Knowledge 2022
227 sessions
Revolutionize your versioning upgrades
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello. Thank you for joining me today to talk a little bit about how to revolutionize your versioning upgrade. I am Paige Duffey. I have 12 years of experience developing on and supporting ServiceNow. I've worked in the capacity of a senior developer, product owner, and process developer. So why should you listen to me about upgrades? In that 12 years of experience, I have run dozens of upgrades for various customers, and then in the last five years, I have successfully run twice yearly upgrades for a customer who was in minus 1. Today, we're going to talk a little bit about the problems that I found during the upgrades I've have done then some solutions that have put in place over time to try and solve those problems. And then ultimately, an app that I built to try and help solve all of those problems in a nice single solution. Just to be clear, this presentation will not be covering the overall upgrade process. So first, the problems with upgrades. A lot of my issues with upgrades came around tracking. I needed to track a lot of information, and it was sometimes difficult to do. I wanted to track the testers, the areas to test, testing compliance. Ongoing defects and incidents after the upgrade, and then I needed a way to effectively communicate out all of that necessary information to my stakeholders. And then lastly, providing relevant resources in a way that was easy for them to access. Over time, I built up several not so great solutions. They worked for the time, but they all had their problems. One of the first things was trying to track the testers. So I would create a bunch of scrum tasks off of a story. That story was for UA testing for Rome. We would create those testing tasks for each individual tester and then they would go in and complete them. And while this worked, there was a lot of manual work that had to go into that. So after each upgrade, I had to manually load the data. I would export it, make the changes that needed to be changed, and then re-import it. So not only was that time consuming, but it also made it really difficult track those testers over time. So if someone changed in between upgrades, even if they let us know, I'd rarely remember when the upgrade came around again that person needed to be changed out. Secondly, in order to provide all of that information to our stakeholders, I did create a dashboard. And while, again, it served a need, there was a lot of manual effort that had to go into that. It provided those resources, but for each and every upgrade, I was going in and making a lot of manual changes to it. And then on top of that, there were some reports that were developed for that to track things like defects, and because there was no easy way to connect those records back to the upgrade, the best I could do was update the reports each time to look for keywords like Quebec, and that was always somewhat unreliable. And then lastly, there was a lot of stuff that was being tracked within the changes and the releases, but it was all being done manually free text in things like work notes. There was never a single place to store it, so oftentimes, you have to go hunt it down. Where did Paige put the ServiceNow change record this time? Was it in the release? Was it in the chain? Was it in the work note somewhere? We did take advantage of releases and ServiceNow, so every story was associated to a release, and those releases were associated to the change, so that was one easy way at least to track everything that was going into that upgrade. And then manually built out release notes for every single upgrade. But I wanted a better solution. So about a year ago, I started thinking through how we could do that better. I tried a lot of different things. I tried project management. I tried changing how we were doing it in Agile, and none of it really worked for me. So eventually, I just decided to go ahead and create an app. And what I needed this app to do was house the version versioning information, including like the release notes from ServiceNow. I needed it to track the upgrade dates which included things like the go live date, backup go live date, and testing completion dates. I needed it to house our internal release notes, our internal change release records, and then a place for the external ServiceNow chain record. I also needed it to help me manage the testing better. So I wanted to manage all the different testing areas. I wanted to be able to associate an individual tester with those testing areas, and then I wanted to get rid of that manual process and automatically generate those testing tasks, and then lastly, of course, being able to track the completion rate of those tasks. And then lastly, I wanted to be able to associate other records with my upgrade. So no longer did I want to have to look for keyword. I wanted to be able to look at a single field and go, this is all associated to the Rome upgrade, and then automatically build up the release notes. So this was the design I came up with for the app. Each box represents an individual table. This is what worked for me. Obviously, if you were to go build something like this yourself, you could do it a little bit differently. You probably don't necessarily need five tables. You could put a lot of the versioning information on the upgrade table. Maybe you want to use something like test management instead of building out your own testing tasks, but this is what worked for me in the environment I was in. And it's the versioning table that contains all the information on the actual version. The upgrade table, which will contain all of the other relevant information around the upgrade, testing areas and testers, which are associated and then all that comes together to create the testing tasks. So next, we'll look through what those records look like. This is the versioning record. Like I said, it contains basic information about the version. I did-- when I developed this-- try and make it something that could be used for other products. If it was successful. Maybe there were other products that had the same struggles that I did, which is why you see the field for product. Additionally, it's got the release date and then the version information, as well as a link to the documentation. Next is the upgrade record. This really holds a lot of the need of what I was looking for. It references back to the versioning record. It has a state field so I could track that upgrade from planning to testing to the free state between testing and actually doing the upgrade and then completion. It house the go live and backup go live dates, the testing completion dates, and then towards the bottom, obviously, you can see where it relates to all of those other records that I wanted. The change record, the release record, and then some internal KPs. And then lastly, the ServiceNow change record. Next, we're the testing areas and the testers tables. So these are two very simple tables, but they were just a really easy way to track that information. So it's a table that just contains all the different testing areas that this organization wanted to test against. So change management incident management compliance things of that nature. And then the actual testers table associates a person to the testing area, and then because it was done this way, you could associate multiple testers to a single area or a single tester to multiple areas so that they could track that they had tested each area that they wanted to sign off on. And then next was the part I was most excited about, which was getting rid of that manual task to create all of the upgrade tasks. I created a UI action, and that UI action would go and query the testers table and then generate all the testing tasks that were necessary for that grade and make all the appropriate associations within those tasks. So it would associate it back to the testing area to the upgrade, assign it automatically to the person and let them know that they've been assigned to it. And then there were fields for test results in the state. So you could easily report on what had been completed and what hadn't been completed, who had done their testing tasks, and who we were still waiting on. Next, this is actually a picture of the old dashboard. I did want to go through that real quick and just show you what that looked like. And while it was very, very useful really, really, really get into how much of that was manual. So this is what we provided our stakeholders, and while all of it was incredibly useful, prior to every single upgrade, I had to go manually make all of these changes. I went in and changed it from Paris to Rome, changed the dates manually, updated the links to the proper release notes, went in and manually changed the reports to search for those new keywords. Went into the user acceptance testing reports and changed all of it to point to the now new story for the test. And that was something that I did every single upgrade. But with my app, I created a new workspace and with that I created its own dashboard, and I was able to automate all of that. So I created a single place to store all of the relevant information for the upgrades, and because of that, I was able to automate all of these manual tasks that I used to do. So now, whichever upgrade is marked as the current upgrade will determine what all is shown on the screen. So I don't have to go in and update all of those dates within the dashboard. I just create the upgrade record and market is current, and it automatically does this. Even things like the release notes link is automatically grabbed from the versioning record. I'm not doing anything else other than just filling out a couple of forms. And then because it's so much easier, it actually allowed me to pass that on to other people to allow them to do it. I wasn't trying to explain this complicated process of exporting things and importing things and go to the dashboard and change all of these records. All I had to do was go fill out forms. So what I really hope that everyone gets out of this is that, while it is a really simplistic app, I think it shows the power behind even the simple apps and the value they can bring. It brought a lot of value to me into the team that I was on, because we were able to cut out some of the manual work that we were doing. So it's really easy for us as developers to get caught up in what we can do for everyone else and not take the time and effort to improve our own workflows. So I invite everyone listening to this to spend some time on yourselves and improving your own internal processes. And by doing so, I think you'll see that you save your time a little. You save yourself a little time and a whole lot of sanity. Lastly, thank you so much for joining me today. Feel free to contact me. My email address is [email protected]. You can also usually reach me on SNDevs Slack. My name on there is just Paige, and then lastly, be sure to check out the women now blog. There's some excellent content out there. [MUSIC PLAYING]
NEW: Public Sector product strategy
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello and welcome to this product roadmap session for Public Sector Digital Services. I'm Jacquie Hirsch, Head of Industry Marketing. And I'm joined by my colleague, Abhi Rele, Director of Product Management. In the next 20 minutes or so, we'll share what's new and exciting in the public sector with our latest technology innovations. And though our product is new, our work with government is not. ServiceNow has a long history of working with public sector organizations to solve all kinds of challenges. And we'll tell you how you can learn more about those as well. So let's begin. The May quarterly store release adds new levels of productivity, low-code governance, and innovation wherever work happens. And we're announcing the introduction of Public Sector Digital Services, enabling governments to deliver personalized, frictionless, and anticipatory services to constituents. It can also help to increase access and equity, transparency, and trust. So whether you're leading a large federal agency or contemplating the introduction of a local 311 service, our solution can be part of your technology and services evolution. Government is an important audience for us here at ServiceNow, one that we've organized around. We have specialized sales and solution teams who understand the unique needs of the public sector related to privacy, security, availability, resilience, and modernization. You might be wondering why we chose Now to introduce this purpose-built product. Governments around the world are working harder than ever to keep up with demand that's been caused by the global pandemic, the economic downturn, and the resulting disruption to our daily lives. There are also new dynamics created by climate change and demographic changes. And until recently, government has suffered from a decline in public trust and a widening performance gap relative to that of the private sector. But now government's beginning to turn the corner and moving to more adaptable cloud services and nimble work processes with mobile first deployments. And these are some of the key trends that ServiceNow has been monitoring that made us feel like now is the right time to formalize our efforts. Hybrid work. Hybrid work is here to stay. According to Forrester's 2022 Public Sector Predictions Report, one third of global civil servants will become permanent hybrid workers. Departments that fail to adapt to this new dynamic will risk a loss of personnel to either the public or private sector. Now to work effectively, these hybrid and remote employees will need playbooks, enabling work spaces, and knowledge management tools, as well as secure connectivity and intuitive application design. Government work is ripe for automation and digitization. Capgemini's 2022 Public Sector Trends Report highlights the continued cloud adoption of governments and the new openness to multiagency and multinational data sharing to power government performance. Forrester predicts that globally, governments will expand their use of robotic process automation, RPA, to eliminate repetitive, low-value tasks and will automate up to 10% of routine work. Automation centers of excellence will help departments bridge strategy, operations, and training. And efforts at improving CX are yielding results. One example of improved customer experience is the US federal government in which high-impact service providers are reporting gains in both customer satisfaction and trust according to Performance.gov. In the US, the 2021 executive order on transforming federal government experience pushes agencies further forward. And now, public sector digital services is one more tool that they have towards their efforts. Agencies provide important information and a wide catalog of services to many types of constituents. Individuals, businesses, and organizations all need to interact with government in unique ways. Visitors may need transportation or recreation information, perhaps event tickets or a beach pass. Residents might take note of maintenance that's required on their streets, or their sidewalks, or to their local signs. And they might report that for action. Or they might need more time-bound essential services, such as housing assistance, rehabilitation services, or government-issued identification. Businesses require permits for building and zoning. Professionals require licensing of all kinds and even routine matters like the retirement of a vehicle from a business fleet need to be handled. Interactions with government may be frequent or infrequent, urgent or time-bound, formal and informal. But all of them are important to the requester. However, constituents routinely lack visibility and sometimes receive slow responses from their government. Why is this the case when one of the primary responsibilities of government is responding to its constituents? One reason is that government suffers from aging technology-- old systems, premise-based architectures, applications that are out of date were written in archaic programming languages. You would not be surprised to find green screens still in some of these offices. Another reason is that customer experience, until recently, hasn't been a focal point of government. And now, the public sector is pivoting to really cultivate an engaged, interactive, and advocating constituency. Finally, there have been barriers related to data or shall we say trust. Data and trust, the movement of information between agencies being limited by both technology and processes and in some cases outdated thinking has limited progress in transforming these vital everyday experiences. Public Sector Digital Services helps governments with these challenges at the engagement layer and beyond it. Delivering a consumer-grade experience, the kind that we all expect in our daily lives means supporting digital-first interactions from any connected device, including a smartphone at any time from anywhere. And this includes options for self-service, assisted self-service, and full service. And that can vary depending upon the constituency and the use case. And this is availability that we've come to expect in our lives. And it goes far beyond what's typically offered in the 08:00 to 17:00 office hours of government agencies. Think about how much more time can be returned to citizens who don't have to travel to government offices or spend time waiting on lines. And how much more environmentally friendly could government be by eliminating paper-based processes? When information is ingested digitally, it's so much easier to be actioned, stored, and routed. And all of this without the risk of loss of forms or data on someone's desktop. And this is where ServiceNow really comes to the forefront in helping to add a high level of automation end-to-end in these digital processes. By creating visibility to work in process, we eliminate unnecessary follow ups which add time, touches, frustration, and expense for all parties involved. Total experience is likewise improved. Government employees are united in a system of action with one data model on one platform. Staff is able to accomplish more with more confidence, greater predictability, and consistency. By breaking cases down into tasks, and by connecting to any system where work is done, ServiceNow enables a single process flow across people and functions. This allows for multi-step processes or multi-agency work to be orchestrated in the most efficient manner with full transparency to where things sit. Let's consider an example of a transition program to reduce recidivism. A job services agency, a mental health agency, and a criminal justice agency might all partner to support the needs of a probationer, each with their own access to only the necessary information that they need about that individual but working in concert to best support their ongoing success. Think of our service catalog as exposing the back end of government directly to requesters. Almost any request type, any service that government needs to provide can be selected and exposed. And using our AI and operations management capabilities, we also are able to offer proactive service, which means that if some system or application is subject to degradation or shut down, we can identify that and initiate the resolution to bringing it back online as well as notifying the right stakeholders. So think about being on your way to the motor vehicle department to sit for a driver's permit exam, for example. And perhaps the testing system goes down. ServiceNow could help identify that outage and identify you so that you could reschedule your appointment. How convenient is that? Public sector digital services joins our portfolio of industry-based solutions for telecom, technology, health care, manufacturing, and financial services. These industry products are built on our mature customer service management product and our field service management product, all built on the Now platform. Now I'll turn it over to Abhi who will show you the product, Abhi. Thank you, Jacquie. We clearly have an opportunity to help the government. And hello again, everyone. I'm super excited to share more details about our newest industry product, Public Sector Digital Services. Public Sector Digital Services is a digital platform that helps governments modernize, digitize, and speed up the delivery of government services. We've built a product in a way that will make life easier for government agencies and the constituents that they serve. Public Sector Digital Services is comprised of five key components. The first is out-of-the-box data models that are purpose-built for government so that governments can focus on delivering innovative services, not on maintaining costly customizations. The second is a constituent experience that makes it really easy for constituents to request services and then track their status. The third is a modern configurable agent experience that helps government employees deliver services quickly. Fourth are packaged KPIs and dashboards so that governments can monitor service delivery and improve its performance. And finally, packaged workflows so that governments can launch new services quickly and expand their services portfolio. And all of this is built on the ServiceNow platform. So governments continue to benefit from the low-code development integration, automation, and workflow capabilities they've come to rely on. So with that, let's dive in. When we were building the product, we spoke to a number of government customers. And we noticed a pattern. Governments were spending a lot of time, effort, and in many cases, sleepless nights building and maintaining bespoke applications and integrations. Each customization added to the complexity. And each government customer did it in its own unique way. So the first thing we decided to build in Public Sector Digital Services is an out-of-the-box data model foundation that incorporates best practices we've learned in working with many government customers over time. With this data model foundation that is tailor made for governments, they can model constituents they serve, the households they're part of, the relationships that exist between constituents, and the relationships that exist between government employees and constituents, for example, a case worker and the household that they support. They can also model these services that are offered to constituents and the services that are received by a constituent. Now, as Jacquie mentioned, if you're familiar with our Customer Service Management product, you'll notice that we are leveraging the proven constructs from CSM. A constituent is an extension of consumer. Services offered is an extension of product models. While services received is built on the install base data model. All of this, so that governments can focus on building and delivering innovative services. Second, we're providing a new government service portal that makes it easy for constituents to request services and track their status. This new portal is responsive, which means it works on the web as well as mobile web. And it is pre-wired to recognize the new government-specific data model. This means that when a constituent comes to the portal they can view a government-specific service catalog, view a list of services that are offered, and request the one that they need. Now each service can be configured to capture information that is specific to that service. And once the request is submitted, it can be automatically routed to the team that supports that workflow. The portal also enables constituents to get quick access to their profile information, such as their name, their contact info, their address details, their household details, and other identification information like a driver's license number. Constituents can come in and view the services they've received in the past. They can track notifications for any updates on cases that are in flight. They can even self-register for an account if they don't already have one. Governments can use the portal to publish any announcements that might be important for those constituents. And constituents can interact with the portal, either through the web or mobile web interface, or through a chat bot interface, making it easy for them to interact with their government on a channel of their choice. All this to make it easy for constituents to request services. Third, public sector digital services provides a configurable modern agent experience that helps government employees deliver constituent services faster. And this agent experience is also pre-wired to recognize the government-specific data model so that when a constituent calls in either via phone, or contacts the government via chat, or maybe the government service agent is working on a case, they have a 360-degree view of the constituent, including their profile, recent interactions over chat or phone, recent cases that were submitted, household details, services that were received, and many more. They can create new requests on behalf of the constituent. They can even create a new constituent record on behalf of the constituent. This is extremely useful when serving constituents who might lack internet access and might rely on the phone channel to get help. And this workspace takes into account security. You can configure it so that agents only see the cases that they are responsible for. And we are also providing encryption so that governments can encrypt sensitive fields like personally identifiable information. Next, we are providing out-of-the-box analytics and dashboards so that governments can monitor service delivery and improve performance. These out-of-the-box dashboards provide KPIs, such as the number of services offered, the average response time on services, services by type and priority, and many more. We've also included some nifty widgets like the services that were most and least requested or services with the fastest and slowest resolution time. And all this is built on the ServiceNow platform so that governments can easily extend these out-of-the-box KPIs and dashboards or build their own. And finally, governments can quickly deploy new constituent service workflows by combining the out-of-the-box data model and the low code development capabilities of the ServiceNow platform. Governments can create new services or extend the out-of-the-box workflows. This helps government launch new services quickly and expand their services portfolio. Next, let's take a look at a demo of Public Sector Digital Services. Let's start with the experience of a citizen named Diane Berryman. Diane recently got married. And after coming back from her honeymoon, she needs to get a driver's license with her new name. But as many of you know, changing your name can be a daunting process. She's not sure where to start. So Diane hops under her computer and logs into her state's portal. Here, she can view important announcements as well as a list of popular services and requests. She's able to chat with a Virtual Agent and is prompted with a menu of options. She types that she's looking to change her name and get a new license. And the Virtual Agent sends her a link with a form to get her name change started. She's able to fill out the form with the details of her new name and attach a copy of her marriage license and other required documents. When she clicks Submit, she gets confirmation of her request where she can receive status updates. And because she indicated she owned a car on the previous form, she's offered next steps to complete, including filling out the form for updating her vehicle registration. And she's even able to set up an appointment to visit the local motor vehicles department office to have all her documents verified and updated in person. How convenient is that? Now Diane wants to have a little fun with her new name and is interested in getting a vanity plate for her vehicle as well. But she can't find the service online so she's going to call the citizen support line. Let's shift over to our agent, Brittany, who can help resolve issues fast. Diane's call is connected to Brittany who is in her configurable workspace. And as she's talking to Diane, she can verify her information in the system. Brittany also gets a single holistic view of Diane, which includes her profile info, prior interactions over all channels, requests raised, household members, services received, and more. Brittany sees Diane's recent driver's license name change request as well as her car registration update and upcoming appointment. To make the experience better for Diane, Brittany initiates the request for the vanity plate so she can also have that ready for her appointment. What an easy experience. A few weeks later, Diane is at the motor vehicles department with everything she needs to smoothly update her records. But we're not done yet. The department has been collecting data. And their analyst, Tom, is reviewing his dashboards on which services are getting the most use. Here, he can see the services that are taking the most amount of time to resolve. He sees that there's a lot of demand for vanity plates. And this process is not yet on the portal. Tom can quickly create a new service for the new online vanity plate request. And now it's ready for residents like Diane to select from the portal. By the way, Diane got her personalized plates in the mail. And you can tell by the name that she is-- wait for it-- very happy. And that is how Public Sector Digital Services is making life simpler for government agencies and the constituents they serve. And this is what we've delivered so far. We have an exciting product roadmap plan with four store releases per year delivered through the ServiceNow store. Looking ahead, we plan to include support for businesses requesting services from the government, as well as packaged playbooks for appeals and inspection and packaged workflows for licensing and permits as well as service requests. We also plan to include support for agency services. And there is much more planned in the future. Like any roadmap, it is subject to change. But if you have feedback, or input, or suggestions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. With that, let me hand it over to Jacquie for some important announcements. Thank you, Abhi, for that thorough explanation of the product. We want to help you accelerate your digitization efforts. Here are some easy ways you can get involved with us. First, check out our page. There you'll find stories about how the Now Platform has created success stories for all levels of government, globally. You'll hear from cities such as Geneva and Copenhagen, Los Angeles and Denver, and States, such as Washington and Tennessee, agencies like Defra and the Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority. Two, request a demo. We'll show you the ease and flexibility that Public Sector Digital Services can bring to your transformation plans, shaving months, if not years, off your timeline. Or three, meet our team. Our sales and solution consultants are eager to consult with you on your challenges. And they'll glean insights from the work that they've already accomplished with like-minded peers from other public sector agencies. They'll show you how simple it is to extend your existing ServiceNow implementation or to overlay a new instance on top of your existing technology infrastructure so that you can move quickly and nimbly to transform and accelerate. And there's much, much more for public sector viewers here at the Knowledge Digital Experience. You won't want to miss these sessions that we've curated for government. Session 1556, our government channel opener featuring the city of Santa Monica in which Joseph Cevetello, the Chief Information Officer, explains how he and his team introduced a digital City Hall. Session 1541, delivering frictionless customer experiences that drive long-term loyalty. This features Pat Snow, the Chief Technology Officer from the state of South Dakota. Session 1203, this is an incredible use case story of emergency housing assistance delivered by the state of Montana in under 59 days supported by ServiceNow. And Session 1693 in which the state of Tennessee offers a retrospective on how they've reduced resolution times and improved their citizen services. How's that for a lineup? On behalf of Abhi, myself, and our entire government team here at ServiceNow, thank you for joining us today.
