designer is one of the automation tools in the service now platform that allows you as a agent or more of a process owner the ability to configure and kind of template out how things will be automated um and yeah it's fantastic I highly highly recommend it and now it's even easier to use it and I will kick things back over to panov for his fourth pick as well all right for my fourth pick is about we always talk about developers what is good for developers and what is good for admins we never talk about agents like who are working on the cases who are actually using it so I really like this task summarization feature which is part of multiple products it's part of Mobile it's part of different product suets what it does is like it grabs all the information from your short description description and create a summary for it I have seen like a lot of people who are working on incidents changes they have a big short description description everything and this particular thing will save a lot of time for the agents so quick shout out to the product team for bringing this feature for not only for the main instance but also for field agend through mobile app so that's my number fourth pick passing it to all okay I'm going to Jumble my list around just because I'm going to get my stuff in before people keep stealing all of my ideas well the good news is it's boomeranging back to you so you get two in a row yeah I get to do two okay um I'm gonna guess this was one is on other people's too but they're updating the script background Ed Editor to I see everybody else's reactions um the the background editor is going to have an actual editor now it's not just going to be a text field and uh especially recently with the updating of the videos for learn JavaScript on the service now platform using the background editor or the scripts background has been uh fun because you don't really see any I got I've gotten so used to being told when I'm wrong right away as I'm typing when I'm writing a script and now they're finally bringing an actual editor into script background and so I'm sure that's going to make a lot of people happy and excited uh especially those that don't know about the third party tools out there that replace it uh which uh as much as people love using like any of those toolkits that are available people I have to remember the vast majority of people out there don't know about those third party tools and so it finally having a actual editor is going to be nice I completely agree this is frankly way overdue I don't know what the technical limitation was for this and why it hasn't had an editor uh yeah there are third- party tools that pretty much started around this Gap um and if you watch very very closely on the did you know that I released in mid January you might notice that I was using the new editor for this explicit purpose oh I think oh it's we're boomeranging right okay so it's back to me uh the next one I have is I really like uh that they're finally at I mean this is kind of the theme for next experience and as we go along with each release is more and more of the Legacy tools or the tools that we use in our day-to-day are being given new consoles or workspaces that make it a better UI uh better usability better experience uh and so this in this release in Washington DC they're adding a clone admin console which uh it exists alongside the Legacy way to do it and look at clones and stuff like that but being able to see it in a nice UI and what is scheduled and when what is coming up uh what instances have clones coming up and being able to do all the exclusions and the preservers all in one space is really nice and it's a really clean UI uh I'm excited that we get to show that off soon too yeah so clone admin console a lot of people will get to use uh and then back to Poff exciting feature like I'm not happy that you stole my number one that was scripts background one because I I really like the black and white thing I still use all these Community codes and paste it there and run on a Dev environment not on PR environment just to see how it works but anyway coming to my third pick it's again a developer Focus thing like we have something like embedded task Automation in RPA So currently before the Washington release like when you are building an like automation which is a attended automation you had to create a particular form in the middle so all these RPA developers need to enter the data into that middleware form and then it goes back to the third party application but now what we are trying to do is like we removing that form that form will be there but you can also leverage service now tables you can directly get the data from service not table into the third party application which will increase the like build time for all your RP automations because I know because I work on building Bots and everything I know creating a simple form takes a while so using all these service now table itself will definitely increase the build time like it decrease the build time I should say so that's my number third passing it to I think Lauren for her number three I don't want to jinx myself but currently I haven't had any of them taken so I'm going to keep on rolling with the ones I have set so my number three for the list uh is kind of indicative just of the platform uh maturing so as our uh development teams build things obviously specific teams dedicate their times to one aspect of the platform and so as those kind of Bud and grow on the service now platform uh there also grows the need to consolidate things of a very similar-minded uh purpose so for example people develop a lot in flow designer but they also develop other types of automation such as decision tables or actions um or also processes within process automation designer so as of Washington DC there is a unification of all these within something called workflow studio so that will be a basically a new oh no I think I might have based off the the faces of others I might FR off you can just see his face collaps sorry brov but it's that cool but I apologize but it's that cool of a thing well add in your comments now what what what made you pick it higher on the list number three yeah like because this is like I'll be honest like when I was not an advocate I I didn't played with decision table at all I didn't know what it is I was going through flow designer and was trying to build a similar logic like which was already which we can do with decision TBL so this kind of experience when you are doing with the this unification of all these Builders together you can see everything so if you're just familiar with flow then you can also see decision table and maybe you can utilize those things up and uh like also there is a some kind of a I heard from the product team there will be some kind of a guidance like you can probably utilize uh like you can probably utilize decision table or add uh subflow to it