Ignite IT service productivity with Client Software Distribution 2.0
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, everyone. Good evening, good morning, and welcome to the Knowledge 22 session. Here, we are to demonstrate CSD 2.0 as an application and JAMF as an integration with CSD 2.0. So today, we had three speakers along with-- two more speakers along with me. So we have Inderjeet, who is a software engineer from my team and Sugandh, who is the product manager for the CSD 2.0. Inderjeet, can you quickly introduce yourself? I'm Inderjeet Singh. I work as a software engineer at ServiceNow. And I'm part of Platform Integrations Team. I work majorly on spoke and app development. Thank you. And myself, I'm Murali. I work as a software development manager in ServiceNow since a couple of years. And Sugandh had been a product manager since a couple of more years than me. And if we move on, we have a packed agenda for today for this demonstration. So we divided this demonstration into three or four different sections. Where in section one, we talk very briefly about what's CSD, I don't know. The next section talks about how CSD should be utilized by any given customer in their instances. And section three talks about real use case of using JAMF as integration and deploying a sample software to an iPhone. And we have a bonus section. If we have some more time remaining, we are open for Q&A. So if we slightly deep dive into what CSD 2.0 is, it's an application that is available on ServiceNow Store. And we use this CSD application, there are few prerequisites that I'll be talking about in the next slide. So it needs a prerequisite of IntegrationHub Enterprise License. So this is the basic need which allows for the flows to be created and flows to be modified by customers. And along with this, the CSD 2.0 application and the JAMF Spoke should be installed on a given instance. So we'll be in the next section, we'll be demonstrating on how to use these three components together to see a real time deployment of software. So once these triggers are available, then if we go into what CSD 2.0 is, it allows an administrator of ServiceNow to deploy and manage softwares of customers who are already doing it with their JAMF and similar providers, whether it is SCEM, or whether it's Microsoft Intune, or it would be even Ivanti LanDesk. So CSD 2.0 enables administrators to maintain a list of records of how many licenses they have. And they can create a software model around how to maintain this list of data, how to rework, how to deploy, manage the license, and all these details. So we'll walk you through those details shortly. So Inderjeet, can you please speak about JAMF now? Thank you. So thanks, Murali. So now, we'll be talking about the JAMF Spoke. So JAMF Spoke allows you to manage various entities, such as users, groups, and your devices on the JAMF account from a ServiceNow instance, shown on this slide, a screenshot of a few of the actions which we provide with the JAMF Spoke. What is CSD 2.0 and JAMF integration? This is a built-in support for JAMF software provider which allows you to distribute software for JAMF managed devices from ServiceNow, which it does through discovering the required data from JAMF server. Then it allows you to create catalog items using that data for software. And once you order the catalog item, it will automate the deployment and revocation through the default JAMF flows. But you can always customize the required flows as per your requirement. Coming to the use cases, which CSD 2.0 supports, as already mentioned, it will automate the software deployment and revocation for you once you order catalog item. It does perform a license check if you configure the catalog item to perform same before deploying. So that you make sure you have the required licenses in your account. And it allows you to manage software releases. And it does deliver notifications based on your lease expiry date that is also configurable, like how many days before the expiry you want the notification. And it integrates very well with the existing SAM solutions, in case you want to consume your license and software model data from SAM plug-ins. What is a CSD 2.0 provider? So CSD 2.0 provider means any third party software provider which can be configured to distribute softwares through CSD 2.0. And it must be configured with a set of tools which are used for deployment, revocation, and discovery of data. And it must also be configured with required tables to restore software and its related configuration data. What is an order client software flow? So this is a main entry point for a catalog item. Once you order a catalog item, order client software is the default flow which will be kicked off. And it performs various checks, such as it will create approval request for your manager if your catalog item is configured to do so. Also, it will perform a license check if license is not available. And it will create a catalog task. So that you can procure the license. That also depends upon your catalog item if that is configured to perform a license check. And it will create the required lease records. And it will schedule the deployment flow based on your lease start date. And it will send a mail that your deployment scheduling has started. As we discussed, order client software will schedule deploy clean software. So deploy client software will create an entry in requested software in CSD. So that you can track what are the softwares you've requested so far. Also, it will trigger the provider specific deployment flow. Let's say you-- in this case, we have JAMF so whatever flow you have configured for JAMF, it will trigger that. That flow will actually send the request to third party, which is JAMF in this case, to actually deploy your software. And in case deployment fails for some reason, it will create a catalog task. So that you can resolve the issue and retrigger the request to deploy it. Now, coming to section two before moving on to the next slide, we will move to ServiceNow instance. And we'll do the required configurations to have a JAMF Spoke running. For this, we will have to configure JAMF Spoke with the connection credentials set up. You can move to Connection and Credential Aliases. In there, we will have a JAMF entry with the name JAMF. We have similar default template. So that it's easy for you to do all the required setup. Here, you give a name for your connection. And here, you give the connection URL for your JAMF account. So I will give one for mine. And here, you give the username which you used to log in to your JAMF account. And here, you give the password. And here again, you give the connection URL. I will just paste it from the top. So verify these details are correct. Once you do that, click on Create. So we have-- this way, automatically your records for connection credential will be created. So if we move on, now your connection credentials setup is done. If we move on to CSD module, we have a list of providers currently building support for JAMF and Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager. The process to deploy, discover, and revoke is almost the same. So in this session, we will be talking about JAMF. But the process for any given provider is almost same. So if we go to the JAMF provider, if you see, we were talking there are a list of default flows, which are already configured. And they are a list of tables which store the required data. So you can always configure these flows as per your requirement. You can build customized flows and change this. And here are a list of properties which you can configure. So first is the property with which you can configure it to use SAM plug-in if you want. That way, we will consume the SAM software model and license information. And you can configure all of the other properties as per your need. And here, we will be creating requested software entries. Let's talk about data discovery in JAMF. So in the JAMF model, we have applications, groups, and policies. These are the data-- this is the data, which we we'll be discovering from the JAMF account. And if we go to the server instances, we will have to create a new entry. So that we can perform data discovery. I will give it the name JAMF. And here, we have to specify a Connection Credential Alias. For now, we just support only the default Connection Credential Alias, which is shipped with this Spoke. So once you do that, you will have an option to discover the data. It will retrieve the application groups and policies from the JAMF server. I will click this. Then we can go to Flow Designer, if you we will see. It will trigger your discover and store data flow. Once it's completed, it's complete now. So if we go back, in the applications, we have a list of applications we have on the JAMF server, similarly, groups and policies. So this is of-- let's move back to slides. What is a discovery flow? As we just saw, that discovery flow brings all the required data into ServiceNow instance. So that you can create the required catalog items. We have already seen how to run it. What are software model and licenses? Every JAMF application must be linked with a software model before creating catalog item. This way, it allows us to perform a license check. So let's move on to the instance and see about the software models. So if you move to software and the software entitlements, this is a license table. Here, you create the required licenses. Let's say, test license. And here, you create the software model, whichever you have. So I have a few of the models already created. So I will just link it, any model. Here, you can give the number of licenses you have. And this is the allocation type. So this-- whatever group you are-- JAMF group you are using for deployment, it depends upon that. If your group type is computer or mobile, then allocation type will be device. If are group type is user, then it will be user. So create that. And it will automatically create the allocations available for you. Whenever you are allocating it, it will automatically recalculate your available allocations. So let's move on to slides. So this is how software model and licenses work. In the deployment flow, as we saw, we discovered schedule discovery of data from JAMF. Then we create and correlate software models to the third party provider to CSD or SAM environment. And as we will see later on, we will create the required software configurations. And then we will create the catalog item. So if we have to see, this is how it works. We have a software model, which we link with the software. And with that, we create a catalog item which is made available in the service catalog. And after that, once you request that item, entitlement check and approval check is done. And deployment is automatically triggered. And we will also make a check of license availability in case catalog item is configured to perform that. If license is not available, we will create a fallback task to obtain license. Once you resolve everything regarding that, we will send a software deployment request to third party provider. And then it will be deployed. Now, coming to the section three, we will do a demo on how to create a catalog item for software and how to actually deploy the software. So if we go to the JAMF applications, so let's take this first application. So we will be doing demo through our iPhone device. So we'll take only the mobile applications. So let's take our Adobe Acrobat. So in here, we have CSD software model. You can create a software model using Create Software Model. But you can also link an existing software model here. So let's go there. You can also create a new software model from this dialog. But I have already software model created. So I will just use that. So once that is done, as I mentioned, we will be creating software configurations, which you can create from the related link. Or you can create from this link. I will give it a name. So it will be software config. And then you specify your group, which is configured to have Adobe Acrobat deployment. And type of group matters to decide the license. Group type is mobile. So license type, which will be checked, will be of a location type device. So I will submit this. Now, we have the software configuration created. But you still see you have create software configuration available, which means you can create multiple software configurations. And any catalog item, you can decide which one to use. Once this is done, you will have the option to create a catalog item. Let's do that. So this will take you to this view, where you can specify all the required options for your catalog item. Let's give some category, Department Services for now. Access type, access type has two values, dedicated and restricted. If you specify it as restricted, this means user can order it only for themselves. But if you specify it for delegated, then they can order it for anyone. Let's go with delegated for now. We have all the required options as required. So if you see in the flow, we have our client software, which will be triggered. But you can also customize it to use any other flow as well. But make sure to create all-- create the flow, so that it creates all the required records, as we mentioned earlier. So you can give all these options. So let's save it. So for CSD 2.0 catalog item, there are a few other configuration values which we need to set. By default, we create one record with default values. If you see here, you can specify if you want to skip approval or you want to perform a license check. Let's do a license check and let's skip-- let's perform approval check. And here in the software configuration, as I mentioned, you can create multiple software configurations and specify which one to use from here. Let's update. OK, this is done. So this will be available in the service catalog. Or you can also do it in the service portal. Let's do it in the service catalog. I don't have the section either. let me check. We go to service catalog. We have departmental services as the category, which we added. This is the catalog item, which we just created. If we go to this one, we specify the type as delegated. So we see the user field. If we set the access type as restricted, then user field will be hidden. I've created a user, K22 test user. Let's install for that user and select the device. We will be doing it for iPhone. And let's give the lease date as the current time. Let's specify a few seconds of it. And give a lease end date. Once that is done, click on Order Now. Once all that is done, we go to the request. And here, we mark it as approved. It's going to be closed. Now, if we go to the flow executions, order client software will start. But it's configured to ask for approval if you see. So we are waiting for approval from the managers, from manager. So we will impersonate as that manager. So K22 test manager is the manager for the user. So we'll impersonate as that and approve it. Go to Approvals. If you see, approval is done. So we'll approve it. So this is done. I will end it. So the request is approved if we go here. So this is completed. And our license was not available. So we will have to create the license. So I will create the-- we did not create any license. So that's what we have to do now, any software entitlements. We will have to create a license, Adobe Acrobat license. And here, you have to specify the software model which you used for that application, which is Adobe Acrobat. And here, you give the number of rights. Let's give it 10. I will save it. If we go here, we refresh it. So once we have created the required license, we will have to resolve the catalog task. So we will approve it. The state should be Closed Complete once we do this. And now, if we see, license was assigned. Also, if we go here to our license software entitlements, license allocations available is all-- automatically calculated. So this is done. So deploy application is in progress already. So I will share screen from my iPhone device to show that the request is sent to the device for deployment. So I will share. So as we can see, this is about to install and manage the app Adobe Acrobat Reader from the App Store. So I will click Install. This is the app which we sent for deployment. So it will take some time. And so loading, as can be seen on the screen. So while it loads, we can move on to next part. I think it will take a few seconds, maybe we can wait. Yeah, it's installed. As you see, this is the app. Now, I will stop shaking my iPhone screen. And we'll move back to the slides. So this is how we solve how to create catalog items and to deploy it. But if we move back to the instance, in the requester software, you will see the software which you have requested so far. And you will have the requested item linked. So for this status, if you are using SAM, we will be updating it to install or whatever the status will be. But if we are using just CSD, we are keeping it as not synced for now. So this is-- and if you want to see the list of software items which you created with CSD, then you can navigate from Software Items. So this is for creating catalog item and deploying it. If we move back to the PPT, in the bonus section, we will talk about how to manage software release and replication. So if we go to requested software, there, you will have option to extend the lease or to revoke the software. Let's do the extend lease first, because if we look, we cannot extend it. So we will give it some other day. Let's say we are giving it 30. So if we come here, in the extended lease, as the catalog item was configured to have a manager approval. So it will create-- extending a lease will also require a manager approval. So if we go here, we will impersonate and approve. So we will approve it. We will end the impersonation. If we go here, it is complete now. If we go back in the requester software, [INAUDIBLE] the requested item. We will see the lease date is now 13/5, which is the extended date. So also whenever they lease expiry comes, software will automatically revoke. But if you want to manually revoke it before that date, you can click Revoke Software. So this will trigger the revoke flow, revoke client software flow, which will trigger the client provide a specific revoke application flow. And it will clean up all the lease records. So if I go to the my mobile screen, I would share my mobile screen again. So soon, it will be removed from here. Now, as it can be seen, the app is gone as we revoke the software. So it will clean up all the lease records. Also if we go to the outbound mails, outbox, as you can see, different mails were sent. Extension request, approval request, request for has been submitted for extending lease. And this is a lease expiring mail. Then this is software is deployed. Then this is deploy request is scheduled. So all these kind of mails, if you see what's sent for the user, and this was for the manager. So these are all mails we sent. So moving back to the slides. This is end of the bonus section. We covered managing software lease and revocation. So similarly, if you want to integrate any new provider with it, make sure you create all the required flows. And you have all the required tables, which can store your software data. Once you do that, you can just click new here and gave a name to your provider. And then provide the required flows, give a software configuration table, and provide a software table. If so, that much easier to integrate any new software provider. Once you do that, you can just click Submit. And whatever process we have seen for JAMF for discovering, deploy, revoke, or extending lease, same processes applicable for any software provider which you will be integrating with CSD 2.0. Now coming the key takeaways from this session. So with CSD 2.0, we can automate the software deployment and revocation. As we saw, you just submit a catalog item. And every process for the deployment was automated. And then you and we just clicked Revoke Software, and it was automatically revoked. And coming to license check and lease management, as we saw, we didn't make a check for license. And it was not available. So we created the license to solve the catalog task. And then it was resolved. Similarly, we were managing lease. We saw how to extend the lease and how flows are triggered based on lease date. And as a last point, this is a local solution for integrating any third party software providers. As we saw, you can just build the required flows. You can set up what tables you need. And then you can just create a new provider record. And the process is the exact same which we followed. Thank you Inderjeet for the wonderful demo. So we look forward for any questions. We are available virtually. And we'll be deploying more number of spokes that can integrate with other providers, as I mentioned, like Ivanti LanDesk, Microsoft Intune, and others in the coming quarters. Thank you, everyone. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Tips for Backlogs, Goals, and Roadmaps
K22 K2022
Build new flows with Flow Designer diagramming
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hey there. And welcome to this session. In this video, we are going to be talking about Flow Designer and how to build flows with the new Flow Designer diagramming view. My name is Brian Bimschleger. And I am the product manager for Flow Designer as well as a few other workflow automation products here at ServiceNow. I've joined ServiceNow about two years ago. And since then, I have worked exclusively with our workflow automation products, notably Flow Designer, Process Automation Designer, and a few of our new automation builders that we are working on. Currently, I'm working extensively with Flow Designer diagramming as well as new workflow automation products that are unannounced. In this video, we're going to talk about three things. The first is the goals of Flow Designer Diagramming. Then we'll show a demo of Diagramming in action. And then finally, we'll give a preview into what's coming next for Flow Designer Diagramming. This is the current view of Flow Designer that many of you know and hopefully love. Over the course of its implementation, we've heard a lot of feedback from customers about how we can improve Flow Designer, specifically as ServiceNow caters to more of a citizen developer and low-code audience. There are several things that we can improve upon here within Flow Designer, notably logic, how we visually represent sequence and logic in a flow; obviousness in terms of placing your finger at the top of a flow and tracing your way to the end. This is a big issue in the current implementation of Flow Designer as certain pieces of Flow Logic, like an IF statement, are not as intuitive as we would have hoped in terms of communicating to the end user what their flow does next. And then finally, for Diagramming, we had a third goal of clarity. If there is ever a possibility where your flow can have multiple paths, we want to make it as clear as possible how the user advances down those paths. Here's the same flow that we just looked at in a diagram view. If we look at how we visualize sequence and logic here, we can see that our IF statements have a different shape, a different color, and have different paths that come out of that. Additionally, if you were to place your finger on the record updated trigger at the top, you would be able to successfully trace your way through the diagram to the end. And on our IF statements, since there are multiple paths, you can see that we have labels that indicate to someone who's reading the flow how you take each path. Well, Flow Designer Diagramming is a new version, a new view of Flow Designer. We've received a lot of positive feedback from our early adopters of this product. One of my favorite quotes is the term gentle on the eyes keeps coming up. It's very approachable and really easy to see what I'm doing. I like this quote for a variety of reasons. One, it's obviously nice praise from a customer who has been using this in a real environment. But secondarily, it's because this customer was someone who was previously critical of some of the usability and performance of the Flow Designer product. So seeing how she has viewed the diagram view very positively that was great feedback for our team and good indication that we were progressing forward well. Now that we've talked about the goals for Flow Designer Diagramming and generally what Diagramming View looks like, let's see a demo of it in action. All right. Let's see how Flow Designer Diagramming works. First off, in the San Diego release, once you enter Flow Designer, you'll notice this toggle in the top right. When I click on the toggle, that is how we switch into the diagram view. Once you're in the diagram view, a lot of the diagram view functions exactly like you would expect if you're familiar with Flow Designer. We can click to add a trigger. And when we select a trigger, that trigger gets added to the canvas and we are then able to modify the details of the trigger just like we would in standard Flow Designer. What's nice about this panel on the right hand side it is it allows you to configure details of the item on your canvas while still understanding what comes before that trigger or action and what comes after. Now let's actually try and add something to our Canvas. In this example, we will go in and add a log. We can still use our pill picker to use data that was generated by previous steps in our flow. And in this example, we're going to grab the short description from the incident that was created. Once we click Done, we can navigate back to the standard Flow Designer view, click on the log, and see that our data pill that we added in the diagram view is now visible within the standard Flow Designer view as well. Let's go back to our diagram view and continue building. In this example, we may not want our log anymore. So in the diagram view, we support the ability to delete content as well. Now let's say we want to perform some logic within our diagram. In this example, the first thing that we're going to need to do is we're going to need to look up some data. In this example, we'll reuse the table from our trigger. And we will add a condition that says we're going to look up any incidents that were created by the person who created our initial incident that kicked off our flow. Now just for fun, we'll navigate back to our standard view real quick. We can see that all of our configurations are still here for the lookup record. Now let's say hypothetically we wanted to loop through these records that we just found or we want to perform some action on all of these records at the exact same time. In the San Diego release, we are supporting a limited set of Flow logic. And if you attempt to add any particular flow logic to your flow that's not supported by the diagram view, if you attempt to navigate into the diagram view, you'll receive a little tooltip warning that informs you you cannot enter the diagram view right now. And it also tells you why. There's an unsupported flow logic type present. Within documentation online, we have a list of the supported flow logic types as well. In this example, do the following in parallel is not supported yet. And once we remove it, we can see that now this toggle to go into diagramming is re-enabled. So if we're in Diagramming View, now let's see what type of Flow logic is supported. By going to Flow Logic, we can see what's available for me now. And it's a more limited subset. For this demo, we are going to add an IF statement. Now what we're going to do is we're going to route our flow based on how many records we get back from step one. So we'll take our lookup record step and the count of records. And if it's more than 10 records, we're going to do something. Once we click Done, you can see that our condition for our IF statement is represented now on the body of the card. If I want it to be a little bit more human readable, I can come in and edit the condition label. And once I do that, you can see on the canvas on this component the text has been updated to make it easier to understand what is happening. Now in this example, if someone creates an incident and they have more than 10 previous incidents, we are going to want to send an email. Don't worry about the configuration for now. But we can see that once we hit this logic point, if there are more than 10 records, we advance down the true path and we send an email. If you're familiar with the standard Flow Designer product, you know that if we just have an IF statement and then perform an action, this is how we represent that content. The standard view of Flow Designer doesn't force you to define what happens if your IF statement is not true. It's kind of implied. Once we got into Diagram View, specifically since this is targeted at citizen developers or lower code users, and one of our principles is obviousness and clarity, we wanted to make sure that there was a false path even if the user didn't define the ELSE statement. But what's nice and what we think is pretty handy is that as soon as I add in any action onto this false path, if we go back to our standard view here, the system is automatically populating your flow with the ELSE action. So even though you didn't manually add in that step, the flow is building in a way so the flow itself will run properly and allow you just to get on with building your flow. Now that we've seen what's possible within Flow Designer diagramming for the San Diego release, let's talk about what's upcoming. In San Diego, it was our initial release. We are supporting all actions, all subflows, and most flow logic out of the gates. In the Tokyo release, we're specifically focusing on support for Service Catalog. This includes the service catalog trigger as well as the ability to add, remove, update flow stages into your flow in the diagram view. In the Tokyo release, we are focusing on additional types of Flow logic, specifically do the following in parallel and make a decision. And then after the Utah release, we have several items in consideration, including the ability to add annotations in the diagram view, supporting error handling, and building subflows as diagrams. Thank you for attending this session today. I hope you enjoy building with Flow Designer Diagramming. And if you have any questions, feel free to post on the community. And I am always listening for feedback on Flow Designer Diagramming. Enjoy the rest of Knowledge.
What's new for Mobile in the San Diego release
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello. And welcome to the What's New for Mobile in San Diego breakout session. My name is David Ha. And I'm an outbound product manager on the ServiceNow Mobile Platform team. And today I'm going to walk you through some of the key highlights and features that the mobile platform has to offer with this latest release. And we're just going to jump straight into here. Let's jump into the highlights for San Diego. So here you can see our mobile platform's release highlights in a nutshell. You can see we've released some new features and updates on our clients, our out of the box apps and workflows, and developer tools and platform capabilities. And we'll actually dive into each one of these features. But I do first want to start and give you some context and summarize our mobile keys initiatives for San Diego. And we're going to break down this release into three central themes-- mobile UX refresh, usability improvements, and further investment into our citizen developer experience. And to start off, we have our mobile UX refresh. In San Diego, we've introduced new features that greatly improve some of the things that you can do to personalize your launcher screens and landing pages. With the introduction of the Next Experience UI from Platform, we wanted to make sure that customers had alignment between their platform design and their mobile design. And these enhancements would give you the capabilities to do so. With mobile card enhancements, whether you're using them for announcements or for record sections that give you quick access to your ServiceNow records, you now have the capability to configure the size and layouts of your cards that are optimized for different user browsing experiences. You can use custom images and colors so that it better aligns with your in-app branding, or you can embed YouTube and Vimeo videos directly into those cards to share news or announcements. It also supports SGV files as well as you have the ability to control text overlay, which gives you the ability to put text underneath the image or video, or have it display on top, so lots of more options that you have to work with for mobile cards. For record section enhancements, you now have more control over the layout and orientation of your record sections. You can see here that you now have the ability to customize the rows and columns of your record sections, which can scroll vertically or horizontally. We also accommodate the ability to customize it based on portrait or landscape mode. So that will accommodate larger devices such as iPads or tablets. And at the end of the day, you just have more control on your mobile landing pages for improved and user experiences. We also have icon section enhancements. We've made these improvements that give you the ability to use custom images and labels on your icon sections. There's now three different layout types that you pick from. You have your standard ServiceNow library of icons on the left. That gives you 37 or so icons to pick from. But if those don't align with what you want, you also have the ability to pick Label Layout, which is the second screenshot here. And that will show text on top of a colored background. But again, if that doesn't appeal to you, then you also have the ability to upload your own custom images. That way you have more control on how you want your icons sections to look like. And then you'll have better alignment with your in-app corporate branding. Moving on to the second theme, which is our usability improvements, how do we create more engaging everyday experiences with native functionality? And to start, we've released a brand new native out of the box app which can be installed and added to your Now Mobile clients. And this is the Workplace Service Delivery app for Now Mobile. This was an app built to help you manage your workplace reservations as employees are returning to work. It allows employees to search, reserve, and manage their asset reservations on mobile, so being able to do things like reserve a desk, a common space, a meeting room. It's really up to you what those assets are. But it is a quick and easy way for employees to quickly check in. Make sure there's space to come back in. And you can book a desk or space really quickly in just a few taps. If you want to learn more about the new employee experience, definitely check out our release notes. Mobile properties. In San Diego, we're introducing this new mobile properties framework for admins to be able to enable or disable client specific functionality. And this is a new properties table that is different than your platform system properties. Our mobile platform team will be able to release new client features using this new framework so that customers can adopt client features much quicker without having to wait for the next release. To give an example, hypothetically, if we were to release a new feature that allows you to block attachments for Asian or Now Mobile, and if we were to release this next month, you would be able to adopt that immediately as soon as your users update to their latest clients. Typically, a customer would have to wait six months or so until the next release. And so it just allows us to iterate much quicker and release urgent features to our customers in a more timely manner. And actually, in the next few store releases, we'll have more information on some of these new mobile properties that you can take advantage of. So definitely check out our product docs in the next few store releases. Automatic app refresh. This is actually one of the first mobile properties that were released in San Diego. And with this, it will automatically refresh your service to our clients with the latest data any time a user executes an action. So you no longer have to be concerned whether your end users are working with stale data. Any time a user executes an action like updating an instant, creating a new record, the app will automatically refresh for them without them having to swipe down to refresh. Right. And upon upgrade to San Diego, your instances will actually automatically have this property turned on for you. Control specific app usage. So this is an important feature that we've released to support our customers' authentication policies and security requirements. And what this allows you to do is create an allow list in which your apps can connect to your ServiceNow instances. So if your users are installing the wrong app and trying to log in, you can actually reroute them with a link to the appropriate app. Typically, this is a system property that customers will use with their MDM or MAM requirements, just to make sure employees are not logging in to the wrong apps and accessing data that they should not have access to. And so it will be used in tandem with your MDM or MAM environments to support your authentication policies and security requirements. Multiple single sign-on support. So this is another authentication feature that enables customers to use different SSO providers for different groups of users to be able to log in with secure access. To give a quick example, there might be customers that use multiple SSL providers for different groups users, such as new hires using Microsoft Azure and maybe full time employees using Okta. We're now able to support this type of environment if they wanted to redirect users depending on who they are and which SSO provider that they want to use. And then the last theme of our features is for citizen developer improvements. We want to continue investing into our developer tools so that our new admins and developers can quickly ramp up on learning how to configure and manage their ServiceNow mobile apps. For Mobile App Builder, our latest enhancement has been focused on reaching feature parity. And so with this latest release, we now support 95% of all major use cases that can be done on the platform. And this is much more than Mobile Studio could ever do in the past. I think the most important concept here is you can actually start building confidence in our Mobile App Builder as your primary tool to configure your mobile app configurations. There's no more major gaps that would prevent you from being able to configure something on our Builder, so you don't have to navigate between the platform and Mobile App Builder just to configure some of the things that you need. And so as we move into Tokyo and further, well, we're going to improve this App Builder tool so it's easier to use and so we can create better Builder experiences for developers. Input from screen enhancements. So these are all the forms that end users will fill out when they complete an action on mobile. Right. We're supporting a new variable type for scripted autofill. And this will actually autofill inputs for the end user based on an execution of a function in a server-side script include. To give you a really quick example, you can now pre-fill inputs for users using the data that's based on that logged in user's profile. And so if you take a look at the screenshot on the left, we're pre-filling the building based on that user profile. So that user doesn't have to state which building they're on. Sometimes you won't even have to state which floor you're on. It's just pulling data from that logged in user so that there's less fields for that user to fill out. And as a result, it's a better input form screen experience for that user. Mobile Card Builder enhancements. With this latest version, 19.3, we've drastically improved the configuration experience for mobile UI roles. Previously, it was kind of a finicky experience in which you would have to manually map JSON to the fields that you want to apply it on the platform side. But with this enhancement, you can now do it all inside Mobile Card Builder. You just point and click on the fields that you want to apply your policies to and then it's done. There is no JSON mapping. It's much easier to do. It's much quicker to do as well. Mobile Publishing version 3.1. So if you aren't aware, this is our premium offering that allows customers to build custom versions of our ServiceNow mobile apps. It also gives you the ability to brand your apps so that you can use your own app name, company icon, and splash screen so that it all shows up under your own app store. But more importantly, it also gives you control on how you want to distribute your ServiceNow Mobile apps. Previously, this offering was only available for private distribution. So if you are distributing to your iOS users, you would have to go through the Apple Business manager process and then privately distribute using MDM or redemption codes. For Android users, you distribute however you like, whether it's through your private store or you send them a private link to install. But as we move into San Diego, we've released a new enhancement for Mobile Publishing that will allow you to publish directly to the public app stores. So that's iOS Store and the Android Play Store. And so with this option, users can now discover and download your custom branded app without having to rely on MDM to distribute or going through the pain of having to manage and privately distribute redemption codes. And so whether you want to publish your apps privately or publicly, we give you both options to pick from, depending on how you currently distribute your enterprise mobile apps. And with that being said, let's actually wrap up with some additional resources that I can point you to. Whether you want to learn about the latest San Diego features that I just took you through or how to get started implementing, these are definitely your go to resources. First is you have the product documentation for San Diego. This is where you'll find the latest release notes as well as any configuration steps, or if you want to learn about the new apps, such as the workplace or service delivery app, this is definitely where you want to start. Next, you have the Now Learning site. And this really covers mobile fundamentals. If you're completely new or looking to get hands on training using Mobile App Builder, there's actually a new course that we built out called Mobile Additional Resources. And this just compiles all the courses that are available to you that's related to Mobile so definitely register to this if you want to learn more. Mobile Community. This is actually a great online forum in which you can access FAQs as well as latest updates and announcements on mobile, or if you just want to ask any open-ended question around implementation. This is definitely something that you have access to. And our internal mobile teams are actually on this quite frequently. And so this is a great place to share feedback as well. So if you go to our Idea Portal, that's where you can share feedback or any enhancements with us directly. And then lastly, we have this how-to app building series that we host bi-weekly. We host it on YouTube called Mobile App Academy. And we go through the process of starting with an out-of-the-box app. And we show you how to customize and extend those apps to make them even better. And we also do deep dives on best practices and how you can configure key features or answer any question that comes up along the way, so definitely a session you want to register to if you want deeper knowledge on how to configure and implement your ServiceNow Mobile apps. And that wraps up our breakout session for today. Let me end off by saying thank you all for joining us in our What's New for Mobile San Diego breakout session. I hope you found this session informative and helpful. And we hope you're excited for San Diego's release as much as we are. If you have any questions around your mobile implementations, feel free to reach out to your account teams. And feel free to check out the mobile community site to ask questions as well. Thank you all for joining us today and for your interest in mobile. Cheers, everyone. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Expand technology services while reducing costs
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] So who is this video for? It's geared towards IT service and operations leaders that want to go beyond keeping the lights on and really create amazing agent and IT services, experiences. So what problem are we trying to solve in this video? It's really simple. Technology teams have multiple, non-integrated tools that increase costs and really solidify silos. This also means that service and operations teams struggle with inconsistent visibility. And they lack service context. And through the eyes of our IT agent Grady, as well as our major incident team, we will see how ServiceNow can easily address this. How? Well, it's really by offering Grady and the supporting teams a single cloud platform across IT estate, which, in turn, gains the visibility with ServiceNow context. It breaks down organizational silos as well as offers teams consistent data across any of the teams. So here is Service Operations Workspace. Now this is ServiceNow's configurable next experience workspace. And it's for all agents, ITSM, ITOM agents alike. And IT leaders, this is IT service management made simple, with a unified Workbench across departments so that agents can stay engaged, productive, and informed as well as support the services the enterprise needs from anywhere. This means desktops, mobile devices, even third-party messaging apps. With Service Operations Workspace, our service agents like Grady, this has reinvented the service experience and really enables modern practices to automate and improve the service reliability. How? Well, we can see this is a single destination to manage incidents, problems, changes. And later, we will see this seamless integration with technology operations to really provide issue resolutions. So this is a unified ServiceNow platform that really underlines these solutions to offer all of our agents the right information in the right place at the right time. Even the ability to change the look and feel of this workspace is no issue. Now Grady has complete visibility into all the happenings from At A Glance. We can see at a glance overviews of incidents assigned to her, SLAs, as well as unassigned incidents, even the ability to review all of her team's information. With built in chat, phone, and walk up functionality, our agent can take an omnichannel approach to work that's coming in. Agents can also dynamically select which channel they want to support. The items that you see here have been queued with advanced work assignment. This is where items are automatically assigned to agents based on availability, capacity, as well as their skill sets. Now in this case, Grady quickly gains full details into this case and incident information, details such as impact, priority, affected CIs, impacted services, activity streams. You'll see this throughout this demo, as well as you'll see predictive intelligence. And this really offers agent support in the form of AI and machine learning. And we call this Agent Assist. What is Agent Assist? Well, this automatically displays search results based on short descriptions. Also can display similar resolved issues, outages. So this way our agent can determine if the solution applies in this case. We also see there's a recommendations framework. The days of searching around emails, sticky notes, or tribal knowledge can be a thing of the past. And here, thanks to AI, we can attach useful articles that will help resolve this particular incident. Now before moving on, the other aspects to highlight here is about incident problem change life cycles. We can see that Grady has everything in a click away, which really helps promote better mean time to resolution as well as up levels all these agents' skill sets. So in a previous demo, we saw how to deliver AI powered self-service. And we saw an issue around ordering services. And the complexities resulted in an IT ticket being automatically submitted and routed to our agent. And Grady is our agent. Now here is where service operation workspace really begins to shine. Once again, Grady is given those full insights into the priority, the service impacts, impacted CIs, activities around all these events. What is a bit different in this case is that ServiceNow is bubbling up even more information around the dependencies. And this is in part due to the interconnectivity between all the departments and, in part, to the CI relationships. And it's offering a more prescriptive Service Mapping information. So with Agent Assist prescriptive recommendations, Grady continues to gain AI and ML insights to quickly address what's going on here. After a quick review, this looks like to be a good candidate for a major incident. Let's bring up a major incident war room. Now ServiceNow is able to get all hands on deck, no matter the preferred communication channel. In this case, it is MS Teams. And it's integrated directly into the ServiceNow platform. What this means is that all the information that Grady sees is easily shared in triage with teams like we see here in this major incident war room team. All the information we saw on Grady's Workbench-- services, service maps, configuration items, priorities-- all are brought seamlessly into this Teams experience. These notifications and information also work on mobile devices. Here we can quickly see MS Teams mobile view. Moreover, we can see all that information in MS Teams carried over into ServiceNow's Major Incident Workbench, really just highlighting and showing that ServiceNow's platform delivers the right information to the right areas of need. We can even see the prescriptive technology and calm tasks kick off in the solution of choice. And in this case, it continues to be MS Teams. And it looks like this is the preferred communication channel. We can see that one of the team members is connected with the events and operations team members. Information is being shared and what's important to each team as well as those team goals. The events team is now working on a bigger fix. However, this major incident war room team sends out a quick workaround to the incidents that have come in on this issue. With a bigger fix in motion, other similar incidents and events coming in can be prevented thanks to ServiceNow's ITOM Pro solution. We also can see that storm. The employee that originally submitted this issue via Virtual Agent has also received a notification about his service working. And this is via ServiceNow's native mobile app. Finally, let's close this story with value. The value of the ServiceNow platform and the suite of purpose-driven solutions as well as ongoing cost savings with ServiceNow. Meet ITSM Success Dashboard. Here is a purpose built dashboard to better distill performance and service quality. This dashboard offers a prescriptive framework for increased transparency around all of the ServiceNow activities and beyond. And we're really providing CIOs, IT leaders, and process owners a 360 view into their IT performance. And we can measure the improvement with these interactive dashboards using prescribed KPIs to maximize that value. Now this concludes my demo. If you like what you saw, please see these useful links that you see here. And with that, I want to thank you for spending your time with me. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Deliver extraordinary employee experiences, resiliency, and productivity
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 So who is this video for It's really geared towards it and service operations leader anybody who provides a service and want to provide amazing employee experiences. And so what is the problem we're trying to solve in this video. Well employees do not have always on consistent methods to request all the technology services they need and in this video through the eyes of our requester storm we will see how ServiceNow can easily address this how by offering storm 24/7 AI powered cell service with VA and NLU really simplifying technology requests and beyond with Employee Center service catalogs and you will see that these experiences can be embedded into third party applications. Finally employees like storm get faster resolutions with predictive intelligence as well as dynamic translation solutions. So here it is ServiceNow is Employee Center now IT leaders this is request management made simple with a unified portal across departments so employees can stay engaged, productive, and informed and request the services they need from anywhere as we can see air request it request any requests it needs in one place even out of the box internal and external employee forums really a peer to peer network to help engage and inform our employees and storm can drop into employee communities like this where it empowers employees to participate in internal discussions and discovery forums via their searches they can even look at leaderboards and reach out to those leaders as well as the ability to post to events and ask those questions here storm has action plans request and these can be showcased in the top area as well as we can see this banner slide show information that uses machine learning to drive personalized content and this can be found throughout storms portal information such as the local hybrid workplace knowledge base articles are presented front and center and storm has the ability to rate how useful this KB article and information is this really better helps our back end teams with the content as we can see this information can be added to my favorites tab on the left so the information is at the ready whenever storm needs to access it the my active items widget once again places information in focus so storm can check on what's important to storm ServiceNow Employee assistant around knowledge management as well as out of the box set surveys can help teams keep a better pulse on what's important to these end users like storm further driving overall experience and engagement to find out more about paid time off storm doesn't have to search through various directories look through emails by simply typing paid time off a query of helpful articles are populated for storm ServiceNow offers a full service employee experience even a live walk up kiosk and scheduling needs are front and center for storm to take advantage of storm can jump in the queue from his desk or if there's a last minute meeting that pops up can easily jump out of the queue and enabling the slot for someone else as we jump back into the queue we can see it's simple now storm is third in line we can see also the hours of operation where the tech lounge is located scheduling anything around that and again, we're really just highlighting that this is storm's portal we can see content is targeted towards storm's needs such as product catalogs recommended content quick links upcoming events, videos even local cafe menu information now let's get into the VA with NLU so if the kbs's the targeted content employee communities are not enough meet our Virtual Agent with natural language understanding storms and yours quick answer to questions and needs. Now with natural language understanding there's not a need to look up topics we can simply type in the need and the Virtual Agent takes over from there no live agents needed password reset is still a challenge for many departments today and with consumer grade security verifications on the back end agents can continue to work on more complex challenges also if the VA is ever uncertain of the direction of our end users need like storm. It can clarify what is needed. Thanks to some of the AI and ML that supports this chat bot in this case storm's request status is parsed out in a few options. One of them being an IT typekit submission as we can see storm's request is still in process and he can jump in add some comments directly right into the ticket from the chat last we realize that ServiceNow that there are instances where the chat bot is not enough this process is also expertly handled for storm Thanks to ServiceNow platform something as specific as ordering issues may have not worked itself into a Virtual Agent topic or the recommendations or NLU suggestion aspects nevertheless it is easily addressed requesters like storm can submit a ticket right in the chat so no phone call, email, or walk to your smartest it guy is needed as we can see storm continues to get kb information to further support him in whatever his needs are now with a few clicks. Virtual Agent automatically routes assigns the ticket to the next live agent based on availability and their skill sets please note that storm can also reach out to a live agent directly via the chat with wait times or phone or email everything is built right into the portal now note that storms experience is not limited to this desktop browser ServiceNow is native mobile app seamlessly carries any of this information this full experience into the palm of the hands of storm this eye search targeted content self-help virtual agents all front and center for storm and this experience is not limited to ServiceNow solutions once again third party messaging apps and platforms are part of the Virtual Agent and incident auto resolution process proactively helping storm in the tools of his choice now some of you watching storm's journey may be saying sure but how long does it take to get this up and running is I always on AI powered service. Let's start with knowledge based information that you saw populated in every aspect for storm ServiceNow offers guided setup for knowledge management. Now knowledge management guided set up provides a sequence of tasks to help you configure knowledge management offering ways to define requirements the ML and really align to the company strategies either offering kicks methodology knowledge demand insights and translation management each section is broken down to a specific task that can be assigned to key individuals and/or groups. So let's talk about the service catalogs that we saw items such as hardware software onboarding requests we saw served up to storm in the Employee Center meet ServiceNow catalog Builder a visual and guided experience where service owners like you can create or edit catalog items along with departmental and roll restrictions very simply now the catalog Builder experience enables you to delegate the creation and maintenance of one catalog or many catalogs and finally let's dive into chat bots virtual agents setup and hopefully demystify some of the perceived complexities around the setup and the maintenance of natural language understanding AI or machine learning around these virtual agents ServiceNow is listen to customers like yourself and we've created a conversational interfaces Workbench this includes guided setup around general conversation setups virtual agents set up agent chats and this really puts it all in one place helping teams to get started in days, not weeks or months. So with that this concludes the video with ServiceNow requesters like storm get 24/7 AI powered self service on a single platform that simplifies technology requests and beyond even the ability to use third party messaging tools such as MS Teams. And finally employees like storm get faster solutions with predictive intelligence if you like what you saw or if you have any questions, please see some of the information you here or even better, please reach out to your local representative and see how ServiceNow can deliver this for your company. And with that, I want to thank you for spending your time with me.
Improve experiences and drive organizational value with field service
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] In this field service demo, we'll follow Lisa Raye, a help desk operations manager for the Solano organization, as they manage point of sale devices. We'll follow how she uses a combination of proactive service along with process automation to provide end-to-end visibility of incidents, work orders, and tasks. Field service has undergone a huge update in a San Diego release, but next experience unifies apps and reduces clicks to access items needed to get working through unified navigation, which sits across the top of every page. Lisa begins her day in a dispatcher dashboard, and it brings new speed and efficiency to field service operations as users get a complete view of critical tasks, field agent status, and agent locations. A service map is integrated within a dispatcher dashboard, and from it, Lisa can get the location of agents out in the field and pull up work orders directly from the map. This allows Lisa to deep dive into work orders within a specific area and minimize navigating through multiple screens through tabbed navigation. As a help desk operations manager, Lisa has reports which highlight issues and tasks which are pertinent to her job. Here, we have a system-generated incident, which Lisa will need to address, as all the point of sale devices at location 558 have become unresponsive. Through proactive communication, service, and process automation, the location manager is kept in a loop through status updates as the site can't process customer orders until the point of sale devices are functional again. Once Lisa opens the incident, she attempts to resolve the issue remotely. Unfortunately, she's unable to do so and notates the incident for attempted resolution steps as well as recommended actions of having a technician head on site to inspect and resolve. She saves her notes in the incident and then proceeds to create a work order to have a technician dispatched to the site. Once in the work order, Lisa utilizes a template to quickly add specific tasks for the technician to follow once they arrive. The template also includes knowledge articles, which the tech can use to help determine a resolution. This amazing feature helps minimize time to resolution, regardless of the experience level of the technician, as pertinent information is always a tap away on their mobile device. Lisa confirms that this work order is ready for scheduling and heads to a dispatcher workspace. Scheduling within a dispatcher workspace allows Lisa to improve efficiency and accuracy of service dispatch, resolution, and streamline project operations. The San Diego update brings multiple views that Lisa has access to, like a day view, week view, bi-weekly, and even four weeks out. Here, she has a view of all the technicians and their schedules. New to the San Diego update is the ability to schedule multi-day tasks and manage crews and contractors from a single view within a dispatcher workspace. This provides Lisa end-to-end visibility around first and third-party teams and enables her to work effectively with multiple groups across longer work spans for streamlined project operations. Clicking a work order task filters out eligible team members by skill set, location, or whether a crew of multiple technicians are needed for the task. Organizations have the choice to automate task assignment through dynamic scheduling, but can also manually scheduled tasks by simply dragging, dropping onto the schedule, as you see here for Teddy Taylor. The purple color of the task indicates that although assigned to Teddy, he has yet to accept it. This is also indicated by the state of the task once Lisa clicks on it. Now, once Teddy has been assigned a task, he can accept it and manage the work order directly from his mobile device. Teddy opens the ServiceNow Agent app and has full access to all the content within the work order that Lisa created, and he can even use a GPS of his choice to get to the site location. When looking at the activity within the work order, he has full visibility to content to help him resolve the issue, including the knowledge articles that we highlighted earlier. Now, pay attention to Teddy's purple unaccepted task from earlier on Lisa's dashboard. Once Teddy accepts the task, Lisa's view instantly gets updated as his task now reflects blue and is an accepted state versus assigned previously. This real-time information provides Lisa with the ability to make smart decisions if and when scenarios occur outside of automation rules and configurations. Once accepted, Teddy can tap Start Travel to begin. This will send the location manager another text status update and provide an Uber-like experience to follow Teddy's location as he starts making his way toward the site. Once he arrives, Teddy taps Start Work and begins working on resolving the issue. After testing and troubleshooting, Teddy is able to get the point of sale devices back up and running for location 558. He notates the work order around the steps he took to resolve the issue directly from his mobile device and closes the work order task. Before Teddy leaves the server room, he notices that one of the rack-mounted cooling fans aren't spinning. Knowing that overheating server room devices can lead to an outage in the future, Teddy decides to take a look to see if anyone has reported this malfunction by scanning the asset tag on the device. Once scanned, details about the rack then are populated, like the device location, any activity on the device, and any other pertinent information like upcoming work orders, scheduled maintenance, or entitlements. Having this information allows Teddy to take the proper steps to get the fan repaired while on site and proactively prevent interruptions to critical operations. Additionally, this helps reduce the organization's carbon footprint, truck rolls, administrative task, and efforts from site leadership as the incident was automatically generated once a service failure was detected. Through this demo, we've seen how the power of the platform enables Teddy to deliver extraordinary experiences to site employees by restoring the point of sale devices.
Deliver effortless customer experiences with Customer Service Management
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] To be competitive in today's market, marketing efforts can no longer be based solely on product or price. Customers evaluate brands on the experiences they have and how easy it is to do business with them. You might have heard the saying it takes a village and that's the truth, even when it comes to providing exceptional customer service. By connecting people, process, and systems, you have a powerful system of action. Enabling companies across their front, middle, and back offices to deliver frictionless experiences for both customers and employees. With ServiceNow's customer service management, you'll have the right products and processes to improve the journey from end to end. We're going to highlight these features with Solana, which sells home and office security systems, and boxio to their business customer with branches across the country. Let's start with our customer Julie, a boxio. She's here on her business's portal where she can review their products, check out the support portal, and get updates on all her current orders. As she's browsing the portal, she gets a notification about some recent support tickets needing attention and this is powered by Engagement Messenger. Engagement Messenger allows you to create, configure, enable, and disable modules based on your customers' needs. You can include modules like those support reminders, special offers, access to the knowledge base, and even incorporate your field service offerings, but the reason Julie's on the portal today is she recently learned about the next generation of security camera Solana offers. She starts a chat with a live agent wanting to see if she can add these cameras to her recent order before stepping away for a meeting. When we transition to our agent's view, John, we can see that with his CSM configurable workspace, he's able to get a full view into Julie as a customer in her orders. He lets Julie know that she can still add to her order and waits for her response on quantity. When we switch back to Julie's portal, we can see that even though she left earlier, the chat that she initiated was not closed or canceled and there's a notification that John has responded. She lets him know that she wants to go ahead and add 100 cameras to her order. Similarly, when John returns from his break, he's notified of that ongoing chat from Julie. And this is great because it means he doesn't have to search for old chats. With Order Management for customer service, agents are able to get a more complete view into the order lifecycle. Agents are now empowered for the very first time to make changes to orders, addresses, and more. And they're able to make these changes right away, reducing the amount of time from initial order to final fulfillment. John drills down into the recent security order and clicks new to add the camera line item. With a few clicks, he easily adds the new security camera, its options, the order quantity and hit Save. These details are immediately reflected in the order details. And because the other routine work and common requests were already automated, John's time was freed up to help Julie with this more high value request. Now, as you might have noticed, we've got a brand new view for our service agent, which has been enhanced with our next experience. With the next experience, agents have everything they need in a modern accessible user interface. They start at their configurable workspace, showing their important daily case information. They can pin and unpin menus as needed, their favorites tab features pages that they access frequently, and their history tab allows agents to return to recently visited pages and workspaces quickly. Dark mode is another enhancement that we've brought into the next experience. John spends a lot of his day in the UI and dark mode helps reduce fatigue and eye strain. All of these features help make agents more effective. But as we know, things don't always go as planned. What happens when companies struggle to service customers? From onboarding new accounts to resolving complaints or processing claims, processes span disconnected teams and systems. This is where playbooks comes in. With playbooks for customer service management, organizations can automate complex customer service processes that span siloed teams and systems. It's a few weeks later and Julie has not received that recent order even though she was promised quick delivery. She calls in and is connected to a complaints agent. With the complaints playbook which is available out of the box, our agent is able to collect Julie's complaint details quickly. She has a focus layout providing her with a visual guide of the tasks required to resolve issues. Related records are dynamically populated with each executed step and the playbook automatically gives the entire company cross team visibility, meaning, agents can resolve cases faster and organizations can scale their customer service with demand. But service doesn't start and end when the customer reaches out, the best service can be proactive. Customer service and IT operations management or ITOM, together allow for proactive monitoring and notification before problems grow out of control. We can switch over to our network engineer, Amelia, who is logged into the operator workspace. Amelia notices that there's a problem with the video streaming event services. By diving into the product and the alert, Amelia is able to learn a little bit more about the issue and how many customers are impacted. She can click into the related alerts to see how many other services are affected. There seem to be quite a few, so Amelia is going to create a case describing the issue, adding some details, and saving it. This case is suggested as a major case. So when our manager is able to go in and review it, they're able to see all the relevant details and approve it as a major case which starts a workflow. The benefit of having a major case is that child cases can be added. So if a customer calls in with a related issue, the agent is able to attach it to this major case, meaning that the customer has access to and receives updates on the status. And that is a high level overview of how you can deliver frictionless end to end service with ServiceNow's customer service management. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Govern low-code app development at scale with App Engine Management Center
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] To realize the true benefit low-code app development can have on your business, it's critical that you build on a platform that allows you to govern citizen development at scale. App Engine Management Center on the ServiceNow platform equips you with everything necessary to manage all aspects of low-code app dev. With this all new App Engine capability, you can control the intake of new applications, streamline developer collaboration, and manage the app deployment process in a manner that is custom tailored to your infrastructure. Let's take a look at this powerful capability in action by watching an application go from concept to production deployment using an expedient and efficiently controlled process made possible via App Engine Management Center. It all starts with an idea. Carla Humble, a marketing operations director, had a flash of inspiration recently about how she could streamline the way her company puts on marketing events of any size. Carla hasn't built an app before so to get started, she applies to be a citizen developer using App Engine's out of the box app intake form. This form helps Carla think like an experienced low-code developer by addressing some of the key details up front. Questions like, is the process repeatable, and will the app require access to sensitive data or info from other departments, can help builders design an app properly from the get go. With the basic info complete, Carla submits the app idea for her admins to review. From here, we move to the admin perspective, joining Able Tutor in App Engine Management Center. The dashboard offers a bird's eye view to all aspects of low-code governance, including collaboration requests, deployment tasks, overview of the app deployment pipeline, and, of course, intake application requests. Able opens up the request from Carla and, after ensuring the app concept complies to their company's guidelines, he approves. This approval will send off an automatic notification email to Carla and grant her the necessary system access. Given the flexibility of the ServiceNow platform, you could also incorporate your own welcome packages or references to training materials as part of this process. Excited by the approval, Carla gets right to work on her marketing event management app with her newly granted access to App Engine Studio. This low-code development environment provides a unified experience for developers of all skill levels, providing a range of tools that can help builders develop nearly any type of app. Data within App Engine Studio can be imported, developed from scratch, or extended from existing ServiceNow constructs. The tooling in App Engine Studio ensures users can seamlessly go from data model to form development all the way to policy and rules all in one place. With her initial data models complete, Carla can add an array of consumer grade end user experiences spanning everything from dedicated portals and admin workspaces to mobile apps and catalog items. These end user experiences are brought to life by logic and automation. Whether it's a modular decision table or a streamlined workflow, App Engine allows you to easily develop flexible and reusable automation to power any use case. Should the need arise, you can amplify the functionality of your app by leveraging the wide array of solutions available via automation engine. This will allow you to incorporate things like low-code API integrations and even robotic process automation. Flow Designer makes it easy to develop this automation and even offers a diagram view that makes understanding complex logic as easy as tracing a flow diagram with your cursor. This flowchart style perspective gives builders an easy way to design their automation with intuitive depictions of things like conditionals and branching logic. After just a few days, Carla is ready to release the first version of her marketing event management app. But before she does, she wants to invite a few experts to help her get started on version 2. Using the built-in collaboration features of App Engine Studio, she can extend an invite to both a visual designer and integration expert to help her take this app to the next level. For now though, Carla is confident her app can start adding value to her team so she submits the app for deployment. After outlining some release notes, the deployment request is now safely in the hands of her admins. Back in App Engine Management Center, Able notices a few new items to address. He first opens up the collaboration request Carla sent out and performs a quick verification before approval. Using this mechanism and App Engine's collaborator descriptors, his team ensures that access to low-code development tools is provisioned in a rational fashion, providing experts with access to the right builders for their needs. With the collaboration request approved, Able can address the app deployment request. After a review of the application, Able can sign off on the deployment request, confirming that the app's data models and user experiences, automation, integrations, and security policies meet the standards outlined by his Citizen Development Center of Excellence. That due diligence enables him to authorize the app's promotion to their test instance. At this phase, App Engine automatically generates a test using ServiceNow's automated test framework that can be extended for the needs of the business. This test phase also includes an instant scan to ensure best practice and security issues are brought to the admin team's attention. Once complete, all logs associated with these tests are available in the deployment request record, providing full traceability regarding this app's journey to production. Satisfied with the test results, Able approves the next phase of deployment, authorizing promotion to the stage instance. Within stage, the application will go through any final evaluation necessary before transition to production. This step will help ensure that integrations are functioning properly, permissions are working as planned, and could even give a handful of early adopters a chance to test out the app. The final approval will promote this application to the production instance, once again handling all of the migration of this app's code with a single click of a button. This particular deployment pipeline involves four different instances, but the flexible pipeline configuration of Engine Management Center means that you can set up any type of pipeline that fits your needs, perhaps just two instances or maybe even five. With this final push, Carla's app is now safely in production and ready to meet the demands of her business. The comprehensive record of this deployment request will always be available within App Engine Management Center, offering a variety of helpful resources such as the deployment environment results page, which gives a quick summary regarding issues found during deployment. This powerful new capability makes it easy for everyone to participate in the low-code revolution and gives administrators peace of mind as they build out and govern their citizen development practice. The customizability of this framework means you can tailor the process to fit your needs, whether that entails offering collaboration descriptors that match your organization or customization of your deployment pipeline to align with your instant setup. And of course, the best part is that all of these solutions are available in one unified place, the ServiceNow platform. For more information, please be sure to check out ServiceNow.com. Thanks for checking out this demo. And have a great day. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Automate and connect anything to ServiceNow with Automation Engine
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] In a world where going faster with greater consistency is a desired outcome, automation is one of the most pivotal factors differentiating high-performing businesses from those struggling to keep up. Market leaders are automating two to five times more work than their lagging counterparts, giving them the competitive edge to realize higher revenues, improved workforce productivity, and fewer business continuity disruptions. ServiceNow provides a comprehensive cloud platform to drive end-to-end automation that can help your business realize new levels of efficiency, integration, and productivity. Automation Engine is the key to this potential, offering a native low-code suite of automation and integration capabilities that work cohesively with both your modern as well as your legacy enterprise systems. Let's take a look at an evolving partnership between two fictitious companies and see how quickly Automation Engine can make a valuable impact. Acme Inc. has recently established a formal partnership with one of their key suppliers, Vendor Co., in order to optimize the way they jointly meet the needs of their customers. To kick off this new partnership, the two businesses need to navigate the initial agreement and documentation phase, hold a kickoff workshop to commence planning, and establish technical linkages between their key information systems. In the past, Acme Inc. struggled with a cumbersome partner onboarding process that involved a great deal of human latency and manual steps. This process required coordination between finance, legal, and operations teams associated with both companies, resulting in an interaction that could take weeks, if not months. App Engine allowed Acme Inc. to quickly build an app to address this problem, allowing their team to not only easily create a data model and an array of stellar user experiences but also leverage the power of Automation Engine in a structured low-code environment. Using Automation Engine, Acme Inc. now has a streamlined approach that automates the onboarding process, providing an automatic mechanism to coordinate with each constituent in parallel. The heart of the solution is Flow Designer with the IntegrationHub spoke for DocuSign, which allows the flow of work to move forward autonomously, requiring a minimal amount of human interaction. Using a catalog item, a member of the operations team can easily kick off an onboarding request, which will then dynamically generate the appropriate documents in DocuSign. From there, automation in Flow Designer will handle the rest, ensuring that all appropriate parties complete the necessary steps, and that management approval and notification is incorporated as needed. This automation enabled Acme Inc. to expedite the traditionally lengthy onboarding phase and allow them to focus on their impending strategic kickoff. Thankfully, this event was also streamlined thanks to the use of Automation Engine's robotic process automation capabilities. For many of the Acme Inc. employees, this kickoff will be their first time in the corporate offices, which means they need to obtain an ID badge. Similarly, the guests coming from Vendor Co. will need temporary badging to ensure they can access the necessary facilities. Acme Inc. uses a legacy badging application built on the Microsoft .NET framework, which unfortunately doesn't have any API access. This tool requires the lobby ambassador to manually confirm and transfer employee information from their directory to the badging tool. When a guest arrives, the lobby ambassador performs a similar process but also has to confirm with the guest sponsor. Normally, this doesn't present an issue, as the lobby ambassador can handle a few guests at a time, but with such a large influx of guests coming on such short notice, it's pivotal that the access and authorization process be as automated and accurate as possible. Robotic process automation solves this problem with ease, enabling sophisticated workflow automation that connects with this legacy tool, eliminating the need for manual repetitive work. The beauty of the solution is that all the automation is unified on a single platform and is using Flow Designer as well. Using the ServiceNow platform, employees can use the Service Catalog within Employee Center to request that badges be available for them at the location and time of their choice. The Service Catalog can also be used by the kickoff coordinator to proactively request guest badges. These requests will then trigger a flow in Flow Designer that automatically interface with the badging system using an RPA robot, or what we call a digital worker, while simultaneously keeping interested parties informed. Once triggered, the RPA robot springs into action, equipped with the data flowing from the ServiceNow request. It will first log into the badging app with appropriate permissions, select the appropriate badge type, enter the necessary details, and determine the completion states that it can send that status back to the ServiceNow instance. As you can see, not only is this automation massively faster. It also provides greater accuracy and traceability. Back in the ServiceNow instance, admins have full visibility to the activities of the RPA robots. RPA Hub serves as the central management interface through which admins can build, administer, and monitor their RPA activities. Admins can manage the lifecycle of their RPA automation, package them for distribution, manage their plug-in library, and more. Another great feature of RPA Hub is the ability to track business application dependencies so that your organization can tactfully manage upgrades to applications involved with your automation. The RPA Hub spoke is a native component of Flow Designer, so you can incorporate robotic process automation in nearly any process or workflow. This flexibility allows you to create truly complete automation that can integrate via API with modern systems using Integration Hub's out-of-the-box spokes or via tight coupling using RPA, all orchestrated on a modern, intuitive, low-code platform. With this badge generation automation in place, the lobby ambassador can focus on what they do best, and the attendees can rest assured their kickoff will start on time. While the leadership team of these two companies strategize, their respective IT teams are already hard at work integrating and streamlining their backend systems. The integration capabilities of Automation Engine encompass more than individual low-code spokes. They also include powerful mechanisms to link disparate systems. One such capability is Integration Hub Import, a low-code tool that provides a structured framework wrapped in an intuitive user interface that walks you through everything you need to execute and monitor even the largest import jobs. Acme Inc. has a critical dependency on issues tracked via Vendor Co.'s Jira instance. In the past, major impacts to Acme Inc. could have been avoided if an automated linkage between systems of record had been established. Now using integration of Import, issues in Vendor Co.'s Jira instance will be automatically synchronized with Acme Inc.'s ServiceNow instance, enabling a bevy of dynamic updates and flags to be triggered should a specific condition be met. This solution provides a reliable way to extract just the information Acme Inc. needs from Vendor Co.'s system, eliminating the need to give Acme Inc. full access to their internal information. To amplify the efficacy of this new integration, Acme Inc. has also established an automated notification system to provide their teams proactive visibility to Vendor Co. issues of interest. After the issues have been imported from Vendor Co.'s Jira instance, Acme Inc.'s automation will kick in any time an issue surfaces with both high impact and high customer usage. Once triggered, this flow will use ServiceNow's automated email notification to update key aliases along with the Microsoft Teams spoke to notify on-call staff and triage Teams Rooms. There are near countless ways these two businesses could take advantage of the out-of-the-box integration of spokes available with Automation Engine. With an ever expanding library of over 175 spokes and over 4,000 pre-built data actions, there's a good chance these two entities will rarely find themselves needing to write a custom integration, but if they do, ServiceNow has got them covered. Automation Engine's solution portfolio offers not only low-code tooling but also a deep range of sophisticated tools for pro developers. One such capability is Action Designer, a robust framework that allows you to create custom integrations for differentiated use cases and package them as spokes for reuse by anyone. Action Designer supports JavaScript, REST, SOAP, PowerShell, SSH, and more. You can even copy and extend existing ServiceNow spokes to give your company even more flexibility with the way they connect external systems. Using Action Designer, Acme Inc. and Vendor Co. can rest assured that by using ServiceNow as their platform of platforms, they'll be able to quickly and easily address any business challenge or opportunity that comes their way. This single-platform approach will help them not only automate their current business processes but truly reimagine the way work gets done. ServiceNow's relentless focus on ease of use and innovation means faster time to value due to the ever-evolving catalog of solutions and capabilities, allowing these two customers to leverage best-in-class, cloud-based functionality with little to no operational overhead. Leveraging ServiceNow also means substantially lower total cost of ownership, given that all of this automation runs on ServiceNow's Cloud Infrastructure. It's easy to see how much of a difference Automation Engine can make and how rapidly this technology can be integrated into nearly any ecosystem. But to make things even easier, we invite you to partner with us to amplify your automation journey. Engage your ServiceNow account team to identify and prioritize automation opportunities within your business and then address them head on with Automation Engine. And as always, be sure to visit servicenow.com for detailed information and product documentation. Thanks a bunch for checking out this demo. Have a great day. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Boost employee productivity and organizational efficiency
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] ServiceNow continues to help organizations to create a great employee experience by boosting employee productivity and driving organizational efficiency. In this demo, we'll focus on how employees communication and take action through the devices and channels that make sense for them, how HR teams can work efficiently through intelligent purpose-built workspaces, and how the experience can be continuously improved with real-time data. Let's start our journey with Emily. She works remotely. So it's critical for her to have access to her company's resources wherever she is. Today, while taking her dog for a morning walk, she opens her Now mobile app to get the help she needs. Here, she sees pertinent communications from her company pushed directly to her as well as other info like upcoming space reservation, tasks, or requests. Today, she needs to get some help understanding her company's policy for reimbursing tuition expenses since she hasn't done this before. And since she's out and about, she simply starts a chat with the Virtual Agent. By using natural language, it's easy for her to type in what she needs to get help with. It looks like the Virtual Agent has found a couple of things for her. To make sure her program is covered, she first wants to review the policy. Since it's all housed within ServiceNow, Emily can review the policy right from her device, and after confirming her course is covered, open the request right from here. All she needs to do is populate some basic information, like what course she's taking and how much it costs. And then she can submit it. Now she's automatically kicked off a workflow to get the process started all from her mobile device. And when she gets back to her home office, Emily logs into her company's modern internet built on the Employee Center to get her day started. Here she sees additional announcements specifically for her, as well as information from across her company, like news, recommended content, upcoming holidays, frequently used applications, and more. But right now, Emily wants to check on the progress of her reimbursement request. The good news is, since where she starts her day is built on the workflows of the Now platform, she can pop right in and see her request alongside the others that she might have opened. Right away, Emily can see all the details at a glance, including granular info like how long this will take to resolve based on the machine learning of similar cases. So not only does she know who is owning the process where it stands, but also has peace of mind that this will be wrapped up in plenty of time. She notices the workflow has assigned her a new task to complete as part of the process. All she needs to do is review and sign a document that is automatically populated with the details she provided when submitting the request. By leveraging the data she has already provided, it cuts down on duplicative effort and drives a more seamless employee experience. And with a quick e-signature the task automatically closes and drops off her list of to-dos. And in case she ever needs to access this document again, it is automatically added to her employee profile for quick access. Here, it is housed alongside other info like her PTO balance and pay stubs that have been fed in directly from her HR and payroll systems. Now she has one spot where she can go get info and take actions across ServiceNow and other systems. And before getting on with her day, she wants to double-check what the next step is. She sees that it's now waiting to be approved. Because all of the details were clearly laid out for her, Emily sees that it needs to be approved by her manager Maria. So she decides to ping her quickly to keep the ball rolling. From Maria's perspective, when Emily reaches out through Microsoft Teams, she can chat with her and move Emily's request forward without navigating away. Instead, because the Employee Center is embedded natively within Teams, she can pop right in. And just like Emily, Maria's content is personalized to her. Since she is a manager, she's pushed manager-specific communications directly to her. And because the embedded experience is the same as what she would get outside of Teams, all the content and action she needs to take are right here at her fingertips. So she can easily see the details of Emily's request and approve right from her home page. And picking it up from the point of view of Harry, our HR agent that was assigned to Emily's case, we can see that his workspace makes it clear what other cases he has assigned, any high priority cases, and if there are any at risk of breaching SLAs, making it easier for him to prioritize and take action on all these moving parts. But for now, Harry wants to tackle Emily's case. So he clicks into the case tile to see the details. From here, Harry has granular detail about Emily's tuition reimbursement case, such as the channel she opened the case from, what service is tied to, and more. Of particular interest is the skills section, which is what was used to auto-assign the case to Harry based on machine learning. This helps cut down on errors when managing a case like this by ensuring it is only rooted to the right individuals based on skill, geography, service, and other criteria. And his HR Agent Workspace provides all the info he might need to help manage a case like this. At a glance, he can see all the biographical info about Emily as well as see that her manager is Maria. Because this info is critical to ensure an excellent experience, it is served right up to him. To make Harry's life even easier, Agent Assist provides him with the intelligence selection of knowledge articles from across the company that are directly related to this case. So if Harry needs further information about how to handle this case or to confirm Emily fits the criteria for reimbursement, he doesn't have to leave the workspace to find the right information. And because the document Emily signed is tied to the case itself, Harry doesn't have to go searching in an outside document repository. Instead, he can tell right away that it's been signed and uploaded by Emily. He also has access to prebuilt response templates as well as step-by-step fulfillment instructions. So that no matter who receives this case, the service they provide is the same. He sees that since Emily has uploaded the signed document, all that's next is approval from both her manager and himself. If Harry needed more info from Emily, he could always open up a team's chat directly with Emily from the workspace. No need to reach out via email or phone, but rather connect with Emily in the channel she's most used to collaborating in. But in this case, Harry has all the info he needs to move the case forward. So he clicks into the approver's tab to confirm Maria has already approved the case. Since Maria has already approved, the workflow automatically assigned an approval task to Harry for final approval. Since everything is looks to be in order, he updates it to approved. Now when he returns to the Details tab, he sees that the case is fully approved. So Harry saves the case and it will await Emily's final transcripts before reimbursing her expenses. And before wrapping up his work for the day, Harry wants to prepare for an HR leadership meeting he has in the morning. So he wants to check out how the HR team is performing across a number of KPIs. With the unified navigation menu, it's simple for him to pop into the leadership dashboard without navigating away. Here he has real-time data on how the HR team is performing holistically. Not only does he have data about HR service delivery, but also insight into the broader employee experience, like net promoter score, attrition rates, which channels employees are engaging in, and more. He can also see voice of the employee data, which helps leadership keep a pulse on what employees need and where HR can continuously improve. With ServiceNow, it has never been easier to boost employee productivity and drive organizational efficiency, all to deliver a great employee experience. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Unifying experiences for people and places