all these things that you can do so that's why I ranked it higher but yeah thank God it's not on video because like my reaction when Lauren picked up was not good I think also just that people understand visually what this might look like um if you're currently using the updated homepage of flow designer it'll look very similar it's just kind of rebranded as workflow Studio there's a couple new tabs so be sure to check it out and play around with other forms of automation that you might not have touched before and with that I will kick it off to Chuck for his number three as well I sent a live coding happy hour coming up on workflow Studio yeah so we can explore and learn together my number three has to do with incoming API credentials now we've had ooth for a while and we've added some client Grant authorizations to that so you can do things like J JWT tokens excuse me and the second part of that is we now support API Keys now this is just my policy but take it for what it's worth when you're doing system to system Integrations API keys are a lot easier to manage than constantly going back and refreshing o tokens sometimes manually if it's user to system that's where oath really shines so take it for what it's worth your policies and procedures and you know take it for what it's worth your policies may vary but that's just my personal stance on that so we've got new Grant type in ooth and we've got API keys for those incoming apis my number two is about remote tables again another integration unplanned theme Here I love my Integrations remote tables are the ability to get data from a remote system let's say your CRM or your Erp MRP system and bring it into service now but not store it in a table like a traditional integration you don't have a copy of it to maintain it's in it's in like a cache and you can say how long the cach is alive but it behaves just like a table for reporting and whatever else you want to do with it typically until now these have been built and maintained through outbound rest apis in script you had to have this related script that said go over here run this and do that and it may be calling outbound rest apis directly or it may be calling actions now you can trigger a flow so easier to build easier to maintain use that commonality of existing actions and spokes that are already out there and it just makes those remote tables a little more accessible to everyone Lauren so similarly I am picking another form of which you can trigger flows which is finally by analytics I when I saw this in the list of dois or or the list that we get prior to the version coming out I cannot tell you how excited I was for this new function fun ality so essentially once set specific analytics tritter can automate your flows being turned on so previously it was just any type of interaction with a record avenge triggers date time and now with the addition to the new rest one that Chuck was speaking of we now have the ability to Tri these from specific analytics results so think of when a certain report hits a certain number that can automate a flow without any extra work um I think that this is long overdue frankly I'm so excited it's finally here to remove that extra step of automation being driven by results and being driven by statistics as well without the need of human intervention very excited for that and on to pronos number two what do you got all right I need to see my list now because you folks have already taken you didn't have a couple of spares I have a few now so for my number two it's the mobile sgk so you might have already seen this in Tech now so this is like coming from my Consulting days like I worked with a lot of clients they had their own custom applications they wanted to add some like service not capability so we gave them all these rest apis to use which was like yeah it it took a while to build now we have mobile sgk so everything is built in now your iOS or Android developers can utilize those sgk and add your add service now capabilities to your own apps that's that's my number two and one more thing like if you are someone who is very new to Android and iOS development what you can do is like we have a sample code because mobile sgk I think is a store app so if you go on store there a sample app that our team has put there so that you can utilize that app try some examples on your own and install Android Studio or I don't know what's for iOS apps but install those things and try to build all add your capabilities to your custom app so that's my number two passing it to ear so my number two before I switched it with script background editor sorry um was uh in they're adding performance testing into the automated testing framework so ATF and so you're going to be able to use existing uh ATF tests or create new ones specifically for this to just test how your system is performing so you'll be able to see if a a particular test is suddenly going much slower or if a new feature that you've added is impacting performance of your system of your instance and so just great because I remember as a developer for customers we would always get the question of like my instance is slow what what did you do it was always our fault um and now we can actually point to a data tests and say like we didn't do it did you refresh your browser was it something on your end but we have a little bit more assurance that it's not something that uh we have control over that is affecting instance slowness or performance so that's a a nice thing for me and then my number one I picked this one just because when I think back about when I got into tech one of the very first things that I did in a real world setting in in my one of my first jobs was uh learn scripting for Visual Basic for applications so learning some scripting within Excel that was my first time playing around with code at work and I wasn't a coder I wasn't a developer um but it really made my life easier and I became kind of the Excel uh Guru Mastermind of the office and I started automating a lot of things within Excel for us and so uh bring all those skills into service now has been very helpful so knowing Excel has always been very helpful for me in my job even as a service now developer I would constantly export data from uh a table and then do quick free button presses inside Excel to figure out the answer that I needed that I knew service now couldn't do quickly or at all really uh and so one of the tools that um it's not like the biggest and flashiest thing but uh they're adding a data comparison tool into ser now and so you'll be able to see uh compare different records on um within the system or um with between systems and it'll actually tell you here's the Deltas here's what's added here's what's different here's What's um all the way down to like the XML what of what's different and that's something that I know I would do every so often or even um every day is pull out records from