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] In the world of hybrid work, the employee experience is intertwined with where work gets done. With ServiceNow, it's easy to create a unified experience across your people and places. In this demo, we'll show how companies can create personalized crossdepartmental journeys during moments that matter, how they help employees grow with curated learning opportunities, and continuously improve service delivery with in-moment feedback, and ensure a seamless experience for employees to collaborate safely in person. So let's dive right in. Let's start our journey with Maria, a manager who logs into the Employee Center to get some work done today. She has someone new transferring into her team so she wants to kick off the process right away. With the power of a search right at the center of her home page, she doesn't need to navigate far to get it started. She just typed in a few keywords and is immediately presented with some suggested results. Maria can see there's a lot of info out there about transfers, but the intelligence of AI search knows that she's probably looking to start a transfer process so she goes ahead and clicks into the Genius Results. From their, all Maria needs to do is put in some basic details about who is joining her team and when they will be starting, and then she can submit the request to trigger the transfer workflow. Powered by the life cycle events engine, all the key steps in the process are already laid out for her. She can see what tasks she needs to complete as well as the tasks Isabelle's assigned as part of the process. This allows managers and their employees to be on the same page when going through complex cross-departmental journeys like this. To keep the ball rolling, Maria wants to tackle the first item for her, which is creating a custom journey accelerator plan to help Isabelle ramp up. Maria simply needs to indicate that this plan is for Isabelle and chooses from the pre-built plans her company has provided her. And to make sure someone is with Isabelle every step of the way, she adds Emily as a mentor to the plan for good measure. Next, she's immediately greeted with a plan in draft form. To cut down on the amount of work Maria needs to do to launch one of these plans, a lot of the steps have already been built for her. She can see how the ramp up process will be orchestrated across the coming weeks and months to ensure a smooth transition. But Maria wants to add a task that's specific to her team so she goes ahead and chooses to add a new to-do. She could choose from one that she's used in the past, but she wants to create a new one in this case. For right now, she wants to include a new e-learning in the plan that she's found helpful for the rest of her team. With learning post capabilities included in the journey accelerator plan, Maria can quickly choose from a library of courses fed into ServiceNow from one of their pre-built integrations to a learning provider. Once she chooses the course, she can assign it to Isabelle, indicate when it should be completed within the plan, and, in this case, she saves it as a template for use in future plans. Now that she has the plan set up the way she wants, Maria can publish and it will automatically assign the task to Isabelle, Emily, and Maria herself. And while she's here, Maria wants to check off that she's assigned a mentor to this plan. All she needs to do is mark it as complete and it will fall off her list of to-dos. But to make sure they're continuously improving the experiences for managers and their teams, Maria is prompted to complete a quick listening post survey to capture her moment feedback. With a quick five star review and a comment about how easy the process was, the feedback is submitted to the HR team. And when she navigates back to the plan, she can see that the task is marked as complete and she can move on with the rest of the ramp up plan. A little later on, Maria receives an email indicating that Emily has reserved a desk for the day to come into the office to help onboard Isabelle. Given that this is the first time in a while she'll have a few people in the office at once, Maria wants to take this opportunity to have a team meeting with everyone. Since Emily reserved her space through ServiceNow, it is simple for Maria to find a space to meet that is in the same area as Emily. Now she could let the system automatically assign her a nearby seat, but Maria wants to get a conference room for the meeting so she clicks into Browse All the Spaces. She is then automatically redirected into the space reservation section of the Employee Center. Here she can see all the different types of spaces she can reserve as well as more information. If this was just Maria coming in, she might choose a desk. But instead, she updates the search to find an available conference room. With the native mapping capabilities of ServiceNow, it's easy for her to see all the available conference rooms around Emily's reservation. She can zoom in until she finds the right space. It looks like this room is by Emily and Isabelle and will be big enough for her team to collaborate. Once she has selected it, she can confirm additional details like a subject, reservation summary, and she can even invite Isabelle and Emily to the reservation right from here. Now they will get notified that she has a conference room for them to connect in person. Once she confirms all the details fit her needs, she can submit and the space will be reserved for her. Once the space has been reserved, Maria wants to double check what the health and safety protocols are for coming back into the office. To make it easy to find this critical information, her organization has configured a dedicated microsite in the Employee Center to house all the details about coming back to the office. Here Maria can see announcements pushed directly to this page, just like on her home page, to drive action and communication for targeted content. It also has featured content, associated articles and requests, as well as videos and other links to give Maria everything she needs all in one spot. Thanks to the banner announcement, she sees that there are updated workplace policies that have been published so she dives in to learn more. Here she can see the updated policies and confirm the requirements all without leaving the Employee Center. Specifically, she notes that she will need to upload a vaccination status for COVID-19 or a negative test prior to gaining access to the building. Fast forward to the day of the team meeting and Maria opens her mobile app to quickly update her vaccination status before coming in. Her company has a dedicated space on the app to inform and take action on health and safety activities. She has already flagged herself as returning so she wants to check the rest of her status to enter the office. Since she hasn't uploaded her vaccination information yet, she immediately sees that she is not cleared for entry. But right from here she can click in and submit her vaccination status. With just a few clicks, she can input that she was vaccinated and which types she received. Since she received a one dose vaccine, she'll only need to complete this once. But if she had two doses, she would be automatically prompted to submit a second dose at the appropriate time. From there, she just needs to choose when she received it and upload a picture of her vaccination card. She could take a picture and upload it right then. But since she already has it in her library of photos, she just uses that image. Once all that information is submitted, she sees that her status is automatically updated and she's cleared to enter the office. And once Maria is in the office, she wants to greet Emily and Isabelle at their desks before the team meeting starts. With the wayfinding capabilities of ServiceNow built into her app, all she needs to do is put in the start and end locations and it will automatically provide her with the most direct route to meet them. Now Emily, Isabelle, and Maria, as well as the rest of their team, can start the rest of their journey together. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Systematically harden the digital attack surface
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Today we'll be looking at how ServiceNow helps IT and security teams work together to systematically harden the digital attack surface. Organizations face vulnerabilities in the tens and hundreds of millions in an ever-expanding attack surface. The recent Log4j vulnerabilities showed us that response teams need to be ready for emergency exposures in high volumes across different attack surfaces. ServiceNow Vulnerability Response helps security and IT teams work with this data at scale, making it easy to find what matters and act on vulnerabilities in bulk, maximizing efficiency. The Vulnerability Manager Workspace allows security teams to visualize their data and watch topics. This makes it easy to track millions of vulnerabilities and visualize exposure. Watch topics show the types of vulnerabilities and assets that are most important to your organization. Security teams can set up sophisticated watch topics that capture specific slices of their data and monitor when to take action, such as the Log4j vulnerabilities shown here. When the response team is ready to act on a slice of vulnerabilities, they can initiate remediation in bulk across a whole watch topic by creating a remediation effort. The work will be automatically divided into remediation tasks and assigned to the appropriate stakeholders in IT remediation groups. Remediation efforts and tasks help us organize vulnerability data into easily managed chunks so that IT teams can quickly and efficiently target and remediate the most critical vulnerabilities that slip through the patching process. From the IT Remediation Workspace, the IT remediation owner can work on fixing these vulnerabilities within their remediation target. If they're ready to fix the vulnerabilities in this remediation task, they can create a change request at the click of a button. Change requests can be created easily and accurately from here using your organization's standard change templates and any customized change approval workflows that have been put in place. Note that information about the vulnerable assets and how to fix the vulnerability is pre-populated into the change request, if available. This integration is bidirectional so when the change has been implemented, the remediation task and its vulnerable items will be marked as resolved and await confirmation from the next scan. In this case, we'll simply resolve these, leaving a note the change implementation is in progress. But how do security teams and IT remediation owners know what to work on first? Using threat intelligence and business context available in the Now Platform, vulnerability response provides true risk-based vulnerability management tailored to your enterprise. ServiceNow can act as a calculator of calculators, pulling in information from all sources and providing a 1 to 100 score of cumulative risk. Simple GUI-based calculators can be used or, if desired, more precise and complex logic can be supplied in JavaScript. For instance, we can change the weight of the input criteria to prioritize vulnerabilities with an available exploit on internet-facing CIs' support of business critical service. We can even incorporate third-party sources into risk score calculations, like the Tenable calculators seen here. To get vulnerabilities to the right owners, scan findings are automatically assigned to groups or individuals based on rules. Assignment rules can be tailored to your needs using any data available in ServiceNow to determine the best assignment for a vulnerability. These remediation tasks, created earlier for the Log4j vulnerabilities, have been automatically assigned to the best groups. But sometimes vulnerability ownership is too complex for rules. When a vulnerable item is unassigned or incorrectly assigned, we can use machine learning predictive intelligence to provide assignment recommendations in bulk, saving security analysts time in chasing down assignments and getting vulnerabilities to the right owners faster. But to fix a vulnerability, security and IT teams need more information than CVE ID and a risk score. They need to know what solutions are available, what other softwares could be exposed, and references to common knowledge from multiple sources. ServiceNow stores a library of CVE entries from the MVD alongside third-party vulnerability definitions. We also store reference information and a list of vulnerable softwares to be presented alongside your scan results. This is what the recent Log4j vulnerabilities would have looked like to an investigating analyst. In particular, this Log4shell vulnerability. The threat intel integrations help us understand what is happening with this vulnerability in the wild. Is there an exploit kit for it? Is it being exploited often? Solution integrations with Microsoft and Red Hat show the available patches and fixes and which solution is preferred for each item. This provides remediation instructions to teams without the need to search, whether it is applying a patch or something like changing a setting. With all your vulnerability data in the ServiceNow platform, even the high level reports delivered to executives are built into a single source of truth. This CSO dashboard is available by default and features interactive widgets with real time data. This helps show actionable insights into your security posture like the prevalence of the Log4j vulnerabilities, shown here. Vulnerability response is the control tower of defensive security across the entire attack surface, extending your response automation across application security, and operational technology, and IoT vulnerabilities. Application security testing scanners can be integrated to show security flaws on in-house applications. You can even perform penetration testing assessments on applications and capture the findings right next to vulnerabilities found by automated scans. With operational technology management, OT and IoT vulnerabilities can receive the same risk-based response with all of the nuance of their Purdue model equipment relationships and site management information. In the ServiceNow platform, your vulnerability data can be put into a new context with data from other business functions. And the experience can be tailored to your processes and metrics. Users can create their own reports and dashboards. The CSO dashboard is a great example of what customers can rapidly build using our GUI-based report engine and drag and drop dashboards. One of the advantages that ServiceNow has is the ability to bring together data from many groups to provide holistic insights across the board. Finally, it's easy to integrate your security tooling with ServiceNow. We offer integrations with vulnerability scanners like Tenable Security Center in IO, Qualys, Rapid7, Microsoft Defender, Vericode, Fortify On Demand, and Tripwire as well as vulnerability threat intelligence solutions for enrichment such as Recorded Future, iDefense, and Shodan, and ExploitDB. All these and more are available to install with just a few clicks from the ServiceNow store, alongside many more certified applications offered by third-party partners. Today we've seen how ServiceNow Vulnerability Response can systematically Harden the entire digital attack surface by visualizing exposure, automating response processes, improving prioritization with integrated threat analysis and business impacts triage, enhancing collaboration between security and IT, and providing the big picture analytics necessary to surface actionable insights. Thanks for watching. And stay safe. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Optimize your DLP incident response
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Organizations have long struggled to keep up with the overwhelming amount of data loss prevention incidents they have to manage. Disparate products across their infrastructure make managing the incidents difficult to track in a timely fashion and can be even more frustrating for end users and their managers. DLP Incident Response, part of ServiceNow Security Operations, gives us the power to integrate with data loss prevention products to import incidents from multiple sources, including endpoint, network, email, and cloud, into a single platform. Then using a remediation workflow, we can automatically assign incidents to end users, managers, and DLP analyst teams with automated incident assignment and escalation, all using intuitive, easy to use workspaces designed specifically to make managing and reporting this work easy. There are four main use cases that DLP Incident Response helps address. First, by enabling the API integration with solutions, like Symantec Broadcom DLP, we can import incidents for endpoint, network, cloud, and email into ServiceNow and then invoke DLP incident remediation workflows involving end users or employees, managers, and DLP analysts. DLP Incident Response also allows DLP administrators the ability to define and filter which incidents will be imported into ServiceNow based on the requirements of the organization. DLP administrators can also configure email templates for coaching and communicating to end users and provides comprehensive reporting on incident trends. And when it's needed, incidents can be escalated up the chain of command. DLP admins can define the escalation criteria for the different types of incidents. Furthermore, DLP analysts can also look into their own workspace to view the state of DLP across their enterprise and respond to different incidents directly when needed. Finally, DLP Incident Response reduces the burden on the DLP analyst team. Since many DLP incidents are generated due to the error on the end users' part, now incidents can be assigned directly to the end users. And email templates can be used either as a weekly digest or whenever an incident is discovered with why the incident was generated and how to resolve it. Let's take a look at the DLP Analyst Workspace first. And then we'll see what the end user workspace looks like. The DLP Analyst Workspace is designed to give the people responsible for managing incidents a holistic view of data loss incidents in their environment. It shows DLP analysts a wealth of information, including open incidents by severity, the top offenders. If we scroll down, we can even see open incidents by policy, scan source, and more. Let's drill into one of these categories. Let's look at the critical open incidents by severity. We can see that there's a lot of information available to the DLP analyst, including the policy names, the state of each individual incident, the severity, et cetera. If we look at one of these, we can see that it shows the state, the scam type, the source, as well as the end user. And in this particular case, we can see that this particular DLP incident was assigned to the end user automatically based on assignment rules the DLP admin set up. Now let's switch personas and take on the role of Danny Watson. We're now logged in as Danny, as we can see in the upper right hand corner. We could see a few important details when we log in to the end user workspace. We can see the escalated incidents, incidents that are assigned to you, due to the next seven days, et cetera. Let's go ahead and look at the incidents assigned to you. And, again, we see a lot of useful information for the end user, including the policy name of each incident, the severity, scan source, and, when appropriate, the file location. I'm going to scroll down and find the same incident that we were looking at earlier. A lot of the same information is available to the end user that the DLP analyst saw, such as the scan type, source, end user. It's worth noting that Danny can upload attachments if needed. For example, if Danny received an email exception from management, they can attach an email right here. The end user can also take direct action, such as reporting this as a false positive, reporting that it's the wrong owner, or submitting a response. Let's go ahead and see what different responses are available to us. Now, these responses were set up by the DLP administrator ahead of time. This is fully customizable. So in this particular case, we can say that we've deleted the content. We can say this is required for a business process, like in the example we had just talked about, using the attached file. Or we can say we've deleted the file. Once that's done, we can enter in some comments and click Submit. That was a brief look at the new DLP Incident Response for ServiceNow Security Operations. If you'd like to learn more, please visit us at www.servicenow.com/sec-ops. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Respond with agility to evolving cyber threats
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Millions of emails are sent every day from all over the globe while most of these are mundane and perfectly normal, some are not. Some are laced with attempts to breach organizations and attack them for a variety of reasons. One of the most insidious types of attacks are designed to compromise and encrypt devices against an organization's will, forcing them to choose between paying off the attacker or losing access to critical data and devices forever. ServiceNow can help you mitigate ransomware attacks by making your organization's security posture more efficient, automated, and responsive with tools like security incident response, threat intelligence, major security incident management, and vulnerability response, working in conjunction with your existing security assets and collaborating with teams from across your organization. With ServiceNow security incident response, you'll be able to increase the amount of fully assessed attack surface in your IT network. Scale your limited resources and improve operational efficiency. It's typical to see a 40% to 60% reduction in the time to resolve security incidents when converting from a more manual and disparate process. Here, a security analyst sees incidents that are assigned to them or their team. Risk scoring allows the analyst to quickly determine the highest priority incidents that need to be addressed first, such as this ransomware incident. Our security analyst has decided to verify what's going on with this incident and scrutinize the data related to it, as well as notify management that they likely have a major security incident on their hands. The security analyst also wants to find out what threat intelligence exist for this ransomware attack. And to do so, they're going to use the threat intelligence that ServiceNow provides in conjunction with the Miter ATT&CK framework. ServiceNow is now fully integrated with Miter ATT&CK for threat intelligence, which can provide valuable insights that security professionals need to see what known patterns of attack this specific type of ransomware uses, it also provides a quick visual of the current security posture for detecting and defending against each of these attack techniques. Miter ATT&CK can assist security leaders in managing security programs by helping them understand how the various defensive systems are performing and identify where there may be any gaps. Paired up with a fully fleshed out configuration management database, analysts can see the who, where, and what indicators of compromise exists for this event. The security analyst knows that this ransomware attack is going to need a prompt and supervised response across different parts of the organization, including management, legal, and engineering. Major security incidents are created when a security incident is promoted, these options are configurable and can happen in one of two ways. Analysts can propose a security incident be promoted to the major security incident manager or commander, which then triggers an internal review process or analysts can immediately promote if warranted. In this case, we'll choose the latter since we know the organization considers a ransomware attack to be a crisis event. This is the major security incident management workspace. Here, the incident commander can coordinate and direct the entire incident response process. And from here, the commander has access to the entire collection of tools and integrations at the disposal. This gives them the ability to see every aspect of the incident quickly and easily, creating a virtual command center. The overview of the major security incident workspace contains metrics that provide a comprehensive look at the major security incident and its related components, such as tasks, duration, incident impact, and collaboration. And as this incident progresses, these charts and diagrams will continue to populate and update. Major security incident management leverages records from across the platform and outside sources. These records are then attached directly to the incident where the data can be viewed and analyzed to work the incident. Major security incident management also provides a centralized repository to store all of the pertinent file artifacts for the incident. Managers can even perform a variety of file operations directly from the UI, such as creating or deleting files and folders and adding or removing user access. Also, this tool allows teams to collaborate across various functions from your organization's C-suite, legal, management, to your security operation center where analysts and vulnerability response teams can collaborate. While the organization deals with this ransomware incident, they also want to make sure that there aren't any more systems that might be vulnerable to this specific attack. To help them do so, ServiceNow vulnerability response will allow the organization to do just that. Organizations face vulnerabilities in the tens and hundreds of millions and an ever expanding attack surface. ServiceNow vulnerability response helps IT and security teams work together with this data at scale, making it easy to find what matters and act on vulnerabilities in bulk, maximizing efficiency and optimizing and orchestrating enterprise security operations. The vulnerability response application provides a single system of action and engagement, integrating with a wide selection of vulnerability scanners, vulnerability threat intelligence sources for enrichment and supporting archives for additional details on your organization's security posture. Here we can see the organization's vulnerability manager has created a Watch Topic related to what systems and devices are exposed to ransomware attacks that are similar in nature to the one that the security analyst caught earlier. Watch Topics show the types of vulnerabilities and assets that are most important to your organization. Security teams can set up sophisticated Watch Topics that capture specific slices of data and monitor when to act. When the organization is ready to act on a slice of vulnerabilities through the ServiceNow vulnerability response, they can initiate remediation in bulk as well. This is all a lot to take in and track. ServiceNow is driven to make your world of security operations more manageable and coordinated. With ServiceNow, organizations can leverage our analytics to improve their security program on the platform, organizations can create their own reports and dashboards. Our customers appreciate the ability to build dashboards for their teams and leadership. This CISO dashboard is a great example of what customers can rapidly build using our GUI based report engine and drag and drop dashboards. One of the advantages of that ServiceNow has is the ability to bring together data from many groups to provide holistic insights across the board. On this Overview tab, we have information from teams across risk, policy compliant, configuration management, vulnerability response, and security incident response. Dashboard tabs can be created to organize the data. In this example, the tabs provide extra details for the different groups, but they can be arranged in style to however an individual user prefers. This gives your organization the ability to watch big picture trends in their day to day work as they strive to keep your organization secure, including from threats like ransomware. If you'd like to learn more about what you saw today, please contact your account manager or visit us at www.servicenow.com. Thank You. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Drive efficiencies through Global Business Services
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 Many organizations are looking to transform siloed operations to a global business services model in order to create consistency and standardization of ServiceNow delivery across the enterprise connecting end to end processes and systems to drive out waste and deliver value that can be reinvested where it's needed most ServiceNow is the glue that connects GBS organizations it's the single point of engagement for employees and it's the workflow and automation engine that powers operations and unlocks visibility to drive continuous improvement efforts Maria is a manager preparing for an on site team meeting and would like to find a trainer to attend and help her team with public speaking she isn't quite sure how to request a trainer so she turns to the Virtual Agent for help Virtual Agent helps employees find answers to commonly asked questions. So that agents are freed up to focus on more complex cases, Virtual Agent uses natural language understanding so employees can enter key words or phrases to receive additional guidance due to the nature of her inquiry the Virtual Agent automatically creates a universal request on her behalf the workflow has been kicked off in advanced work assignments ensure that it gets routed to an expert that's able to help this allows agents to resolve cases seamlessly across the enterprise. And provides a consistent ticketing experience regardless of what the employee needs help with before she leaves she also wants to check the status of another request so she asks what is the status of my workplace case since ServiceNow is a single platform across HR IT workplace legal and more she can search for any open ticket to view an update of where it's at in the process, providing an exceptional experience for your people now let's sign in as Stephen the head of shared services Stephen is provided with a consolidated dashboard view of all cases across the business from the single view he can monitor trends and look for areas of opportunity and efficiency Steven can drill into cases to get a sense of what his global team is working on across the different lines of business whether that be HR or legal IT procurement and more the training requests Maria submitted is just one example of the many cases being created and moving through his organization ServiceNow is natural language detection has automatically assigned the case to an HR agent Harry this auto assignment routed the case to the ideal resource eliminating back and forth between departments and ensures that the case is resolved quickly now let's switch gears to the agent's perspective similar to the shared services dashboard Harry the HR agent also has insight into critical data such as sales and high priority cases as he views the list of all open cases he can drill in and immediately begin working on the case this request was auto assigned to air but this same view is consistent across all departments and agents if needed the case can easily be transferred to another team member or business unit the air agents at this organization get hundreds of cases like this every week so they work with our internal development team to create a custom form that allows them to gather additional information about the training needs this custom app was built using the Now platform's low code tools which allows GPS to create customizations without having to replace existing systems and it provides faster time to value here you can assign the custom catalog item to Maria and she'll immediately be notified that she has an action item related to her case let's circle back to Maria she's now in the office and on her laptop and wants to view the status of her case Maria has visibility into every action item that has taken place from the time that she submitted the case, including the automatic assignment of ownership to HR, as well as the action she's now being asked to perform this is exciting for a few reasons. First the employee sees a single stream of information and doesn't need to piece together updates from separate incidents or cases second the agents are working together toward a collective service level, which means the organization can measure from time of creation of the overall request until it's resolved and get a more accurate picture of the employees total service time in a matter of minutes we saw how easy it is for an employee to request help even when they don't know who to turn to processes are connected to end to end so agents achieve greater efficiencies and outcomes. And with low code tools they can create custom solutions to quickly resolve employee requests. Finally insights across the business can be served up to leaders in a consolidated view that drive automation standardization and operational efficiencies across the enterprise.