service now just to do quick comparisons because it was easier for me to do it in Excel and so that was one of my that's my number one and it's not as flashy but I know that I like seeing uh these kind kind of convenient tools for things that I know people out there would be doing outside of system but now they can do it inside service now that's my number one uh and now we're going to do the number one round and throw it back to Prav all right thanks s and for my number one I talked about mobile sgk for number two I'm going to talk about platform sgk for my number one so platform SDK is something like that's I when I saw from one of the product manager at first to be very honest I'm not a pro code developer so I didn't understand it but as soon as I get some hands on it like it's it's one of the one of the powerful feature to create apps so like to give a bit background to people who are hearing about it for the first time service now sgk allows developers to create and modify scoped application in a third party like third party tool like vs code and you can utilize in Industry standard development practices so this particular thing will allow more people like who are working as full stack developers come up and build apps on the service now platform I know like 30 seconds or 1 minute it's not enough time to explain service now sgk so we'll be having a greater toolbox episode with our product manager who will be having much more knowledge than me on this particular product and they will share their expertise alongside a demo and yeah that was my number one passing it to Lauren we'll also be talking to our product managers on the next episode of breakpoint about this as well so this we'll get more into the philosophy stuff because I know you want to see this in action but we want to hear why we did some of these things and understand the the the reason for some of these products sorry didn't mean to interrupt over to you Lauren it's okay you gave me a dramatic pause I appreciate it so my number one pick uh which I also say that I'm proud that my list none of things nothing got stolen so I'm like all right sweet I get to talk about all my stuff my number one pick is something that I think is been long coming ever since the success of app engine Studio obviously first we had Studio which was a huge breakthrough that was service now's first IDE then we had app engine studio so I think it's only very fitting that we're moving forward into the future with a brand new Creator studio so Creator studio will not be coming out until the second store release so don't go poking around looking for it the second that Washington DC comes out however it is a brand new building IDE on the service now platform what is making it different from App engine Studio well first it's focusing more on being the also the target for all the New Gen features that we have for Creator so think of things like text to form text to process uh logically think bigger and larger for possible future use cases of text to insert blank here that is the place they will be occupying um also we are further expanding the capabilities to touch even lower code developers than we ever have before so creating a more simplified version of the kind of wizard style builders that already exist and then on top of that introduce a more use case based app creation process as well so again this will not be coming to the second store release so think around more around knowledge is time to play around and test this however it is something that I could not be more excited for and nothing could occupy my number one spot other than that and for our grand finale I will toss it to Chuck tamasi for his number one for Washington DC well Lauren I hate to kill the buildup on number one mine was already taken with the scripts background but I can't underscore enough how happy I am to see this in the product with line numbers and formatting and all the good things we know about you know just doing scripts background I'm sorry to the people who spent decades building add-ons and plugins and apps they are still very wonderful tools there are things about James Neils explore that make it a wonderful tool to use if you choose to keep doing that great don't don't abandon these just because we got line numbers uh SN utils has some other wonderful features as well so you may be tied to the slash commands and never gone to background but we still have that available if you if you want so that is my complete list is that the end of everybody's we got all our number ones that's everyone's number one and two and three and four and five any closing comments looking forward to Washington very much looking forward to Washington be sure to check out Dev link.net or Washington DC to check out the full list of the upcoming content calendar as well yes we hinted at a few I think we even made up a few we'll see what actually how the how the cards lie when when we get there in the next few days we'll be coming up with that as we record this so by the time you hear it it's out Dev link. snw Wasington DC or Washington if you want to save a couple keystrokes well listener thank you for downloading and listening to this episode and we can't tell you we are so fired up and ready to go with Washington DC release and we hope you are too by this point Thank you for joining us today don't forget to check out the other service Now podcast you can find them at servicenow.com Community under the events menu subscribe to this podcast for free and get it automatically deliver to you of course breakpoint at this point is brought to you by service now and it's produced by me and Lauren to find out more about the service now developer program get yourself a Washington DC PDI or upgrade your existing instance to Washington DC head over to developer. servicenow.com and once again thank you thank you so much PR of Earl and Lauren for sharing with us today yay thanks for having us always mine thank you please let us know what you think about this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the service now Community for more great information on service now development check out the service now developer portal at developer. servicenow.com thanks for listening d d welcome to no wait yes okay yes PR of yeah sure okay okay the the next one I've got is no I got it I got it I got it are you sure kind of bunkers to me that that okay oh all right Whiplash oh it hurt pron of do you know where we got that from it was not in my slides Lauren I don't know it wouldn't be the first time we did something on the show and we made something up wait wait wait Chuck then where did you get it for your list I don't know oh it's my turn oh okay I okay so let me I'm back okay my turn oh I get to do number two and one right okay Jack you might need to do it again really what a fun episode to Ed it I'm so happy I didn't throw my hat in the ring for this one good enough for government work