Align investments to implement strategy
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello. I'm Debbra McGrath, Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at ServiceNow. In this demo, you'll see how ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management enables an organization to align technology investments and work execution in order to implement business strategy. With SPM, you'll keep investments continually aligned to your strategies, so that your teams are always focused on the right things. You'll fund what matters most using a variety of planning methods to guide investments, communicate plans, and see work in the context of strategic initiatives. And SPM will help you to make work execution easier, even across diverse teams, methodologies and approaches, so you can ultimately meet and exceed your business goals. You'll experience all of this through the perspective of an executive leader, Jake Elliott, and see how Jake and his team drive the business forward by ongoing prioritization and funding of important initiatives. How they respond to inevitable changes with scenario planning that enables them to keep initiatives and resources continually aligned to business strategies. And how his project management and scrum teams efficiently execute work across traditional, agile, and hybrid work methodologies in order to deliver measurable business value. Jake begins by viewing his executive strategy dashboard, which provides an end-to-end view of his company's overall spend and benefits, which he can also view by portfolio and work execution type. The strategic spend tab shows him how much they're spending by strategy and goal, and how well their initiatives are aligned. The company leadership team has committed to improve alignment of their work and strategic spend to four key business strategies. They believe digital transformation is foundational to the continued success of their entire business. So Jake wants to review and prioritize the investments aligned to this strategy, and then connect team planning with work execution to ensure that business value is being delivered. He uses Alignment Planner Workspace to see a roadmap of all their initiatives. Roadmap planning shows their high-level enterprise investments on a timeline, filtered by their four companies strategies and, color-coded by priority. Jake can see how all these initiatives are tracking relative to important road map milestones, or he can hover over a single initiative to view the milestones specific to that investment. Next, he views the digital transformation portfolio roadmap to see the work that's been planned in support of their strategies. Here he can view the demands, epics, and projects that support their four strategies, altogether on a single roadmap, and he can easily adjust the information displayed on each planning item for quick, at a glance insights. Jake could also easily add new items or drill into an existing item directly from this view. For example, to adjust plan spend without having to open another ServiceNow application. Instead, he decides to use the investment funding application to review existing funding for the digital transformation strategy. Viewing all investments by strategy shows Jake the current strategies that have been funded by year and by quarter, including Capex and OPEX funds received, allocated, available, and total actuals. Here Jake can add or adjust funding for the digital transformation strategy as necessary. He takes a look at a top-down, bottom-up view of the funding for each of their four business strategies, and sees that digital transformation funds include 600,000 for business capabilities, 8.8 million for the digital transformation portfolio, and 600,000 for a Tiger team focused on digital transformation work. Any other type of ServiceNow entity could also be funded as needed in support of delivering business value. For now, Jake is confident they have adequate funding for the digital transformation strategy, and their portfolio of supporting work items. They use the ideation portal to generate a pipeline of innovative ideas that may ultimately be converted to new digital transformation projects. Jake filters the ideas by category to see those that are aligned to digital transformation. And then he sorts them in order of ideas with the most votes. The top idea is then promoted to the demand backlog, where costs and resources can be estimated. Ultimately, this demand will be added to the digital transformation portfolio for further consideration and funding. Jake will now look at several scenarios to determine what work his portfolio managers should include in their portfolios to best deliver on all their business strategies. Scenario planning enables them to consider different sets of demands and projects, as well as different budget amounts. Optionally, scenarios can also span across strategies, and across fiscal years. Portfolio managers can create new scenarios, such as focus on innovation to support their digital transformation. And they can add or remove projects and demands from the plan, such as removing this demand, which is more than the budgeted cost. As selections are made, the details for the scenario are automatically updated and displayed on the right, including total spend, number of selected investments, financial benefit, unaligned projects, over-allocated groups, and any amounts left over by actual spend from unselected projects that would not continue in this scenario. He can also track resources to see if they would be over or under allocated by looking at all resource groups or just over-allocated groups. And viewing them by quarter or month. Finally, he'll compare scenarios, and select the best one. When he confirms this scenario, budget will automatically be allocated to the selected demands and projects in this scenario. Jake then works across their diverse teams with project managers and scrum masters to make sure that the work included in the selected scenario is being executed properly. And with ServiceNow, Jake doesn't have to chase them down for these updates. For example, to get the latest status on the Acme customer sales product, Jake selects the planning console to view the project workspace for this hybrid project, where he can see a Gantt chart showing the project schedule and dependency relationships between tasks. He can add, remove, and arrange columns, and easily adjust the list in the Gantt view. The Dev execution phase is an agile development methodology that's being managed by a scrum team, and the agile board enables Jake and his scrum masters to view all the work that's planned across multiple Agile teams. They can see work dependencies across teams, and each team's backlog of work. A red bar lets Jake know that the integrations team is overcapacity in sprint 2, and red lines with arrows indicate dependencies that are out of sequence. Jake or the scrum master can immediately fix the capacity issue by dragging a story to sprint 3. And they fix the sequencing by moving this story to sprint 3 as well. By quickly making these changes, now all their agile teams have the proper load to deliver their work as scheduled. Of course, Jake needs to continually measure how much value the company is getting out of the investments they're executing on. So he returns to the executive strategy dashboard, and selects the benefits realization tab to see results to date of all their companies benefits by strategy, including what they've achieved for digital transformation. And finally, back on the enterprise roadmap map, Jake toggles the tracking mode to continually monitor how each of their initiatives is progressing toward enabling them to achieve their strategies. You just saw how strategic portfolio management provides Jake and his team with a single unifying solution that gives them complete, accurate, and timely insight into every aspect of their business, enables innovation at scale and speed, and helps them align investments to implement strategy, and deliver measurable business value. For additional information, visit servicenow.com/spm. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Revolutionize work with smarter experiences and engagement
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to today's session on revolutionizing work with smarter experiences and engagement focused on the Next Experience and configurable workspaces. In today's session, we'll focus on the unified navigation experience in Next Experience. We'll also take a look at configurable workspaces and then take a little bit of time to review how to enable Next Experience for your instances. And we'll wrap up with some resources that will help you get started with Next Experience and let you know what to look for and how to plan. Work is complicated, teams are inundated with mundane tasks and are mired in poor experiences and low productivity, but the good news is smarter experiences are here with the introduction of Next Experience in the San Diego release. Next Experience introduces modern, intuitive, and personalized workspaces that empower delivery teams and supercharge workforce productivity. They bring together platform apps and unified engagement and flexible work modes to reduce eyestrain and to energize efficiency. In our demo, let's follow Beth who's been in a role for a couple of weeks as she explores her Next Experience she notices right away that the experience is tailored for her, showing her important assignments on the role based landing page. Next Experience gives users more productive space by placing the menus at the top, allowing Beth to access the functions she needs while giving her the flexibility to pin and unpin menus as she needs them. That animation is a first and that's a great experience right off the bat. She can access great time savers like favorites, capabilities and records she uses often and revisit her history as well. Beth needs to browse a list of open incidents. With Next Experience, she can choose how to best present the list using her display preferences. She checks out compact mode to eliminate some of the White space, then add line breaks in the list to show the entire short description and eliminate the need to scroll left and right to see all the columns. Even with a simple list, Next Experience is making a big impact. Beth sometimes works evenings and her coworker encouraged her to use dark mode, which really reduces eye strain after a long day. Next Experience enables customers to create themes for different work groups or even holidays. Beth also checks out a brief tour with highlights for Next Experience. Beth heads over to the CSM workspace where she spends most of her time. She really likes that Next Experience prominently displays her place in the application at the center of her screen and she can easily add this to her favorites with a single click. She opens a case that needs her attention and is immediately alerted to special notes that give her critical information about the account. On the left, she has a playbook that walks her through all the steps necessary to address the customer's problem. This ensures that no steps are missed giving her and the customer peace of mind that everything's been addressed. Next Experience introduced in the San Diego release gives users new power to tailor their experiences to best serve their needs. So now that we've had an overview of Next Experience, let's take a few minutes and chat about what some of the prerequisites are to activate it. So first of all, you don't need any additional plug-ins to activate Next Experience with San Diego. All of the plug-ins necessary to activate it are installed with the San Diego upgrade. You don't have to navigate to plug-ins, go to the store or purchase any other capabilities to activate the Next Experience UI. Activation is done simply by switching on a system property and we'll chat about that in a moment. Also, configurable worse workspaces are not a prerequisite for using the Next Experience UI. Although we do encourage customers to begin looking at them for their tier one and tier two agents, you can still use Agent Workspace. Agent Workspace users can still use it, although they'll see the workspace open in a new tab like they have previously and it does not use the new styling. You do not have to turn on Next Experience right away when you upgrade, unless you're upgrade plan has allowed for this. Prior to activation, we encourage customers to review the product documentation for activating, some of which will cover it a really high level in this session. Existing customers should also build in time for testing and remediating any existing UI customisations. Couple of things to note in terms of what's not supported in Next Experience UI at this time, first of all, it's connect chat and support. If you're using workspace already and you're not using Agent chat, we encourage you to go ahead and make this switch to Agent chat. We do have support documentation on allowing subsets of users to use UI16 if connect functionality is needed. Also, guided tours are not supported in Next Experience UI while we do have a new onboarding feature built in to the default landing page, users who have heavily invested in guided tours and require that functionality should hold off on activation. Finally, the JavaScript console log found within the developer user's preference is not available and users are advised to use script debugger instead. Now, here is a list of the system properties that I mentioned earlier. The main one to turn on is the glide.ui.polaris.experience system property and let's take a look at those right now. Now, new customers and Z booted customers will have Next Experience activated right off the bat, there's nothing that they'll have to do. But for existing customers who have upgraded when they first upgrade and after the upgrade takes place, they'll see when they log in information around the new simplified navigation in Next Experience. They'll be able to see a preview of what Next Experience looks like before they even have to do any activation. So to do that as we mentioned, there are some system properties that need to be updated. Here's a legacy UI16 user interface and I've already loaded up the system properties table. So the quick way to search for these properties at least the first couple are to start with a filter on Polaris. So Polaris was actually the code name for our Next Experience project internally and some of the system properties are still retaining the Polaris name. So the main plugin that needs to be activated is glide.ui.polaris.experience. So when you're ready to turn on Next Experience, you go to this system property and change the value from false to true. Once you update, you'll see that the user interface for the UI16 list has updated, but the unified navigation has not been. To fully see the new interface, you simply log out. You immediately see that there's a new login experience. So you'll see the starfield move in the background and that's something new for us. And when the user logs in, they'll get access to their original landing page for the first ServiceNow, that won't change right away. So the other system properties that need to be updated, again, we're going to search on Polaris and we're going to look for the dark theme. So this is the system property that needs to be updated for dark themes to be enabled. We already see that this value is true, so there's nothing we really need to do at this point in this instance. Next, we want to take a look at the login experience and there's a system property called glide.login.home and that will dictate a standard landing page that is the default landing page for the Next Experience. There are two that are included out of the box to tailor them for different roles for your organization what have you, you can simply copy those within UI Builder and make changes to those copies. So here is the updated value for the standard landing page that's included with Next Experience. The next system property that customers might want to update pretty early on in the process is the shortcut or the link that happens when users click on the banner logo at the top. So again, within system properties, we're going to search just for the word banner and then we see that there is a property called glide.banner.image.url. Simply click on that and then you can update that to the value for your landing pages and this will enable your users to get to their landing pages just as they did within UI16. Next Experience introduced in the San Diego release gives users new power to tailor their experience to best serve their needs. Whether they use traditional lists and forms or modern configurable workspaces, they'll engage and perform at higher levels than ever before. As always, before changing configuration within ServiceNow, refer to product documentation, as well as the Next Experience Center of Excellence included within the community. If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to engage your account and support teams. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Leadership trends: Technology Excellence
K22 K2022
Let's break down AI Search
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, and welcome to the session called let's break down AI Search and how it works behind the scenes. I want to talk to you about AI Search. and what it is, but I'm not going to walk you through how to set it up or even show you what it looks like. I am, though, going to walk you through some of the main mechanics on how AI Search does what it does, and by doing that, give you a better understanding of how you can shape your content to provide better value for your end users. So the agenda is this. So we're going to quickly just look at what AI Search is, then we're going to learn about indexes, something called word stemming, and search term relevancy-- how to make your search relevant. And then we're going to look into how AI Research deals with typos, and in the end, look at how this matters. Why do we need to know these things to work with AI Search? So allow me to first introduce myself. My name is Anders Figenschow. I am a certified master architect, and also a ServiceNow developer MVP. I work at Sopra Steria as CTO and digital workflows, and I have about seven years of ServiceNow experience. But I also have 22 years of experience as a software developer. And if you hear me talking, just like now, my experience of those two years are heavily influencing what I'm talking about. So one of my last projects now was to work with Inter IKEA with their transformation of document management. And if you're attending the Hague this year at Knowledge, please do come by and have a look at that session as well, which I'm having with that customer-- as well as I have an in-person version of this session, which is a bit longer, and you can come and have a talk with me after. So what is AI Search? So it is the next-geneation search engine from ServiceNow. The previous one was Zing Search, and it's-- this new one is being made from the bottom up, so it doesn't really re-use anything from the old search, and then has a lot of new capabilities that improves it a lot. We're going to look at how that works. To install AI Search, you have to specifically ask for it. But you can do that from within your instance. You write AI Search status in the search-- in your instance, and it will give you a place. You can just click and request for it to be installed, and within a day or two, you'll have it ready to use. And you can just set up the search sources, and you're ready to go. So let's have a look at the architecture of AI Search. So there's data first-- so for example, knowledge articles, catalog items, users, or whatever you want to be accessible for the search engine as a search source. So the index is in the middle, and there's a reason for. That is the core engine, is the index, and we'll have a look at that in a second. You can also index external sources. So if you want to index data from, for example, SharePoint. You can set that up as well. And it's using API to grab the content, place it into the index table. It does not copy the articles itself, and it will not display it within ServiceNow. It will actually redirect you to where that content is originally. Then you have the service portal and mobile apps, and so on that is utilizing the AI Search-- which is basically a front end for the search engine itself And of course, you have the technologies that are underlying technologies that helping you out-- the machine learning the natural language and so on. So the features of the search engine AI Search is these index tables. It has typo handling, word stemming. It has some algorithms to create the scoring relevancy for a search. And it's something we'll look into also. And there's two things I want to mention while we're on this slide, which is the stop words and the synonyms-- so the synonyms first. So if someone is searching for a broken laptop in the search portal, in the Service Portal. Maybe it doesn't say laptop in that article. It says computer-- so broken computer. So instead of having to index every single variety of this to make your end users find the article, you would add a synonym of laptop to computer, and the search engine understands this, and it will find that article with the same sort of relevancy. The stop words is the opposite. So you have a dictionary-- and it's already in your instance-- that is containing words that are never relevant for a search, because if you have a word that is in each and every article, it carries no weight. So if the word me is in all articles, then searching for help me doesn't really work in the search engine. So you have to stop words that are basically excluding these very common words, so it doesn't mess with the weighting, and the scoring system, and the relevancy. Of course, if you're into that sort of thing, you can use stop words dictionary to censor. So you can maybe censor articles that you don't want people to see-- which, if you're in a country with as popular, that's what you do. Let's have a look at the indexes and how that works. So the index is the core of the search engine. It is a collection of all of the words present in your content library-- for example, the knowledge base-- with the listed scoring to each one pointing to each article. Now, it works the same way in, for example, a cookbook. So if you have a cookbook, you want to open up a cookbook and find a specific dish you want to make. You don't browse each and every page of hundreds of pages potentially to find your recipe. You would look in the back. And here's one example of a table of contents. So maybe I want to make light and fluffy waffles. So it's on page 21. So if I switch each and every page and go to page 21, it takes a long time to find it. So instead, I can just browse this very quick index and find that, oh, what I'm looking for is on page 21. There you go. There's my target. So I use that. So an index table in ServiceNow and other search engines as well is working the very same way. So it's creating a list of all the words that are relevant for you and telling the search engine where to find them-- so which article has this and that word or that term. And it will just be very much quicker to search through a smaller table with less data. And having less data is actually very important. So you need to, when you're building your index-- and how ServiceNow does this as well-- is to try to reduce the need to have these words. So stop words is one way. You don't need to index something that is in the stop word list. But you also need to take into consideration that you have variations of words. So when we get to that, we have something called word stemming. So let's look at one example of variations of words where you don't want to index all of them. So the word consult, that is the stem word for these variations-- consultant, consulting, even the plural, consultants. So instead of taking all of these words and indexing them, making the index potentially eight times bigger than, you have to making this slower to search-- then ServiceNow will just index the stem word consult. And when you're searching for consulting, it knows the stem of that word also, and it finds just the stem word. So it treats them as if it's the same one. And it will list up articles that has all these variations, and that's very useful as well. I have some code, actually I want to show you-- how it works. So there was a guy called Porter, who created an algorithm called the Porter stemming algorithm. So I found this just by looking around the internet. And it was fairly easy to find people who already made JavaScript versions of it. So I put it into a Script Include, and I want to look how-- see how it works. So in this one I'm just having-- inserting a word and finding the stem of that word. That's everything this does. I'm not going to show the code, because we don't have much time. So we just have to look at the results. So I'm going to try the word computerize. What is the stem of that word? So we can see here that the stem of computerized is computer-- makes sense. Let's see if we get the same result if you take the plural of computer, computers. No, actually not. So it's compute. So there's some surprises when it comes to these algorithms, but there's reason for it. We can even try to do something else. We can take computerism, if that is a word. And the stem of that one is computer as well. So with these examples, you can see how it shortens the world and finds the stem of it. There's a few words that-- not possible to use an algorithm for. For example, if you have words like verbs, like I am, you are, those are transformative, so they would be a little bit different. So in those cases, you have the most common ones are actually being translated into one of the forms of that word. And that's how you can use the Porter stemming method-- and how ServiceNow does as well-- to find a stem of a word. So then there's the search term relevancy. So when you have these words in the index, ServiceNow and the search engine needs to know your search query's relevancy to the different articles. So if you write broken laptop, some articles might be more relevant than the others. So how do we do that? So there are some algorithms again. So there's one call to TF-IDF algorithm. And ServiceNow is using this, and several other search engines are using the same one. So what it does is it's calculating the frequency of a word within the document. Let's say you have a document with 100 words, but the word laptop is mentioned twice. So you have a frequency of two. And then you have the inverse document frequency, which is basically count the frequency of a word across the document. So you can see, how relevant is the word in one document compared to the relevancy across all the documents? And with this algorithm, you can actually see that it gives some pretty good results when it comes to these search queries and which one's the search engine promotes to be the top match. And it places this into the index with the word. So maybe the word laptop is a pairing three articles, but one is more relevant to the other, because it has a higher TF-IDF score. That is the relevancy score. So the problem with people is that they can't always type correctly. And me being Norwegian, English being a second language, I type wrong all the time. So for these search engines to have type handling, it's helping me out a lot. So how does this work really you cannot add all the variations of typos into the index. It would make the index too big. So you need some dynamic algorithm to deal with these typos. There's, luckily, some smart people already figured out how this works, and there's something called string metric, or edit distance. What that means is that you have two words and you compare them to each other of how far away they are. What that means is, how many changes do you need to make to one word-- changes to the characters in that word to match the other one? So in this example, we have the word intention here, and you have another word called execution. One change is you can delete one character here, you can substitute these three characters, and you can insert another one here, and those five changes will transform the first word into the second one. That will give this a distance score of five, according to one of these algorithms called the Levenshtein algorithm. It's not documented ServiceNow is using the Levenshtein algorithm, but I'm assuming they do, because if you look into the Script Includes, you find the mention of Levenshtein a couple places. So I went and found that algorithm and tested it out in my own instance. So how about we have a look now and see how that works. So first let me show you that. I'm just making an array, and I'm just adding a few words into that array, just as a proof of concept now. And I'm going to look at a few of these words, but I'm going to write them as typos and see how the Levenshtein algorithm or the string metric at a distance algorithm works and gives me the best results. So first let me try to type in computer, but I'm adding an extra r. Like I told you, you don't want to index this word, because it has a typo. So I'm going to look through my array of words and see what the distance is for the nearest word. So here it says, you were looking for a computerr-- with an extra r-- and the closest word in the dictionary is the computer. And it has a Levenshtein distance of 1, which makes sense, because I just needed to delete this one. Let's try another word. Let's write comutre. I'm not sure this is a word. But it says that the closest word is commute, and it has a Levenshtein distance of 2. So this is the closest word. It realizes that this is probably a typo. Now, of course, as you can see, you have a much farther distance for all these other words ServiceNow is the distance of mine. So it's very far away. A good way to think about this is that you've put a threshold on it, and everything above, for example, 2 or 3 is probably not a typo, but a different word. So if I write something gibberishy, like this, let's see what-- it will find the closest word, but it probably won't be considered a typo. So the closest word is-- actually, several ones have this same distance, but 8 it is most likely not a typo. It's a different word. So this is how ServiceNow also uses algorithms to deal with your end users' typos and still give a good result. Even Google has this. If you write something which has a typo, it will ask underneath, did you mean, and the word closest to that one. And it will actually give you the results without the typo itself. So what? Now that we know how the search engine deals with typos, how it scores for relevancy, how it stems words and uses that in the dictionary, and how the dictionary's built, then so what? Why does this matter to us? Do we need to know these things to use the search engine? Well, obviously not, but it will help you to deliver better value to your end users if you know how it works. Let me explain. You can now advise your customers on how the relevance scoring works. So if you have an article with 100 words, if you have 10 words of those being the same, it will score very high in the relevancy scoring. So you can now tell your customer or end user that the frequency of word matters when it comes to the relevancy scoring in the search engine. Now, you can also tell your customer and user how ServiceNow handles the word variations. You don't need to put all of these variations in a meta field, for example, like computer, computerized, computers. ServiceNow will deal with that. So you can advise them to spend the time working with a search in other ways. Experimenting with stop words can give you totally different amount of results, and also using synonyms will improve your hit rate, so-- using laptop, and computer, and so on. So both stop words and synonyms already have tables in ServiceNow where you can have a look at some demo data as well. So by saying that, let me conclude and say thank you for checking in. And I'm hoping to see you in the Hague this year. Have a chat with me, and let's talk about how search engines work and how to make your life better for you and your customer. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Integrations for fun and profit
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to Integrations for Fun and Profit. My name is Eric Riemer. I'm the development team lead for the ServiceNow practice at New Access Innovations. We're a ServiceNow partner working exclusively in the federal government space. I'm also a 2021 and 2022 ServiceNow Developer MVP. I work on a lot of interesting projects, but that's not actually why we're here, to talk about me. In this session, we're going to integrate, have fun, and profit. More seriously, we're going to go through what integration is, build some examples, and give you some tools that you can go and learn more yourself. So first, what is an integration? Well, there are so many terms that people use, as if you should just know what they all are. And this long list is only a few of them. The good news, you don't need to actually know most of them to get started. Eventually, yeah, you're going to have to learn a lot of them. But up front, very few are actually going to be important. So we don't need to boil the ocean. And let's simplify things. So there's only two things that you really need to start off knowing. What is an integration? And that's when computers talk to other computers to exchange information or take actions. And yeah, that's a gross oversimplification. The second is, what is an API? It stands for Application Programming Interface, which you don't actually need to know. What you do need to know is that it is the agreed-upon ways for the computers to talk to each other. So let's look at some examples of how to do this. So there's two major buckets that all integrations fall into. The first one is inbound. That's when somebody else is going to talk to you, rather than you talking to them. So some examples of this is a SRAPI-- a Scripted REST API. It gives you total control. It's my favorite one to use. There's out-of-the-box APIs, like the Table API and the Import Set API. They're out of the box. They're there. You don't have to lift a finger for them to exist. And they're super well-documented. Finally, there's the Flow Designer API trigger. And this one is super low code. You don't have to know any code whatsoever to use it. It does have the caveat that it's asynchronous. So you can't return any data. Makes it not so useful if somebody says, hey, give me the details of this record. But it is potentially really useful for somebody wanting to insert a new record, if you want to do that. Now, no matter which one you choose, you can and should make use of the REST API Explorer for testing. You can find it by filtering the Left Nav or the All menu, if you're using the Next UI. And one of the bonuses, not only can you test it that way by setting all your parameters, but it'll even give you code snippets that you can then pass along to that third party developer of like, here is everything you need to talk to this API correctly, so that they're not stuck only searching through documentation. Especially if you made a scripted REST API or a Flow Designer API trigger, if you didn't write that documentation, it doesn't exist. But at least you can give them, without having to write anything, here's how to call my API. And here's the code in the language that you're using to do it. So now let's get into an example, Scripted REST API. There's going to be a bunch of code, but it's not that scary. So here's the quick tour of what we're going to be looking at here. OK, so the first is a URL to call this API. The part in green is ServiceNow provided. It's your instance URL slash API slash your company code. Every company has a unique code. Even PDIs have a company code. So if you're just playing with this in a personal developer instance, you totally can. The next part in orange are the name you gave the API, a question mark, and the parameter name that you defined. And finally, in white is the actual value that's going to be sent as a parameter. You can have a whole bunch of parameters. I'm keeping it simple and only having one. And I'm expecting to receive an incident number. And I'm going to return some details. So here's the rest of the code. Again, looks like a lot. Not actually as scary as it might look. So lines 3 and 4 are just to grab the parameters from that payload that got sent. And so in this case, it's saying, find the number of parameter. And we're going to just hang on to that for a second. And line 7, we're going to do a GlideRecord.get on that record. And if it exists, build a payload of information to return. Pretty straightforward stuff, even if you don't understand what the heck this payload is supposed to look like. It's a JSON object. Almost doesn't even matter, because you're returning it to somebody else who needs to be able to handle that. Line 20 sets the response body with that payload that you're sending to them. Line 21 is the HTTP status. Those are those weird codes that you see and hear about, like 404, page not found, and 500 error, and whatnot. In this case, it's a 200, which just means you did it. You're good. And that's going to be returned to them. Line 22 deals with the bad incident number. Somebody sends me a number that doesn't exist, I'm going to send them a 404 not found message and an error saying, you gave me a bad number. And just like that, I've built a Scripted REST API endpoint that I can then make, that somebody else can call. And then they can get the information that they need. Now, the second major bucket of integrations is outbound. That's where you're going to send a message out to a different system and either get some information back from it or have it take an action. You should know, there might be ServiceNow licensing implications, depending on your contract. Ask your ServiceNow sales rep, if you have any questions about that. Because every contract is different, and I have no idea what yours says. So the easiest way to do this is to use an existing Integration Hub Spoke. There's a whole lot of them. ServiceNow keeps on coming up with more of them. Low code. It's great to use. If one of those doesn't exist, you can also make your own spoke. It's not actually that hard, and we're going to do an example of that in just a few minutes here. And it's pretty simple. It's sometimes even no code to build an entire outbound message that you can then do stuff with. Next is REST Message. This is the pro code way to do it, where you're going to have to write a bunch of code. You need to understand more what you're doing. But it gives you far more control. It also lets you test it with example parameters and see if you're getting back the results that you expect or not. Finally, there's Recordless REST, which is even more pro code. It doesn't have a REST message record that you'd find in the navigator. It just exists in a business rule or something, and that's the only place it exists. Another downside of it is it limits reusability, because it only exists in that one place. So we already built an example of an inbound API. So let's talk about how to make an outbound one. So how do you get started with that? Well, go find the API documentation, and then you might panic a little bit. This is the ServiceNow documentation to use the table API to get the details of one single record. It's fairly representative of what good API documentation looks like. It looks really long and complicated, doesn't it? And it's only one simple-sounding use case for an API. So let's break this down as we build a custom action and Flow Designer so that we can make use of it. So in the interest of time, we're not going to go through every single painful step. But basically, you go to Flow Designer. You go to New, Action, give it a name. We defined an input and added a REST step. And that's where I'm going to jump to on the next slide. And we're going to go through side-by-side with the documentation and what we're doing within that custom action in order to build on it. So I'm doing this with the ServiceNow API documentation that I just showed you. But any API should have similar documentation. Some APIs have absolutely horrid documentation, and I can't help you with that. I'm sorry. You just have to suffer through it. So we're going to do a GET. That's why we set the HTTP method, because I want to get information back into my system. I also copied the URL format into the resource path. And all of those parts surrounded by curly brackets are variables that we're going to need to replace. So those are the path parameters that we're going to replace them with. To make a simple example, I'm hardcoding in the incident table. So this action will get the details of an incident. And then I use the data pill from my input for the sys ID that I want to retrieve the details for. I'm skipping over the connection details, because depending on what you're integrating with, there are a lot of different authentication methods. Everything from a very basic username and password, or sometimes even no authentication, to far more complicated things that are way outside the scope of what I can talk about here today. But there's a lot of good documentation out there when you're looking for specific information about different authentication methods. Next, we have the query parameters. In this case, I set two of them. If you don't set them, they might have default values. The documentation is going to let you know if they're required or optional, and if they're optional, what the default is going to be. Just like the path on my last slide, I can stick the variable pills here from my input or anywhere else in my action, if I want to automate setting those or let the user, when they run those action, define it. In this case, I'm telling it that I want to get all of the details about the fields that I'm asking for-- not just the display value. Not just the raw value, but I want both for each of them. And that I only want to get back the values of a certain subset of fields. I don't want all of them. I only care about a couple of fields. Next up, we have headers. Same thing applies about optional versus required headers as well as the default values. In this case, ServiceNow is saying, well, would you like the response to be JSON or XML? In this case, we're just leaving it blank. We don't even need to set anything, because we're happy with JSON. Different APIs are going to have sometimes more, sometimes fewer things that you can set as your query parameters, header, body. That's why there's documentation. It'll tell you what you need to be building and setting. So great news, we built the request. And now we have to deal with the response that comes back to us. So the docs tell us we're getting name-value pairs. And we already saw that it's JSON name-value pairs. So I added a JSON parser step. And in that step, I set the source data field to the response body data pill from the request. So we finish the request step. We grab the output of that, put it into basically the input of this JSON parser. And the API docs were nice enough to give us a sample payload. So I just copied and pasted that into the source side and click Generate Target. ServiceNow did a whole bunch of parsing magic, and I have data pills for everything that the response might have. Now, some of you are looking at this and furiously writing me hate mail, because you remember that just a few slides ago, I set parameters to only look at some of the fields and not all of them. Then you look more closely and say, hey, you said you were querying the incident table, and that payload says the location table. And those fields aren't the same at all. And you are absolutely correct. Well done. So example payloads might not match your exact use case. And sometimes, you have to make a real request to get back a payload that you can use as a sample that's going to match what you're actually doing. How do you get that payload? Well, you test your flow. And when you run the test, you can look at the execution details. And you can scroll down a little bit and unfold the steps and then click on the response body. And that's going to give you the raw response of the actual API call that you made. So the system didn't know what to do with it, but it captured that you got a response. So I opened that up, copied and pasted into my parser step, clicked on Generate, and now I have a real payload for my API call with the exact fields that are going to get returned, and all of the types and everything else that I need to use for it. At this point, I just need to set up my action outputs. And then I can use this action in any of my flows. It's going to ask me as an input, please give me a sys ID. I can look that up from an existing record, if I'm saving those somewhere, or however else I'm going to get that input information. And then it's going to output those data pills with those values that I asked for. And that's it. You just made an action that's going to call an API and bring back useful data. And then continue on with your flow, and you can reuse this over and over again. Now, I know I went through a lot of stuff. And where do you go from here? I made a GitHub repo with some links to additional resources, the code that I used in this presentation, and other stuff that's going to help you as supplemental things to all of this. You can also feel free to find me on the #sndevs Slack. It is a wonderful community of developers, admins, and other ServiceNow professionals. It is a great place to go get help with whatever you need, talk to people, make connections. And again, if you have questions about this presentation, feel free to hit me up there. Did you like this session? I'm going to be doing it live in Las Vegas, and I would love to see you there. Thank you for watching. I hope that you found this useful and that you have a great time at Knowledge 22.
Stepping beyond the portal: Transitioning your skills to the Now Experience
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to Stepping Beyond the Portal. I'm Travis Toulson. In this session, we're going to be discussing how to transition your skills from the Service Portal to the Now Experience. So first of all, I want to cover a couple of things that we're not going to be covering in this session. And that's going to be NodeJS, now-cli, Component Project Scaffolding. For help on any of these things on getting started, you can check out the developer site, where there's a URL at the bottom. And there's a fantastic guide to help you get started down that road. So first up, let's talk about the editor experience. And for this, we're going to compare some of the features and attributes between the Service Portal editor versus what we are now working with in the Now Experience Components. So with the Service Portal editor experience, we're all familiar with that three-panel layout. And of course, there's a couple of hidden panels we can switch in. Widget source code is stored in ServiceNow in HTML, CSS, and ES5. The source code is combined primarily in a single record with the sp_widget. There are a couple of other widgets off of that. But for the most part, it's all governed within that single widget. Of course, the editor is browser-based, unless you're using the VS Code plug-ins. And whenever you save changes, you immediately get that update in the instance. You can immediately reload the page and see your results. And of course, one of the key features of Service Portal is that your server code and your client code sits side by side in the same widget, so you can rapidly iterate and build out those widgets on both sides of the network. Now, the UI Component editor experience really changes the game on this. First of all, your components are now stored in source code, basically in local files and folders on your local dev environment, using JSX, SCSS, and ES6. The source code is spread across numerous files. It's no longer consolidated to just one record. And you can bring your own code editor, which I highly recommend VS Code. Those changes also have to be deployed to the ServiceNow instance. So you're actually developing on a local environment. And you'll see those changes in the local environment. But if you want anybody else to see those changes, you're going to have to deploy your component up to the ServiceNow instance. Also, the UI component only contains the client code. So there's no server code inside of these components. And that's a very big difference between the two. So where do I put this code? Well, in the Now Experience, we're working primarily with JavaScript files and SCSS files. So your ES6 modules, in the form of JavaScript files, basically equate to your HTML templates, your Angular ng-templates, and pretty much all of your client-side JavaScript code-- the link function, the client controller, instance options, your angular providers. Basically any of this client's JavaScript that you would have put in Service Portal in various records is now all going to go into JavaScript files. And your SCSS equivalent, basically you'll have an SCSS inside of your local dev environment. And you will import those SCSS modules into your JavaScript modules. So it is a little bit different from what we're used to dealing with. But for the most part, there's really strong equivalent to the SCSS fields and the CSS dependency tables in your service portal widget. And as I said, there really is no equivalent for the server-side JavaScript. Basically, you can use UI Builder data resources or REST endpoints with the HTTP effect. But you really won't have the actual server code stashed in your components. Your components are strictly client-side. Now, in terms of how this looks in your local development environment, on the left-hand side, I've got the File Explorer for VS Code as the sample project that I'm currently working with. And you can see that the ES6 modules and the SCSS modules all fall under that SRC folder. And you can see the index.js and the styles.scss, which is part of your boilerplate project. Now, you can add additional files, additional folders, import things in. You can get as wild and crazy with the folder structure and file structure as you want. And that's one of the key advantages, is you can build larger projects in a very structured way, as compared to what we used to be able to do in Service Portal. So let's take a look at a sample project. And let's start out with the HTML template. So you can see in the laptop on the side there the example of what we're going to be outputting with the code. And so the view typically is done in the HTML template in the Service Portal. But let's look at how we would accomplish this in a Now Experience component. So in the Now Experience component, you can see the code on the right-hand side. And basically, if you look at that orange bar, you'll see a view function. Now, this is using the ES6 arrow function syntax. But trust me, it's basically just a function. So the HTML templates are going to be written in JSX. You'll notice the HTML inside of that view function. Now, JSX is a syntax extension to JavaScript. It's not actually HTML. We're not returning HTML out. Officially, your returning JavaScript objects that represent DOM nodes. But that's a little complicated for this session. The important part is to note that it is not HTML. And it has more equivalence to calling JavaScript functions. It does get compiled to JavaScript functions. And each view function can only return a single top-level element. And the last thing that I'll note is the parentheses after the return statement and at the end there. Those parentheses are very important when you're dealing with multiple HTML nodes. So you absolutely have to have that. And it basically creates the expression. So now let's talk about data binding. So in this one, you'll notice that I've changed the message from Hello, World to Hello, Travis. So basically, how would we bind that dynamic data? Now, in Service Portal, we used one way binding. And that used the double curly brace syntax in the HTML template. So let's take a look at how that's going to be done now. Again, on the right-hand side, you'll see the code. And you'll see in the first orange bubble that there's a var name equals Travis. So we're setting up a local variable. And then on the second red bubble there, you'll see a single curly brace with that name variable inside of it. Basically, since views are just functions, we can declare variables in them the same way we would in any JavaScript function. And that little single curly brace syntax is part of the JSX expression that embeds-- or binds the data to that particular expression. So it's very similar to our double curly brace syntax from Service Portal. And that's going to make the transition really easy. Now typically, we're going to want to get that dynamic data from somewhere else. We're not just going to use a static variable name. So let's take a look at how we can pass some instance options and hold internal state. And basically, this is going to be functionally equivalent to passing instance options into your widgets. Now, the one thing I want to highlight, though, is that there is a bit of a difference. Because in Now Experience components, the properties are much more powerful and a much more prevalent part of components than what they were in Service Portal. So once again, the example is there on the right. And let's take a look at the code. So first of all, take a look at that second orange line down there, where it specifies the properties inside of that createCustomElement call. And you'll see that we've defined a property called name. So this whole scaffolding is setting up our Now Experience component. This is some of the boilerplate scaffolding that is required. And the properties are basically equivalent to instance options. That name property is then being passed in to the view function via the state property. And you'll see on that first orange bubble, the Hello, state.properties.name. So the properties are exposed via that state variable-- or that state parameter. And you can use this in any of your custom components. Any properties that you add in that createCustomElement syntax is going to be available inside the view. And those properties can be updated as we perform different events and actions. But that, basically, is how you are going to pass data into your components in order to expose them within your view. So since we mentioned events and changing that data, let's go ahead and talk about, where's the ng-click? Where are these events? So once again, you'll see on the right-hand side, I have an example view with a button that says Change Name. So instead of changing that manually to Hello, Travis, we're going to change it when we click that button. So instead of using the on-click handlers in Service Portal, you usually use ng-click. And there's a bunch of other events we can use. But the short of it is that that triggers a digest loop, which reprocesses the view and updates it for you. Components are a little bit more straightforward. So once again, we're going to be using that view function. Everything basically goes inside this view function. It makes things very easy. And instead of the ng magic, you're actually going to bind events using on, dash, eventname, Just like you would traditional HTML and JavaScript events. And what's really powerful about this is that it even works with custom events. So if you define custom JavaScript events, you can just use on dash whatever event name you created, and it still works. Basically, behind the scenes, that on dash is just instructing the Snabbdom renderer to call element.addEventListener, where you pass the event name. So it's just a declarative syntax for that. And it makes it really easy to bind any event. So you really don't have to memorize any special magic ng incantations to make it work. You just have to know your event name. And you can see in the updateProperties where we are-- or sorry, we're passing in the updateProperties on that first orange dashed as a co-effect. And then on-- and I'm not going to go too much into that particular topic. You can find more on that in the guides. But we're going to call that update properties in order to update the name parameter to World. And that way, when we click on that button, that on-click event will fire. What's really cool is that we're still just dealing with JavaScript. JSX is just JavaScript. There's nothing particularly fancy about it. So we can create event handler functions the same way that we would in vanilla JavaScript. And this is going to be roughly equivalent to your c.handle something in Service Portal, c.updateName. So if you look at the second orange dash there, you'll see the updateName handler being called in the on-click. And up on that first orange dash, you'll see the updateName function being created. And because it's done within the view function, it has access to the updateProperties co-effect that we passed into the view function. All of this is handled by the Snabbdom renderer and by the overall Now Experience framework. So you just have to plug-in the right pieces in the right places. And the rest just fires and works. And of course, you'll also note that we're still using that curly brace syntax. Basically, any kind of dynamic binding that you will use will be done using the curly brace syntax, which makes it really easy to remember. Now, of course, no component is complete without a little bit of conditional logic. And of course, in Service Portal, we had ng-if ng-show, ng-hide, ng-switch. We had a lot of magical directives that we had to memorize in order to set up some of these conditional statements and some of these conditional templates that show and hide the view. So basically, in this one, when we click the button, we're actually going to hide that button. And once again, we're just using pure JavaScript here. So you'll see that, on the second dash there, the second orange dash, we call a getButtonTemplate function, where we pass the state parameter in. And then you'll see in that first long orange line, you'll see the getButtonTemplate that passes in the state. Now, the important part there is the if statement inside of that template function. So if state.properties.name name is not equal to World, then we will return that button template. So this is how we set up a conditional template inside of our view function. And you'll notice it's just plain JavaScript. It's just an if statement. This will work with switch statements. This will work with ternary statements. So basically, it's just JavaScript. And that really simplifies the learning curve on this. Because once you get a handle on the view functions and some of the magical bindings in the createCustomElement, you're really free to write those components how you want. You're not constrained to the magical directives that AngularJS offers. And also, I'll point out that you can separate the view functions. So you'll notice that I don't have all the HTML in one place. I can call functions to get other fragments of HTML out of it. And this is a really powerful capability. We can also move those functions off to other ES6 modules, which is really going to help us clean up our code and make it very compact and very well-structured. So then we've got lists. Of course, most of what we're dealing with is repeating over a list, repeating the same template over lists. In Service Portal, this is done with ng-repeat to loop over iterable objects like arrays. Once again, components have no problem leveraging pure JavaScript to accomplish this. So in the component, you'll see, first of all, that I'm passing in properties. I'm passing in an array as the default, with five items. And then in the first orange dash, you'll see my little ul tag there with state.properties.items.map. Yeah, it's just JavaScript, array.map function. So we're going to iterate over the array using plain JavaScript. And we will return the list item template that represent each item. So the map function is going to be similar to for each, except that it returns a new array, where each new item in that array is the result of the original item passed to the map function. I'm going to leave it to you guys to go look that one up in a little more detail because I don't have a clear demo of that one for this presentation. But suffice it to say, it works just like for each, except that it creates a new array using the function that you pass it. In this case, we're returning to LI tags that contains the item name. Similar to conditionals, we can separate that template fragment out into its own named function, like the getListItem one that you now see in the code section. And this can make templates much easier to read. And again, we can separate that off into separate files to get a very well-structured project out of it. And of course, we're just getting started with this. There's so much more to add. There's actions. There's life cycle. There's hooks and behaviors. There's a lot of stuff that we haven't really covered today. This is really just a foundation to give you those basic ng-ifs, ng-repeats, how to get data in and out of your components. But for more, you can go to the developer website, where there's a really good introduction, getting started guide, for building out these Now Experience components. But this should really help you get started on your journey in transitioning your skills from the Service Portal to the Now Experience framework. So with that, if you have any questions, you can feel free to reach out to me. My email is [email protected]. Or you can head to the codecreative.io website. Thank you very much. [MUSIC PLAYING]
007 A bond strategy to enable citizen development
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everyone. Welcome to Knowledge 2022. You're watching a brief session titled 007, A Bond Strategy for Citizen Development. In this brief session, we will give you an eagle-eye view of citizenship development methodology. By the end of the session, our main aim is to push the idea that is innovation is not invention. Also, improvement or automation of current processes has better return on investment. I am Ashutosh Munot. I am a certified ServiceNow Technical Architect and two times Dev MVP, four times Community MVP. Currently, I'm working with an end group in Netherlands as a ServiceNow architect. I'm accompanied by another Dev MVP and a good friend of mine. Dhruv, please introduce yourself. Hi, everyone. My name is Dhruv Gupta. And as Ashutosh mentioned, I am also a ServiceNow Developer MVP. And I currently work as a ServiceNow Architect at Accenture. We are pretty excited for two decisions, so let's start with the agenda. So today, we'll begin with an exploration of citizen development. What is it? Why use it? What are the advantages of using it on the platform of platforms that is ServiceNow for citizen development. Once you are settled with the theoretical aspect of the program, then we'll share our experiences, the challenges we faced, and most importantly, the mitigation strategy along with some key learnings. And finally, there are resources you can utilize along the journey of your citizen development program. So if that sounds interesting, Ashutosh, please guide us through why citizen development is important. Oh, that's a very broad question. And every new initiative starts with a problem, so let's start with the problem. I will summarize this with some numbers. Basically, need for citizen development can be broken into two things-- business challenges and IT challenges. Let's first read the mind of business leaders. As per the research by Mendix, it says 50% of business feel that they are unable to meet their key strategic goals. And then, almost same amount of business leaders find it hard to grab the opportunity of cost reduction, or I should say, scope of improvements. And the usual culprit behind this are IT challenges. Let's see not-so-shocking numbers. When we say not-so-shocking numbers, that means we have experienced this personally, where 77% of tech leaders think that they are struggling because the pipeline is too huge, and stakeholders tend to go away from the requirement over the period of the time. And to cater to those needs, we end up having external parties for our rescue so that they can help us to reduce the pipeline. If you see, 77% of business leaders think that it's very hard in today's era to reduce the cost because of the huge pipeline. Hence, it is very hard to neglect also. These are my thoughts. What do you think, Dhruv? Definitely, these numbers are not shocking for me as well. The reason that I want to highlight is that we always tend to ignore our internal resources who can be a better fit in our IT ecosystem because they're aware of the ecosystem. They know the ecosystem. They know the actual crux of the problem. B, they tend to be less costly-- I should say that-- than if you go for a specialist role. For some domains, you need specialization but not for all. You can cross-train or develop the culture of citizen development. That was an interesting point, Dhruv. So please tell us what exactly citizen development is all about. Sure, man. Citizen development is a business process that encourages non-IT trained employees to become software developers using, how should I say this, IT sanctioned low-code/no-code platform to create business applications. This approach to software development enable employees despite their lack of formal education in coding to become citizen developers. That was the official definition. But in layman's terms, citizen development is basically a process of identifying your citizen developers that can optimize and solve bottlenecks for you using a local platform. So Ashutosh, I know you have an experience on identifying citizen developers, so tell us who is a good citizen developer as per your. Oh, a citizen developer can be anyone within the organization-- a non-developer or a non-IT guy. So basically, our stakeholders can be also citizen developers who can tap into low-code platform to build a specific business application. Since they are facing problems on day-to-day basis, their response is more agile towards the problem, and they can build the app quickly, and they are very quick to the dynamic business landscape. So citizen developers are different from traditional developers. How? You can see on the screen, there are some differences between both developers. So I would say, citizen developers are empowered business users who create new or change existing business applications without the need to involve IT department. So please take a pause and read this slide for a minute so that you understand the difference between citizen developer and the traditional developer. Thanks. Dhruv, you have been an advocate for ServiceNow, especially for citizen development. Why is that so? Please tell us. Yeah, man, I have been recommending ServiceNow, especially for citizen developer and because ServiceNow has literally almost everything that you need for developing an app that run a low-code/no-code approach. And it is scalable. And you can go and ask for your compliances as well-- what else you want. I can talk about this whole day. But in the interest of time, I'll just highlight a few capabilities but the platform has made most of. To begin with, first one is your Flow Designer. This is the main contributor to low-code/no-code functionality, where NLU plays an important role. The drag-and-drop feature in Flow Designer requires no coding and makes it easy for new developers to understand it quickly. Second one is your Integration Hub-- major player to automate things with 200-plus [INAUDIBLE] available out of the box. Automation is the key aspect of why people want to go for citizen development. This is because they want to handle their own pipeline and catalog forms which can automate their tasks quickly. Next one is App Engine Studio. It's a development tool for creators of varying skill levels to build applications that meet immediate needs of your organization. Next one-- my favorite-- UI Builder, a platform for designing and engaging UI experience. Its capability grows exponentially with the level of skill set our developer has. But it definitely caters to more than what is required. Apart from this, we have low code capabilities like virtual agent, machine learning, process optimization, et cetera, et cetera. So it's basically enhanced the arsenal for developer. You can find more details about them in the Resource section. So in short, in short, ServiceNow and citizen development is a perfect match for my site. Great, Dhruv. So this was all about the theoretical knowledge for citizen development, who are citizen developers. Let's deep dive into practicality now. We started our journey a couple of years ago, and we stumbled onto various issues out of which we have got some must do to, make the process moot and extract the best return on investment from the platform. First of all, choose the right use case-- that is those can be developed with no or very less involvement of IT resources. Citizen development is very exciting. And because of that, we end up trying to involve or overdo a few things. Basically, identification of resources and setting up guardrails-- that is governance-- along with their initial trainings are the key to success. We need to understand it's a journey. It's not a one-time affair. So don't do a big code life or onboarding of the teams. But start with a small team and then build upon it. Sharing your success story is equally important because it acts as a catalyst to motivate other team members and citizen developers within the organization. Having the right tool does not always solve all the problems. You always need a right approach along with the right tool to get maximum return on investment. So Dhruv, please enlighten us with the recommended path for this. Yeah, as you mentioned, it's a journey. It's definitely a journey. It's not one-step process or one big goal life. I usually divided into four steps. Step one, prepare the environment and culture. When we say, put on the guardrails, we mean to clearly state what is expected from citizen developers and what they are not allowed to do. And the next step is the enablement of the team. Based on your organization's vision, set up a training plan for citizen developers. And in that training, don't forget to include some challenging activities. And once someone gets the basic skill set, I usually recommend-- or this is something that has been beneficial for us as well-- give them an instance to sharpen their skill set. They can use their PDAs as well. But give them an instance before putting them into some project work. It would be most important for their confidence. And now, it's time for bringing them into the mainstream, assign requirements to allow them to take responsibility. Make sure your IT team is there to help them out but not building on their own. And finally, it's time to scale up. We use the components as it's built. And don't forget to share the success of this journey. By the end, you will realize that you simply use your employee to build something that is cost-effective, quick, and, most importantly, it empowered your employee. Great. Thanks, Dhruv, for showing us the path. Now, as we are approaching the end of the presentation, let's take a moment to summarize some key takeaways of the presentation. If you remember, we had an issue of use pipeline, and we also saw how to solve it. And the answer is citizen development, which is the need of an hour. Also, we saw how ServiceNow will act as a tool or act as a solution to help implement citizen development and how it can help you to bring maximum return on investment. Also, change enablement governance is very important to explain the importance of citizen development and how ServiceNow can cater to this. On your screen, you can see one QR code. It will take you to one of the community articles that we created for this session. It contains link for all the articles that we read while doing this research, while setting up this session, and all the recommended webinar sessions-- whatever we want to pass on. Also, can use this article to put on your queries, and we would love to answer them. Thank you for patience. We look forward to interact with you all. Keep learning, and enjoy Knowledge 2022. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Automate provisioning and entitle users in three minutes with Integration Hub Spokes
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everyone. Today we'll be talking about automating provisioning and entitling users in three minutes using integration hub spokes. So to start off with the introduction, I am myself, Ishaan Shoor. I'm a senior technical consultant working with a ServiceNow partner, Thirdera And my primary function is ServiceNow development and consultation. I've got around four years of experience in ServiceNow and seven years experience in software development and IT. My favorite part of ServiceNow is working with integrations, orchestrations, custom applications. And that is why we are here. So again, the topic relates to integration of our Flow Designer. So in today's agenda we'll be covering the following topics. We'll be going through the overview, process flow diagram, use cases, benefits, key highlights, and demo. So I'll start off with the overview. So overview-- we, as every organization, uses Active Directory and Azure AD. but the provisioning in the Active Directory and Azure AD is pretty much limited to provisioning of the users or de-provisioning of the users. But there are a lot of other activities that take place around this, which is giving users access to a particular group, a particular application, having some shared mailboxes, some distribution list, and updating some user details-- might be a phone number, might be a second name, first name. It can be anything-- or just starting an email alias to a user. So a lot of other activities are involved, but they are all manual activities that the team do while the-- they get a request, and they get those requests as a manual-- using manual intervention. So using ServiceNow platform, we can automate all these tasks. And we can fully cater these identity management requests. So this automation can be done in two ways again. So the first one is having a third-party software and ServiceNow as a middleware and having connections with AD, Active Directory, and Azure Active Directory and leveraging the integration of spokes and the Flow Designer. The second one can be where we don't have a third-party tool, and we go to the Forms Automation. So, we'll be covering Forms Automation in this demo, as I don't have a third-party tool with myself. So this is a process flow diagram. This pretty much covers all the use cases that we were discussing in the last slide. So as you can see here, there can be some third-party systems involved in this process, where we have got a third-party system, like Workday, SuccessFactors, which generate an event and create a request in the Microsoft product. And again, Microsoft is Active Directory and Azure Active Directory. And from these, the request goes further down to ServiceNow. And then we have got some capabilities to enrich the accounts through ServiceNow, add the users to a particular group, or we can also notify the account details to the manager. So this is one process. And the second one is we don't need the Microsoft works in the middle. So we can also have a direct connection with the third-party tools and ServiceNow. And then we can go around with the enrichment of the user accounts, adding the users to the group, and a number of use cases that we have there. And there's a third step, where we don't have a third-party tool. We don't have any requests coming in through the Microsoft products. We have got ServiceNow just acting by itself, where we can use the service catalog, the ServiceNow forms. We can automate those forms to fulfill these active user account requests or updating some user account, adding users to group, application access, remote network access, employee onboarding/offboarding. So this is where ServiceNow comes into the picture. And we have got all the capabilities to pretty much get a lot of flavors of employee profiles sorted just by using ServiceNow automation. So this pretty much wraps up the process flow diagram. I'll move over to the next slide. Again, I've been [INAUDIBLE] it all over. So for some possible use cases that we have here is updating my cell phone number, updating group membership, user account creation, creating a new shared mailbox, creating a distribution list, rehiring an employee, offboarding an employee. And there can be plenty of use cases that we have here. Now, some of the benefits that we have realized over time-- so I have worked with a lot of similar projects. And plenty of clients are moving towards the ServiceNow or are involving ServiceNow automation in their onboarding/offboarding and user update requests. So basically they are doing this to reduce the manual intervention and fully cater the identity management requests. So what happens when this manual intervention is removed? So in turn they also remove the errors, so reduce errors in processing. Also, dependencies are removed of in-house legacy automation scripts. So these scripts are basically which the AD team or the Exchange team or Active Directory team is having in their systems. So those dependencies are also removed. After all this, the biggest factor is a quick turnaround time. So we'll be coming to that. I'll be circling back to that later in the slides. But the turnaround time is the biggest change that we have here-- reducing the errors, no manual intervention, and also a quick turnaround time. Moving on to some key highlights-- OK. So some of the key highlights here, a number of employee profiles can be digitized. So, as we have got, we can create a user account. We can add users to the group. So many times we just, if we want to give a user access to an application, maybe Workday, we are creating an HR profile. We can simply add that user into the Workday group, and other automation will take place around it. And we have set up a HR profile. And similarly, we can set up a service desk profile, where we are adding user to a service desk group in the Azure AD. So there are a number of levels that we can set up using the ServiceNow platform. And a request form can be configured and automated. And again, this all can be done through the service request form that we have been using all around, all the time. And the design is future proof, configuration friendly, and robust. So why this is the case? Because ServiceNow is highly moving towards Flow Designer. It's promoting Flow Designer and the use of it because it's easy to use, it's user friendly, and in terms of the debugging of the logs and everything are pretty straightforward, if you can just read and see what they show is. And every six months, we are getting an upgrade for ServiceNow, which is again a plus point. We don't have to worry about anything. So there is no technical depth. So if we are having some kind of custom integration, it is on us improving and maintaining the code. But here we don't have to worry about it. So automatically everything is getting upgraded. It's getting better every day. And the biggest point that we have here is the average fulfillment time. As I was just speaking in the last slide, it gets reduced to around three minutes from around 24 hours. And again, these 24 hours can be even more so, if we have got some approvals and they are just sitting there to be approved. And once they are approved, they might take a couple of more days to fulfill those requests. So in those terms, this time can be even more. But when we are using this automation, once the request is approved it just goes in and it's done within a few minutes. So this is a drastic change. And also, the return on investment on this one-- like, if you are having a manual employee sitting there fulfilling these requests, you can get a big turnaround, maybe save a-- so one of our clients had emailed me that they were saving of a full-time employee using this automation. So they were saving a lot on that one. So these are some of the key highlights. And where this can be applied to? So this can be applied to HR systems, as we have already seen in the process flow diagram, some HR systems where we want to automate the identity management requests and also streamline the requests by removing manual intervention errors and unstructured time-consuming processes, also customers who want to transform manual processes into self-service forms automated by ServiceNow workflows. So these are some of the places it can be applied. So before we go off to the demo, we have got some prerequisites that we need for this automation to happen. So first of all, we need a ServiceNow instance with the Integration Hub subscription. The second thing that we need on the instance is we need to install a Microsoft Azure Active Directory Spoke. Again, this can be different for different use cases. But the demo that we are going through today, we'll be using the Azure Active Directory Spoke. And also we need access to the Azure Portal and also the credentials to build a connection between ServiceNow and Azure. So I have got my ServiceNow instance with me. And I have already sorted out the connection between the Azure Portal and ServiceNow. So that's all good. So what I'll be doing the first thing, I will be raising a request for a new user account. And this user account is a fully automated form that we have. And once this form is submitted, it will go ahead and create a user for which we are requesting in the Azure Active Directory. So let's start off. No problem. Now look for-- we'll put 567. And we don't need to worry about the comments. We need to press Submit. So now, once this request is submitted, if I click on it, and as you can see, just within a minute it has actually gone to complete. So if I go to Azure and go to the users, we do have that user created here. So Tom Molly-- and we have got the job title. We also do have the phone number that we have entered. And that's how quick it is. And also, I have got the user provisioning setup from Azure to ServiceNow again. So I think every 30 minutes the users are synced back to ServiceNow. So all the new users that come in are also going back to ServiceNow at the users. So we are also provisioning a ServiceNow application for those users. Now, if I go to the back and backend of this one and check with the executions, so this is the flow that was executed in the catalog item was requested. We updated the record. And Work notes has request-- work in progress. We get catalog variables. So this is a custom action that I've created. I'm building out the account name and password for the user using this. So it's a basic script action that we have, which takes the first name and the last name of the user and generates an account name with first letter and the last name of the user and also gives out a generated password text. Now, once I've got this, I'm again updating the record with the account name-- the requested item record with the account name of the user that we get out of that action. [INAUDIBLE] the next action that I'm executing is create a user. So I am almost setting every attribute that's required for the user. So I'm setting the account enable to True so that the account is enabled for the user, and he is able to log in. So display name is set up through the catalog item, first name, last name, user IDs. We have got it from the previous step [INAUDIBLE].. So this is a servicewow.onmicrosoft.com. So this is my application on the Azure. And we have also got the email alias as Tom Molly. And we've also got the password. So we are also changing force change password for the user. We can set it to False as well. And we also got the other attributes, given name, surname. We've got the phone number, job title. We can set a lot of other attributes, but for this demo I've just used some of them. And once it has success, it gives out a user ID as the output. Now, once this is done, I'm also sending out an email to the manager, so Adam Haro. I'm sending out this email. If I go to the email logs, we should be able to see that there. OK. Let's look. I'll go back to the email in a bit. And, yep. At the end I am marking the request as complete. OK. Yep. So we have got the email there. So, Hi Adam. The account details of the new user request, RITM-- full name this, network account name, and username, and the password. And the manager can, further down, share these credentials with the user to log in. And, yep, post that, we are just marked the request as complete. So once this is completed, it's all good. We're done. We're done within, I think, less than three minutes or so. It was completed. And just in case if something goes wrong, I am also having a error handler, where I'm creating an incident and assigning it to a team, to action, just in case if anything goes wrong, to look at the logs and see what has gone wrong. And they can reticket the flow or the request for that particular user. And, yep, I think that's quite magic. And also just one more thing-- this was just a create user. Again, if I search my Azure, we have got around 39 actions with us. We can look up user stream. We can add users to group, reset user password, disable user, and delete a user, and also update a user, create a user, enable a user. So there are a number of use cases that we can get at. So it's just a small thing that I showed you. But there are a lot of possibilities around this. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for your time. If there are any questions, do reach out to me or my email address, LinkedIn, Twitter, SN Devs, Slack. And Flow Designer is the way to be. So I have been using it since 2018, and I think it's just awesome. And there are a lot of other spokes that we have outside of this use case, Azure AD and Active Directory, that can just do brilliant stuff. And it can be done in hours. So that's also an amazing thing. And thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Hack your environment to work for you ✶✩
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everybody, and welcome to hack your environment to work for you. My name is Maria Gabriela Ochoa Perez Waechter. Some of you may know me as MGOPW, and my pronouns are she/her. I am a 2022, 2021 ServiceNow Developer MVP. And I've got ADHD combined, PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, and major depression recurrent with stress. I'm a Venezuelan-American immigrant, and I'm part of the LGBTQIA+ community. We're getting a little bit personal in this session today. So I wanted to get all of that out of the way. And I wanted to first share with you a quote that really helped me realize some things about myself. This is from the Disability Science Review, but developmental disabilities are not a disease. They are a mismatch between a person's capabilities and the requirements of their life situation and culture. It helped me realize that my ADHD is really only a problem because I live in a society where I'm expected to sit for eight hours straight and work, and I just can't do that. So it's story time. When I was young, I really struggled in school, and I had no idea why. I got perfect grades, but I could never focus on any one thing. And I could never make my mind up about what major I wanted to be in. I switched majors because I love doing everything, and I couldn't stick to one or the other. I went between advertising, psychology. My dad always tried to get me to do art, but I wanted to make money, so I want computer science in the end. When I was part of the computer science program at my school, I looked around me and I saw just a bunch of men, who could sit there and stare into the matrix and pull out lines of code and somehow just be able to work for hours on end, when I couldn't even focus for 30 minutes at a time. It took me a while to get everything figured out. I went to a couple of doctors and a whole bunch of therapy. And I was finally able to accept myself for who I am and really keep working on my own mental health. Somewhere through that, I ended up getting into a car accident, and I'm still going to school. One day, I'll finish it. And then I ended up getting to ServiceNow. I finally found a place where I could do all the things I wanted to do, and I could do them all at once. I could get to interact with people. I was getting to be creative to the Service Portal, and I got to write code like I had always thought I couldn't do. But how did I get there? A lot of coping mechanisms or alternatively, how the Job Accommodations Network calls them accommodations. Now there's a lot of things that you need to consider, and you should work with your boss or your manager when you do this. But you have to figure out what parts you're struggling in your career with. And I've been very lucky to have had some amazing mentors and role models in my career that have been willing to help me out. One of the hardest things that I just cannot do is prioritize tasks. I'm really great at taking notes, so I'm really great at paying attention and retaining information. But I don't know where to put it. I don't know how to organize it, and I don't know what needs to come first. So I've always asked my managers for help, figuring out which of these 37 tasks need to be done first. Other stuff that has worked for me in the past is being provided a structured breaks, being provided private workspace time, minimizing random things that I have to do as part of my job. To focus on specific things and specific blocks of time has really helped me out. An uninterrupted work time with no meetings has been just one of the biggest and best things ever. You can also do to-do lists or have meetings at the start of the week in order to prioritize the rest of your week and other assistive technology, like pomodoro timers are a lifesaver. They're little cubes or you can even have digital timers that you do pomodoro sprints with. So it could be 30 minutes of work and then a 5-minute break, and then 30 minutes of work and then a 5-minute break. And this has really helped me out because I've been able to just really hard focus on just working, and then I've been able to disconnect for a little bit and then be able to reconnect. And I found that I have been incredibly productive during those pomodoro times. Now there's something else that I ended up figuring out, and that takes me to this code. It's a lot of code, isn't it? It's too much for me sometimes, and this is only a third or a fourth of the final length of the script. And while I was working on this, it was awful because I just have to kept-- I just kept coming back and then leaving, and then coming back and leaving. And every time that I had to get my mind back in the coding mindset and back into the code, it took me at least 30 minutes to really figure out what the heck was going on. Because there's so many words on the screen, all of it makes sense individually to me, but it all doesn't make sense at the same time. So I started looking around because there had to be some way to figure this out. Somebody had had to figured something out with this by now. So that made me turn to Visual Studio Code. It's a great text editor. I highly recommend you use it. There's a bunch of awesome plug-ins, and one of them is called Highlight. Highlight lets you use regex to highlight different things in your code. The suite's called Highlight. So I used it and the help of some of my really good friends, thank you guys so much, to highlight previous, current, and my log statements and change their colors. You can make them be really obvious. You can use background colors. You can change the color, the font way. You can change the color looks on the sidebar, a whole bunch of stuff, and it will just do it automatically for you when you load your script. And it basically turns this giant block of text into something a lot more legible for me. To you, this might not make sense and in my look, even worse. But to me, it's really helped me out because I'm now able to-- well, first, I can look at the entire line of code. And that log line in line 4, it doesn't register in my brain because it's so close to the background color. But I know it's there when I need to reference it. So suddenly, the size of it looks a bit smaller. I also discovered that I could use emoji inside of ServiceNow scripts. So I now use emojis to figure out logic. With this script, I was working on a lot of previous and current objects inside of a business rule, and I kept getting confused about the if and else-if statements because they had to be compared to each other. One had to be empty. One had to be non-empty, and there was a whole bunch of different cases where I needed to do something specific according to the state of previous and current. So I created these little comments at outlines, where it tells me if it's two X's, I know they both don't exist. And if it's an X and a check mark, I know that previous exists, it doesn't exist, and then current exists, and so on and so forth. Because I don't know why, in my mind, I just cannot read if nil or dot nil and remember the meaning of it right away. It always takes me a second to read logic that out in my brain, and I've realized that that was just wasting a whole bunch of time. So when we compare the two, one of them might look better to you. One of them looks way better to me, and that's what this whole session's been about. It's been about you working to find what works for you, and what works for you may not work for me, and vice versa. So I highly encourage you all to take a look at the Job Accommodations Network. A lot of us don't put a term to the struggles that we face day in and day out. Some of us choose to go with mental health therapy, and others choose to find other methods of treatment. But we all end up having our own individual struggles. Even if it looks like nobody else around you is struggling, trust me, they are. Look up imposter syndrome. And then look up the Job Accommodations Network to really figure out how you can help yourself succeed because there's only going to be one person invested in you, and that's going to be yourself. And you need to take that time for yourself. One last thing that I wanted to mention is something that a lot of people come up to me and say is that they can't find any jobs that are looking for people with their experience. They don't know how to get into the field. And they don't want to apply to this job because they feel like they'll be rejected. But what I want you to know is that I have never applied for a job that I was fully perfect for. I have never met the job requirements. They always asked for a degree, which I don't have. They always ask for 20 some years of experience for an entry level job, which nobody has. And what you really just need to do is just apply. You just need to do it. Don't let your dreams be dreams. Just do it. Yesterday, you said today, do it, and just join us over at SNDevs, where we all love to hang out and help each other. We're the largest independent ServiceNow community. You can find the link on the slide right behind me. And finally, make sure you go check out WomenNow.Dev. I'm going to be posting a blog post going further into my experiences, the specific accommodations that have really helped me out throughout my career. And I'm going to be posting a lot more resources that you can tap into and other blog posts to really help you in your journey in getting started or wherever you might be on helping yourself succeed. So thank you so much for watching. And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. [MUSIC PLAYING]
How to avoid causing skipped records
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Howdy. And welcome to Creator Con. I'm here to share with you how to avoid creating skipped records. My name is Kim Reverman. I am the ServiceNow architect for Texas A&M University. We are a multi-tenant instance with multiple universities, colleges, departments, and agencies. We have over 1,000 ITIL users and a user base of over 400,000 users. With this configuration comes a significant number of customizations and, of course, skipped records. So I'm here to tell you and share with you what we did to avoid creating skipped records. One of the things that we were challenged with was reduce the upgrade duration time and increase time spent on improvements. And I'm going to show you we have. Here's some background about us whenever we first started. You can see there was a sharp rise in the duration time to actually getting an upgrade delivered from when we first started our clone to whenever we put it on production. And it took us up to three months for several of the upgrades. And now whenever we're deploying a major upgrade, it's taking us less than a month. One of the things too is our customizations were also rising. And we noticed we have a huge technical debt because of running a multi-instance. We adopted a strategy for getting back to baseline. And we've been still implementing new products since then and keeping our skipped records low. During the London upgrade, we leveraged the really sweet ServiceNow upgrade feature to only review the skipped records that were actually changed. That saved us a tremendous amount of time there so thank you, ServiceNow upgrade developers, for that feature. We really appreciate it. Getting back to baseline or as close as you can still isn't enough. How do you keep it there? And that was our challenge. Here's what we did to stabilize the growth of creating the skipped records. We made the ServiceNow records stand out using Field Styles. Using field styles, we were able to color the ServiceNow records with a green background. And if they happened to be modified by us, then they're priority one or two, then we're going to put a red border around them. The priority three and fours we have a dotted orange border, and the priority five a solid green border. Anything else created by us is left white background with a black text. Now the script that we use to control which of those styles we're going to show is called CreatedByNow. And I'm going to give you a demo of what you will see if you installed this script on your instances. This is Problem Management. It's the Configure All section. And as you can see, here are the business rules. All the records you see with the green background are ServiceNow records. The ones with the white ones are ours. And the ones that the very bottom there with the red dotted border is the ServiceNow record that we modified, a.k.a that's a skipped record. Here are the client scripts again. We have some that we've modified, and some that we have not, and others that we have created. And one of the things that's real nice about these is when we are looking for problems, we can easily see, OK, well, let's take a look at our modifications that we made, the things that we created first, or what did we modify and take a look and see if we need to make some changes there before we modify something else. This is the dictionary entries. As you can see, they have the green border around them because those are priority fives. So what does the script do? Well, first thing that we're going to check for is to see if the record is in our scoped app. If it is, it's ours. The background will remain white. Then the next thing we do is we look at the versions, just one record, to see if there is a sys update history record and see if it's current. If it is, it's NOW's and therefore it's going to remain green. If it's not current, it's NOW and we revised it. Any other version records is ours. Those are all going to be system updates set records. Since I didn't show you the script and you're probably curious about what you can do to get it, go out to SHARE. It's in the developer site for ServiceNow. And link for CreatedByNow or scan the QR code here to download it as soon as you can and install it. If you want to contact me, my information is here. I'm also available on the ServiceNow Devs Slack website community, an awesome place for getting help at any time. Thank you all very much for coming to Creator Con. Enjoy and be inspired to do great things. Thank you very much. [MUSIC PLAYING]
A ServiceNow discovery spoke to setup workflows for your IT operations
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, everyone. Welcome to this breakout session on the topic ServiceNow, Discovery Spoke. This session is about Discovery Spoke that I've prepared some time back. And with this spoke, it allows you to set up workflows for your IT operations. So my name is Alikutty Abdulrazak, and I work as a senior solution architect at Wipro. My functions include as a TUE lead for Wipro. I handle all the solutions and the prod offerings. Apart from that, I'm also involved in supporting the pre sales and delivery teams. But my experience, I have over 12 years of experience in the IT industry. I've worked in different roles as in service delivery and also in pre sales. On my expertise here, I have [? family ?] worked on different IP workflow products, employee workflow, as well as created workflow products. And I've been also part of community MVP for the past five years, and also part of the developer MVP for past two years from now. So something about by myself. Going to the topic here. So the discovery spoke. So this is a custom spoke which I have built, and this allows you to perform horizontal discovery via flow designer. So being working with different item implementation for a long time, there has been always a need to-- as you know, you have to set up workflows for your IT operations. There are different use cases that you can come across during your implementation. With this spoke, it allows you to set up no code, low code workflow for your IT operation. As a part of this spoke, I have two different actions that have been built. First action is about discovering any device in your infrastructure. It's called as discovered by IP address, and it allows you to discover any of your servers or your network devices within your infrastructure. There is also a second action within the spoke, which is get status details. It is the corresponding spoke related to the discovery, and with this it allows you to extract the discovery result and you can validate whether your discovery is successful or not. A couple of use cases where in real time you could use it. One of the main common use cases that we have is the infrastructure change. So let's say you have to make a change to your server, for example, adding more CPU or adding a disk. Whenever the specific change is implemented by your IT team, you can use this spoke to trigger a discovery to your infrastructure. Since you have the server as your CI on the change, you could access the IP of the CI and trigger this workflow. And with this workflow, what it gives you is the latest changes in your infrastructure. So let's say you have added more disk or more memory. The same things get discovered at the same time, and this allows you to validate that your change has been successful. You can set up such workflows for change. Apart from this, other common use cases that I've come across is when you have alert management. So if you need to remediate the alert by restarting a server, then this is a case where you could use this spoke to rediscover your server and make sure you know your server is back up to normal. That is another use case where you could use it. Another use case is regarding software installation and uninstallation. So whenever you have a software installation happening in one of your servers or any other infrastructure, this spoke would, again, be used to discover whether the software has been installed or not. It would act like a failover, for example, you have a CCM to do this. In case of that installation fail, with the help of this discovery spoke you could actually open a path to the asset team to validate it. So it's kind of an instance failover. Apart from this, you can have it used for any of your orchestration uses with your servers or within your infrastructure, or also on any other discovery request. Now this spoke is available in the share repository. You could search for ServiceNow Discovery and download it. You can also import from GitHub in your source control. Additionally I've also put up a documentation for this in the community blog. So this is the spoke, which is available in share repository here. You can search it for ServiceNow Discovery Spoke and download it from here. The GitHub URL and also the documentation related to the spoke is available within this repository, so you could access all the details regarding it. I'll now show you a couple of demonstration use cases on how you could use the specific spoke for your discovery, for infrastructure discovery. Coming back to my instance here. So I have the spoke already set up in my personal instance here. So you can see that this is the primary action that I have. This is called as a Discovery by IP address. So you can discover any devices from your infrastructure using this. You need to provide the IP address from your CMDB. So primarily, a prerequisite is you already have discovery set up in your instance. So I'll just show you how to test this. When you test it, you need to provide a specific IP address, so I'll be giving a sample IP address here. The second input that you have here is the source. You can specify any task number which is associated with it, which you are trying to relate it to. And also have the option to select an application. So this is a [INAUDIBLE] server that is associated with your discovery. For now, you select this as all and I'll try to test this. Once I click on Run Test, it would actually start triggering discovery on an infrastructure. A discovery status record would be created. If I open the results of this, you can see here that the discovery status has already initiated. The discovery of this device is in progress. Now if I navigate back to my instance here under discovery status, you will be able to see that a discovery is already started here, which is active, which has been initiated by the spoke. And if I go to it, you'll be able to see all the results regarding it. So as soon as this is triggered, system will try to access the device information. Once the discovery is completed you could use my second spoke, which I've built, to access the discovery result. So let's see what the second spoke is about and how you could use it. We're going back to the second spoke here. The second spoke is get status details, where you could provide your discovery status with just an output from your first spoke and then see what are the results. So let me show you how the results would be here. So I would be selecting a discovery status and I would click on Run Test here. I would start extracting the discovery of the results from my status record. And if you see the results here, you can see I will get the complete details of my discovery. This would primarily be an adjacent reformat here. You can see the sys ID of the CI which was discovered, the class of the CI, the IP address related to it. If there was any issue associated with the discovery, that information is also added here and you would also get that issue link, which would be in HTML format. Finally, you would also get the status of the discovery, whether it was successful or not. And depending on these choice values, these options, you could actually trigger your workflows for your IT operations. You can also get multiple discovery value. For example, if you are discovering a subnet of large number of IP, the second spoke would be used to get results of multiple devices as well. So that is about the second spoke. Now coming to the two different use cases that I have set up. So I would be just going through the first flow here, which is a use case for change implementation, and I'll also demonstrate a second use case which is regarding software installation. So this is a flow which gets triggered, the number you change is getting implemented. That's the trigger condition for it. As we do it, what we do here is we would call up the discovery spoke here and the discovery spoke would access the IP address of your CI, which is on the change. You would also see the source as marked as a change request number here. Once this is triggered, you need to wait until the discovery is completed. And once discovery is completed, you can use the second spoke here to get the status details. So depending on the results which we get back-- so let's say I have an issue in discovery the device status was not successful. I can open a task or an incident for it, or if it was successful I can update that the change was successfully implemented. So that is what the specific flow has done here. Depending on what output you get from discovery, the change gets updated. So this is the first sample use case that I've built. I have also another use case, which I will be demonstrating today. So this is regarding software installation. So whenever you install a software, either it might be depending on automation. You have automation enabled using a CIS-EM or any other product, or it may be a manual installation. So right now I've considered a manual installation because I don't have that automation tool. What this workflow does is whenever you have a software request on your server-- so let's say I have considered WinZip as an example here. This is a workflow that would be associated with your software request, basically your service catalog. What we do here is basically it first goes to the manager approval, depending on your process. Once the manager approves, it creates a catalog path for the asset team. Now this can also be an automation. If you are using a CIS-EM, you can use the out of the box CIS-EM spoke for this, which would automate it. Once the task is manually set up by the asset team, in our case here, the spoke would be automatically triggered here. So this would be, again, discovering your infrastructure. It would capture the new software installation information. It will bring it back to the instance here and depending on your software installation status, let's say if the study was a success and I was able to look up the software installation record, it would be a successful installation. If I was not able to discover the software, then the catalog task would be reopened and the asset team would have to handle it. So this is kind of an instance failover where as soon as you close the task, if discovery is not successful, the asset team would have to handle it again, giving a better user experience. So let's try this out. So I have set up a catalog item for this. So I would open my software installation catalog item for WinZip here. You can also request this from Virtual Agent, if you want. That's also possible. I need to select a server here where I would be installing this. So I select my server name here, which I have already access into, so I select the server. So before opening, before going to this, let me just go to the server once and I'll show you what is there currently in the server. Switching back to server here. So this are all the information regarding my Windows server that I have. And if you see correctly, I have around 25 softwares which has been installed in here, and you won't see the WinZip as currently installed as a part of this list. So once I do this workflow, you'll be able to see that the WinZip gets discovered, and automatically it would also help in setting up my IT operation process. So now the request is submitted. I would have initial approval for this, which goes to the manager. It's a normal process of a task setup. Now I have approval here, which I'm just going to bypass this. An approval. So as I approve it, a task would be created for installation. Since our case is a manual installation, task is created. If this was automated installation you could directly install it even without a task. So let's do one thing. Let's also install the software directly on the server. So right now I'm going to switch back to my server here, which I have opened up. I have switched back to my Windows server here where I will be installing the software. So I have the installer here for WinZip. Just take a minute to install it, so I'll begin installing it. So it's a normal process. As an asset team member, once you get the task you try to install it. Generally this would be an automation. You would have an agent set up which would automatically install it. But just for the sake of demo, I'm just installing it. Now if I try to close my task without installing it, it would trigger as a failure. It would reopen my task and it would notify the asset manager. Right now since I am actually installing it, this would actually be a successful use case. And when I close the task, it would trigger the discovery and let me know that the discovery was successful. So that is typically the use case that I have set up here. Now installation is almost getting complete here. OK, so this has been installed and that process is completed, and also we can see the software has got added in my Windows server list here. Now going back to my instance again. Now since the installation is over, I would actually be closing this task manually for now. So as the asset team member I'm just going to close this task. As soon as I close this task, the discovery for that specific device is triggered. So I just open the related flow here. So you can see the corresponding flow and how it is getting executed. So the flow is just opening up. So here you can see that as soon as I close the task here for the catalog task, the custom spoke for discovery is triggered. Now it is just waiting for the discovery to complete, a couple of-- might take a couple of minutes. As soon as it's complete, what it does is if the discovery is a success, then it tries to look up for the software record. Now the advantage here is the catalog of items linked to the software model, and the software model is also a part of your SAM process. In case you are using Software Asset Management [INAUDIBLE],, you can link both the software model and the discovery model together and you can set up your installation process for this. Now let's see if the discovery is getting completed or not. So now it's completed, and the process has also completed. Look up is completed. And if I go back to my device here, software device here, you can see that an additional software is also added. Right now we have 26. And if I scroll down, you can see the WinZip software has got added. It has been discovered as soon as I closed the task, and that has also been validated by my workflow there. So using these two custom actions that we have, you could actually set up any workflows for your IT operations depending on your use cases. It's possible to set it up. And you could use it for any kind of infrastructure validation. With that said, regarding this session, thank you all for watching.
Multi-source eBonding– the one ring to rule them all
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi. I'm Christopher Carver. And I'm here to talk to you about multi-source eBonding. Before we get into that, let's talk a little bit about me. I'm a technical architect here at Textron helping them realize ServiceNow across the enterprise. Textron has customers in defense, aerospace, specialized vehicles, turf control, and fuel systems. Now, let's go ahead and get into this topic of multi-source eBonding. So Textron actually has engagements with a lot of external IP service suppliers that perform various operations within our enterprise. They can do everything from server support to database support and call center and data recovery. Now, Textron needs to eBond with each one of these individual companies and making sure that our ticket communicates with their ticket in their ticketing system. So initially, when we set out, it was a one-to-one correspondence between our tickets. However, have you ever run into an issue where you need to coordinate the work with multiple external service suppliers where you have an outage that involves multiple parties to communicate? Well, initially, our major incident manager, here at Textron, would end up creating four or five incident tickets and make them children under a big ticket, but then they would have to manually ensure that the coordination of information from one supplier made it into the other supplier's ticketing system. This is a huge burden for them and didn't scale very well. So we needed to create a new solution to allow us to work together. And the idea behind it is that we only wanted one ticket here at Textron, and updating that one ticket at Textron actually updated all of our IT service suppliers across the board. What this meant was is that if a supplier updates their ticket, that information would flow to ours. But then our system on the ServiceNow platform would be intelligent enough to update the other suppliers and their ticketing system. That way the data flowed smoothly between suppliers. And that no supplier actually needed to know who the other company was that they needed to interact with. We took care of all of that in this new framework. So let's talk a little bit about the ServiceNow components that comprise of this multi-source framework that we're putting together. So the first thing is we take advantage of the out-of-the-box experience on the platform for imports [INAUDIBLE].. OK. That is a very powerful ability within ServiceNow. But we went ahead and just leveraged out of the box that other suppliers will actually write into the single import table, and then we take care of that transformation. The other thing that we needed to build, and this is the core, this is the part that really makes this all run, is we did create a custom table called the relationship table. And this is a one to many relationship where we have our one ticket but then we know which tickets on the supplier side to update and keep them updated. And lastly, we did create another custom table. And it's our payload table. That's to ensure that as we're sending outbound messages, that we keep track of those messages and then are able to recover and do some data recovery if necessary. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. All right. So let's now move on to the inbound topology. So everything that you see in blue is within the framework. It's static OK. That way as we on board new suppliers during the initial engagement, we would just work through the data mapping session. How do you talk to us? Because as soon as you send us the right message and we then set them up, everything is set in place. So I don't have to rewrite everything from scratch for every supplier. So what they'll do is they'll actually write into the import set staging table. Then we'll perform the transform. I say we, but we know it's ServiceNow at the back end, the platforms do the transform. So we set up that transform to actually do the logic. We do trust our vendors, but we also want to verify all that data coming in before we write it to our system of record table for that incident or ticket. The target table for our transform though is our relationship table, and that is key. Once we've written to the relationship table, we then know on the final steps of the transform, do we create a new ticket? Or do we update a new ticket? Now, the outbound topology is a little bit free. There's a little bit more involved. However, we try to streamline out all of the static areas, once again, in blue. That once it's set up, you don't have to change it for every supplier. The other items that are colored is what we would have to put into place for every supplier as we on board them. So we did set up a standard business rule that would look at the ticket table of the ticket that we're looking for, and then we created an event that's unique for every supplier. And the reason for that is just as we said in the inbound, where the supplier needs to talk to us how we ask them to talk to them, in return, we talked to the supplier how they want us to talk to them. So we actually had to create an event that would be sent, and then we would take that event and process that and build up the payload of the data that we've captured from the ticket. We then send the payload down to our REST handler that would end up sending that message over to the supplier. And we use asynchronous communication calls, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. And then when the supplier is done, they'll send that message back. And then we actually have another handler that's listening on the ECC queue on processing that message back. Because typically, when a supplier responds back to you, they have their own structure of their response message. So we have it unique for every supplier. As that gets sent back, that also is updating the REST payload table. Now, on the far back inside is the payload monitor. And the payload monitor, what it does, is schedule a task that is set up in ServiceNow and it, monitors the REST payload table. And what it does is it determinants do I try to resend the message? Has the message timed out? Because we have to remember the internet is like the wild, wild west. You don't know what's going to happen. Something can happen in between the external service suppliers ticketing system could be in the process of being upgraded. So we need to be able to true up all of the missing messages that we weren't able to send to that supplier at a later date. So let's talk about some of the lessons learned that came about all of this. So the first thing is the concept of reflect or deflect updates coming in from the external service suppliers. So imagine you have this large party. Everyone is talking together. One of your service providers, they're done with their ticket. So if they close their ticket, do you reflect that closing your ticket. Well, if you do, your other service suppliers might think you're closing it out. It's all solved. So the question then becomes should I reflect that change or deflect it? And in that case, we would have deflected that change, just made a work note and pass that work note on to the other suppliers letting them know another supplier has closed out the ticket, is they're done. That might trigger them to take further action on their part. The next part is asynchronous REST calls. This was a game changer for us. It not only helped us improve our performance, but it also helped improve our scalability and led into the third point. Now, I included a link in this presentation. I don't know about asynchronous REST calls. I totally recommend you read up on that. And the third point of scheduling automatic recovery, that was because of an outcropping from asynchronous operations. We were then able to perform that automatic recovery, and that was a great lesson learned. Because we used to do synchronous calls, and that was a real performance killer and made automatic data recovery very difficult. The next one is truing-up those conversations. Back to that party. You've got a big party, but now you need to eBond with another supplier. You're pulling in this new supplier who needs to do some work, yet they're late to the party. So you need to be able to true up all those prior existing conversations and files that you've been sharing, and let them in on what that conversation is about. So don't forget about turning up those vendors keeping them up to date. And lastly, don't forget about deBond. It's just as important as eBonding. Sometimes you need to decouple your ticket from another vendor. So make sure that you work through that with your vendor, and how you can accomplish that. And finally, if you're interested in pursuing multi-source eBonding or want to see you how we've done it, we do provide a copy of this framework on GitHub. So if you're interested in reviewing, testing, deploying, or even contributing, I'd love to hear from you in the future. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Write your own Outlook add-in that exposes ServiceNow UI natively inside emails
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everyone. Welcome to my session, Outlook Add-Ins for ServiceNow, where I'll show you how to expose service portal natively inside of Microsoft Outlook. A little bit about me-- I've been at ServiceNow for 10 years, which means that that's one fourth of my 40-year coding experience and, frankly, one fourth of my entire career. My name is Grant Hulbert, and I'm the Director of Innovation for Corporate Strategy. Today, we're going to talk about what the problem is-- too much copy and paste and swivel chair. We'll talk about the solution, which is Outlook add-ins for ServiceNow. And we'll actually walk through installing the solution, and then we'll talk a little bit about customizing and debugging, and how you can make changes to this yourself. So first off the problem-- imagine that you've received an email-- and I'm sure this happens all the time-- where you are asked to do something that probably needs to be reported as an incident or a customer service case. So in this case, somebody sent me an email with a request. Well, what do you do every time you do that? You, first of all, have to slide your email a little off to the side. You have to then open a browser, log in to your incident management system, and then you have to go over to the email side and copy the username. Go to the other side, paste the username. Copy the issue from the subject line. Paste the issue into the subject line. Copy the comments. Paste the comments. And then, finally submit. And then, finally get back to your work. And this seems like an awful lot of swivel chair, an awful lot of work, for something that really should be automated. So let's talk about the solution. And the hint's right there on the screen. What would happen if we just never left Outlook? Well, this is the solution. You have the ability to write Outlook add-ins, where your icons and menus appear right there on the screen directly inside of Outlook. And when this task pane that Microsoft provides slides down the side, you as a coder have the ability to put your service portal into that spot, right inside of Outlook, and you can have all of the data from the email pre-filled into that form in ServiceNow. And then, after you submit this incident, you can click to view it. And sure enough, there in ServiceNow is all the information that came Outlook. I don't know about you, but this is potentially life-changing. It seems terribly mundane, but, frankly, being able to get rid of all of that copy and paste and be able to have ServiceNow itself showing up inside of Outlook, to me, just changes everything for myself, and for employees, and for my stakeholders. So let's talk about what you as a coder get. This is really cool. I just get so excited about this. Microsoft has created an API where all of the data in that email can be queried from client side. And in our case, what ServiceNow engineers have created is a way for you to see that inside of portal client side code. So you actually get access, through APIs, to everything inside of that email-- the subject, the body. There's tons of stuff that we'll talk about towards the end here. And then, of course, any arbitrary service portal that you can design-- the one I'm showing here is out of box, but you can create any service portal and have that appear, again, directly inside of Outlook. So let's go through the steps of installing it, because I know when I'm looking at these kinds of demos, a lot of times they leave the installation steps out and sometimes it can be a little bit confusing. So I'll take you through every step of installing it. It's actually pretty easy. And good news is this has been around since the Paris release. So first step, you just go up to your list of plugins and click Plugins. And then what you'll search for is add-ins, or the com.sn_outlook_addin and install it. So after that Outlook add-in plugin is installed, you'll find that there is a list of manifests. And these office add-in manifests are the starting point for these apps that are projected inside of Outlook. So in our case, this came out of box ServiceNow for ITSM. So we'll click inside of this manifest, and you can see here, that there is, up under the hamburger menu, Copy Manifest URL. So when you click that, the idea is that you need this on your clipboard for the next installation step. So we'll copy this manifest URL, and then we'll switch back over to Outlook. Now, inside of Outlook, if you have the new Outlook user interface, you'll see the little three dots up top here. You click on those three dots, and then you can see that you can get add-ins. So we'll click Get Add-ins here, and a dialog box appears that allows you to add more Outlook add-ins. And in our case, we'll click the My Add-ins. And then, all the way down at the bottom, we can say Add from URL. And this presents a dialog box where you paste in what you copied earlier. So it's really cool, because ServiceNow actually builds this manifest URL for you. The app does that for you. And people in the email IT part of your company can actually provide this link as basically a base system. They can actually push this out to everyone in your company who's using Outlook and automatically have lists installed if you want. But in our case as the developer, we'll just paste it in manually. And now, after you've installed that, you'll immediately see this menu bar. And that is evidence that you're add-in was installed and is functioning. So I imagine the next thing you want to do is see what it takes to customize the code. In our case, we'll open a portal widget. Because what the Outlook add-in out-of-box product provides is a whole bunch of widgets-- one for creating incidents and one for creating BTB tasks. So we'll type portal in the nav. Click the widgets. And it's a little hard to, find because there's a lot of widgets, so search for star outlook. And then you'll see that there's a widget called outlook_create_incident. That is the widget that actually appears in the slide-in task pane over in Outlook. and we'll click inside to create the incident. Scroll down to the bottom of this, and open the widget editor. Now, for those of you who are familiar with ServiceNow portal, this is technology that's been around forever. If you're not familiar, this is basically kind of a very standard Angular.js layout for creating widgets. But I want to draw your attention to the centerpiece here, the client script. So this is running client side. When you run Outlook, you actually are effectively running a web browser. Outlook is, of course, a native app, but inside of Outlook, that little slide-in pane is a web browser. And that browser is projecting JavaScript, HTML, all of that stuff. So when our slide-in task pane comes on with this particular portal widget, we can look at the source code that's running in the client side of the browser. So I searched here for office. And you can see here that we are accessing the end user's client browser, looking for Window.office.co ntext.mailbox.item. And what this is is we've basically exposed Outlook's APIs directly inside of here. And so, this is all Outlook's syntax for subject, and body, and all the information that you can get out of that. Now, notice here that we have a data view of Outlook. What this is is this makes it easier for the plugin to only show the fields that are in a particular specific view in your incident form. Remember, this is out of the box. You'll be able to customize it however you like. But on the incident form, this plugin adds a new view called Outlook, and that enables you to really easily customize that particular form. And then, also notice that I've pre-added-- you wouldn't see this if you followed along. I pasted it in one more line of code here, because I wanted to do something kind of useful-- have a correlation ID for the incoming email that I could then store inside of the incident that's created. That way you can have a data connection between the email and the created incident. So now, let's go see what this looks like inside of incident. We'll open up just a random incident here, and we'll switch to the Outlook view that I mentioned before. And then we'll switch to the form layout. Because what we're going to do is add one more field onto this form to make it visible on the slide-in pane in Outlook. So let's click that form layout. And we'll select the Correlation ID, bring it over to the other side, and click Save. Notice that the result of this is that we now have a new Correlation ID field showing up. This is all out of boxes. This Correlation ID is part of the incident table already, but we're just making it visible so that we can show it in our demo. The idea here is that you, when you want to put in your own cool add-ons to this, would pick any other fields that you want. I'm just showing you one example-- one that's actually somewhat useful. So now, when we reload the task pane inside of Outlook, you can see that this Correlation ID appears here. And that's the actual string that comes from the Outlook email and from their APIs. So let's talk about debugging. It turns out that because this whole region here, this pane on the right-hand side, is an actual webkit browser view, you can right-click and treat it just like a browser. So in this case I right-click and choose Inspect Element, and a typical webkit browser inspector appears. So here you can set breakpoints, you can see how your JavaScript is running-- basically all the stuff that you would do is if you are in a browser. But notice that this is actually in Outlook. So you're not going to ever see this in your browser, in the sense that Outlook provides its own browser and its own environment. And here is the Microsoft documentation. I just brought you to one page. There's plenty of docs online if you Google for office add-ins. But the idea here is, down at the bottom, you can see this is Microsoft Docs on this mailbox item-- the blind carbon copy, the body. And if we were to scroll through here, you would see tons and tons of information, including things about calendar items-- basically just everything you'd want to get out of a user's email. So what's next? Well, what I would suggest to you is that you clone the base system manifest, that manifest that we opened earlier to grab the URL from, and start your own add-on. That gives you the chance to create your own plugins, create your own menu items, create basically all the functionality that you want so that you're not interfering with the base system one. Then I'd suggest that you Google for Microsoft's Outlook Add-ins APIs and see what they can provide. This slide deck does provide links to that. So if you get the slide deck, then just go to the bottom and you'll and you'll find those links. And that's something I haven't had a chance to do yet. Notice that I've been talking about service portal. Service portal is really pretty old technology. It works great. I love the look of it. But nowadays everything's about UI Builder. So if any of you find out that UI Builder displays just as easily inside of these little slide-in panes-- I see no reason why they shouldn't-- please let me know and let the world know what you find. And finally, just have fun with this. Enjoy making your users' lives easier. I certainly find that I became the hero. As soon as I enabled this functionality for my users, they were beside themselves with joy. And being able to reduce all of their swivel chair and all of their copy and paste, I practically got a parade out of it. So hopefully you will, too. Thank you everyone for joining this session. I hope you enjoy building your own Outlook plugins and add-ons. And the slide deck contains resources. These are hyperlinks to the various parts of the technology that I've showed you today. Enjoy. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Regain 30 minutes of lost productivity a day with SN Utils
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to the session, how you can regain 30 minutes of productivity a day with SN Utils. My name is Arnoud Kooi. I am a Workflow Design Architect at ServiceNow. I'm five years at ServiceNow, seven years in the ecosystem, and I love the platform. Today's session is about the browser extension, SN Utils. It comes along with a VS code extension as well. But today's topic is the SN Utils site. It is available for every major browser, ranging from Chrome, to Firefox, as well as Safari. The code is available on GitHub, and all the direct links are also available on my site, arnoudkooi.com. And it's as easy as clicking Install from when you are on your favorite browser extension Web Store. So I have started working on SN Utils six years ago. And in that time, it has grown to almost 45,000 users. I have a lot of positive store ratings that I am really proud of. And here, you see a few testimonials. Set the video to Pause and read them all. The one on the right side, it changes my life. So that is also really, really cool to have testimonials like that. Recently, I have run a survey. And in the upper left circle chart, you see that more than 50% state that they gain 30 or more minutes productivity a day. So that's really awesome-- and even a substantial part, more than one hour a day. It's used by customers, by partners, so it's used all across the people who work with ServiceNow. A lot of positive experience-- if the experience is subpar, then it's most here often heard suggestion is more enablement, more training, more help on how to get the most out of it. So hopefully, this session will enable that as well. Today's focus is on slash commands. That is a feature to navigate around the instance, search for things, and invoke particular functions. So that will make more sense once I demonstrated it. So let's now jump right into the ServiceNow instance. And here, we see four tasks that we have at hand today. And let's just open the first one and start off with it. What group is Fred Luddy a member of? And to investigate that, instead of going to the normal navigation, I can invoke a user search by starting a slash command. And what I have just done is hit my keyboard forward slash. And now, this popup is available. I have a really shortcut for that called u, and that does a filter search. So when I do fred, when I would hit Enter, it would open in my current window. I would really like to open a new tab, so I do a Control-- or on Mac, a Command tap-- and now, that opens in a different tab. I get all the threads that I have in this instance. When opening it, it's opened the Fred Luddy record, as I would expect. And scrolling down here, I see the groups. And instead of needing to export this, what I can do here is use the select multiple records with Command-- that is a normal ServiceNow feature. But now, again, I can use a slash command copycells. I type in copy, and then I hit Space or Tab to fill that command. I hit Enter. And now, the cells that I had selected are being copied. So let's go back to my task. When I hit the Command-V here, I have all the groups that thread is part of. I hit Post, and I think we are done with this task. So I'm going to change this task to Done. What is up next? Why is dark mode not available? So there is a question, but it appears that dark mode is something that we just enabled. It is a new feature of their-- dark mode is a new feature available from San Diego in the next UI. So I recall that I have done that earlier today. So what I'm doing-- I can better open this in another tab. What I see here that I don't have the full UI but only the Record view. So I first want to enable the full UI. And it appears that there is a system property, polaris. And I expect it to find it over there. So dark theme enabled-- that is the property. And I recall that we have already changed it. So indeed, it has been changed. And it has been changed just recently. So some problems fixed themselves. But just to be sure, let's try to impersonate Jenny. And I have a slash command for impersonations. When I do imp jenny, it will search all the Jennys. And by hitting keyboard 1, I'm going to impersonate Jenny. And I'm going to go to her preferences. And yeah, it seems that theme dark is already available for Jenny. So this problem was already fixed. Let's do an impersonation as well to stop impersonating. Go back to our task boards. And here, I say, already fixed. What we did some confirmation, and all should be good now. And this should be good as well. So the next lots of error messages following containing a string. I recognize this as a sysid. So what I want to do is I want to copy that sysid. And when I paste in that sysid, it's recognized that this is a sysid, and I can do a direct instant search for that sysid. So when I hit Enter, immediately, the record, it is a script include as it appears is found. And it is called a script include NastyUtils with a function strangerCode, and it only throws an error. So this really doesn't seem something that should be here. But I would like to also investigate where this code is being used. So I have NastyUtils. Again, triggering the slash command. We have a slash, do a code, and then search only for nasty. Now, it does a code search within my entire instance. And based on nasty, I get a few hits, some irrelevant ones. The script includes itself. And I do see a business rule that constrains the code. So let's open that business rule. And this does not seem to be OK. So I would like to disable this business rule because a business rule that only throws error doesn't seem OK. So I can do sa and then hit Enter. And what it does now, because this record is in the global scope, I could hit this one, but I want to permanently switch to the global scope. So I do a /sa, and that gives me the last 10 scopes. I could also add in a search term, but until that is the global one-- so by hitting 2, I'm switching back to the global scope. Now, I can disable it. And instead of using a UI action to save, I can use hit Command-S to save. That's also a shortcut added, so you can use a shortcut to save your current record. So the immediate need is done. But we also have a prod instance. And I have a slash command-- /prod-- that is a configure command to open in the prod instance. So now, it will open the same record with the same sysid in a different tab. And ServiceNow has a Compare function. So that is triggered by diff1. So this is the left side of what I want to compare. Hit diff, and it will open this. But we also need to define the right side. So now, I'm in the business rule on the prod instance, and I'm hitting diff2, hitting Enter. And now, we see diff loaded. And now, we see the differences between the two instances. And here, we see that the faulty code doesn't seem to be on the proper instance. So that seems good. A few other differences between the two instances, but I think it's really important to see that the code that causes the errors is not on the prod instance. So I'm going to leave this one for now, go back to my task boards, and say it needs an investigation. I'm going to go back to this one later. And for now, I'm setting this in a state of doing. So the last immediate task is manager field on incident form. Why is it there? Let's see if the instance contains a bit more info. Yeah, I got a link to the underlying record. And here, it opens in the new workspace. And when I do a double click here, it shows me technical names. That can also be done by a slash command-- /tn also triggers the same. But really, the quickest way is a double click in the form white space. And it shows me a lot of extra info on my record. So here, I see that manager record is the caller ID and then the manager of the manager. So that, indeed, does not seem to make sense. So I would like to remove this from my form. And another data that the double click or the technical names adds is when you are in a workspace, it adds a link to the classic UI as well as the particular view. So by clicking that, I'm on the classic UI, and I see exactly the same here. But from here, it is pretty easy to configure and go to Form Design. So it opens the Form Design, and I should be able to remove it. But currently, I'm not in the correct scope, so I don't have the option to edit it. But the slash command detects that this is not the correct scope, so it automatically adds a suggestion to switch to the correct scope. So by clicking this link, it now has changed the scope to the scope where this record view is in. And now, I can just click here, click on the Remove, hit Save. And I'm pretty confident that this does the job. Another handy shortcut of SN Utils is a double click to reload a form. So when I double click the header, it reloads the form. And now, it is gone. So that's good. So basically, we fixed another two things over here. So when I say over here, removed, Post. And set that to a state of Completed as well. So as you've seen, in a short matter of time, we were able to complete three tasks, determine the course of the fourth task. So with that enhanced way of navigating, searching, and utilities, we can really boost our productivity. I hope this inspires you, and I love to keep in touch with you all. The best way to find out what new in then SN Utils is to keep in touch with me on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter. Every major update or significant update, I tweet about it. If you want a direct conversation, SNDevs is a good place. Make sure you are in the SN Utils channel. I always love to connect with fellow ServiceNow enthusiasts on LinkedIn. And on my website, I also have all the links to all the versions that I maintain. A last thing that I can offer-- I have a cheat sheet available in SN Utils itself, but you need to do a bit of deep dive investigate to find out behind which slash command it is hidden. So good luck with it all. Again, I love to stay in touch, and I hope this is beneficial for you, and I thank you for your attention. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Five things I wish I knew before attempting to localize my scoped application
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everyone, and welcome to five things I wish I knew before attempting to localize my scope application. My name is Maria Gabriela Ochoa Perez Waechter. My pronouns are she, her, and I'm a 2022 and 2021 ServiceNow developer MVP. Hi, everyone. I'm Jesalyn. I'm a ServiceNow developer, and I'm looking forward to sharing what we've learned about localization. So before we go further into the presentation, we thought it would be helpful to go back to the basics real quick. We're going to be using some terms throughout the session, and we want to make sure everyone is familiar with them. So what is the difference between localization and translation? Localization is making an application adaptable to specific regions without impacting functionality. This means your application can show the target language, currency, date formats for that region. Translation refers to changing source text into another language. You may be thinking can't ServiceNow do this for us. The language pack plug-ins that ServiceNow provides only cover out-of-box strings. This means that anything custom that you add or you modify to the system needs to be localized by yourself, and in a scoped application, that's everything. There's a couple of different ways you can localize your app. You can do it by hand or by machine, such as Google Translate. We're going to be focusing on the manual approach because that's what we decided to do. Here's some tools to help us localize our application. We recommend using them since they made the entire process a lot easier. The out-of-the-box tools that are available are the Translation Prefix System Property. It places a prefix-like message before each string to tell you which table a string is on, and that helps with debugging and identifying translation gaps. And then there's the Translate and Learn System Property that will automatically create records in the applicable translation table for any strings that are missing translations. So what you basically end up doing is you click through your entire application, and it's going to pull things like table names, options for the fields and automatically create translation records for you in the corresponding tables. Another great tool that is available online is the FetchCode project on the ServiceNow share. We used it to help us identify hard-coded strings in our script includes, in our business rules widgets, and any other place that has a script field. We use this to search for word code that is, in our instance, in a large scoped application with lots of legacy code. It's likely that you don't know where code exists or what it's doing, and it made it really easy to search for everything. Next, we use the website called Crowdin in order to obtain our translations of our strains. We basically compiled everything into a spreadsheet, and we uploaded that into the Crowdin website, where we were able to get quotes from multiple different vendors and select who we wanted to work with from there. And finally, we're going to have all of these resources and many more links in our GitHub repo that's available at the end of this presentation. Now that we've covered the basics and some helpful tools, it's time to learn about the five things that I wish I knew before attempting to localize my scope application. We've broken up the process into five steps, and the first step happens before you do anything. You need to plan your localization strategy. This means figuring out details like what language you're going to support, how you're going to source your translations, and many others. In our case, we decided to focus on Spanish, French, and German since that's what our customers currently requested. There's a few options for sourcing translations, like Jesalyn said. You can use machine learning, such as Google Translate, or you can use experts and native speakers in order to translate by hand. Our team had native Spanish and French speakers available to us, so we only had to figure out plans for German translations, which is where we went with a Crowdin tool. Now that you're ready to start because you have everything strategized. You can go ahead and turn on the language plug-in. During this stage of the process, you really want to focus on finding those missing translations. This is where you want to use the Translate and Learn System Property that we mentioned earlier. This property will create initial translation records for you because ServiceNow will only show translated text if there's a translation record for that string on any of the five tables. This property will create the records for you, so what we recommend doing is turning the property on and then clicking through everything in your application. Going module by module, visiting every form, every list, every widget, every portal page, and so on. And through this method, we were able to generate over 100 records of translations that we need to source. Another thing to focus on is the Display Translation Prefix System Property. What this one will do is it will show you if you have hard coded strings in your instance. Because if there's no prefix, which is what shows you what table a string is from. If there's no prefix, then that means that the string is hard coded, and that is not ideal. And what you need to do for that is convert that into a translatable way. So then ServiceNow knows to translate it, and it won't stay hard coded. And for that, what we recommend doing in the next phase, stage three, is Establishing Design and Development standards. So in order to make sure that everything is scalable and translatable, you want to have standards. So this means not hard coding any strings, and you want to be using the appropriate gs.getMessage depending on if it's the server or the client or even in a portal widget. So the best way to do that is to have gs.getMessage is to structure it by using a system-like message. So the general example you've seen with gs.getMessage is gs.getMessage hello world. So, hello world is what's displayed to the screen or the user. Rather than using hello world, we recommend structuring your gs.getMessage in a system-like way. So the key for the input to gs.getMessage would be a system-like description such as widget header text. Widget header text would then be your key, and your value for the record on the messages table could be hello world. So then, you're still showing the same output of hello world, but you're just structuring it in a way that makes it easier to maintain and to code. Because now, if you have it structured like that, where you're showing widget header text, then when you are doing your search for missing translations with the display translation prefix system property. When you're searching around your instance, and you see the output of widget header text, then you know that you don't have the appropriate translation record. Because it's showing that system description rather than showing the hello world that you would expect to see. So to sum it all up, static strings are bad, and you want to make sure you're always wrapping everything in your gs.getMessage. With everything localized, it's time to test all the hard work that you've done so far. We don't have a well-defined testing plan yet, partly since we haven't reached the stage ourselves. However, what we have done is taken a look at everything in our application to see how it looks when things are translated. Different languages are going to have different sizing requirements compared to English. So what looks good in the English version of the UI might appear cramped or overflowing in the translated UI. So, for example, the word new is three letters long in English, but it's nine letters long in French. This is something to be mindful of and keep in your mind as you go through this process, especially when users are zoomed into their browsers, or they have a larger default font size. Another thing that we plan to do here is have our customers try to navigate our application in English and then in the target language like French, using our service portal as an example. Our goal is to verify that our customers can navigate and use the portal functionality in the same way in English and French. If our customers are unable to use the French version of the portal, for whatever reason, that gets us feedback on what needs to be reworked. And now, great job. It's the future now. The localization implementation has been deployed, and now you need to maintain it. So like testing, we don't have a well-defined maintenance plan just yet. But we are planning on scoping that out and figuring out exactly what's required. One of the things to keep in mind is that as new content and features get added to the app, localization needs to be considered. Code reviews should be checking that strings aren't hard coded and that you have correspondent translation strings in your system for any new updates that are getting added, for example. A good thing about making sure that you're not hard coding strings and wrapping everything in the appropriate gs.getMessage, in your scripts is that this makes maintenance of your strings a lot easier. Whenever you want to change the wording of a message, you no longer need to edit your script includes or business rules. You can instead update the value of the translation record for that key which is a beta change. And finally, we'd like to thank you for listening to our presentation on localization. I hope that this has helped you all get started. If you want to get more resources, you should check out our GitHub repo linked down below, which is going to have a lot more information and links. You should also check out our blog post on WomenNow.dev. We're going to go way more in-depth on what we covered today, and we're going to have code samples that you can reference. You should also come hang out with us at sndevs.com, which is our community Slack server, where we all like to hang out and talk about ServiceNow and ServiceNow related topics. Thank you very much, and have a good day. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Build developer friendly APIs with JSON Schema Validation
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi. I'm Jarod Mundt, vice president of engineering at Clear Skye. I've been working on the ServiceNow platform since 2014, and I've spent time at customers, implementation partners, and am now working at a product partner where we publish identity security and governance solutions into the ServiceNow store. Today, we'll talk about JSON schema validation and how you can take your APIs to the next level. Now, this is not going to be a deep dive into schema validation and also not going to be a deep dive for importing external JavaScript libraries into your instance, but we will look at the JSON schema validation concepts and why it will be worth the investment to implement this into your instance. We'll also take a look at some scripted REST API examples, but this validation can be used in any other server-side or client-side code in your instance. Both the schema and input object are both written in JSON. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation, and it's the data format that powers most of the internet's APIs, including ServiceNow. There are things like curly brackets for objects, square brackets for arrays, and things can be nested inside of other things. Now, the schema on the left we see has a very specific format so that the validator code knows where to find each object. There are many validators available online in a variety of programming languages. For these examples today, I'm using Tiny Validator a.k.a. Tv4 out on npmjs. I'll show a link to where to find this library at the end of the presentation. Now, in our first example, we have a very basic flat object. So hypothetically, in this example, we have a client that is sending the input object into our system, and the result of that will be some expensive database long-running queries and a variety of inserts and updates across multiple tables. So ideally, this will be an all-or-none transaction. We don't want to get half of the transactions completed and then find out that some of the data is missing or in the wrong format. So what we do is we pass both the schema object and the input object into the validator, and then we'll get a third JSON object that we'll call the validation result. Now, in this case, valid is equal to true. Great, we won't have to stop processing or send any errors back to the client. We can begin our processing. But what if our input object-- what if we had an age of negative 21? Technically, according to this schema, that's still an integer, but that may cause errors when we start processing. So in example two, we've added a few more attributes to the schema definition. Now, if we try and process it now, in theory, negative 21 is out of the scope so we'll receive an error. Notice the message and data path attributes of our validation object. We see that it says specifically that the parameter of age is less than a minimum of zero. And we did this with very limited code. This is part of the JSON schema validation standard. Also notice that we're on only example two and both the schema and the validation result are starting to get rather long for a relatively simple example. The definition on the left is 22 lines long and the validation result is 17 lines long already. So pretty quickly, when we start nesting objects and arrays, both our input object is going to get big but also our schema validation or our JSON schema definition also start to get pretty big. So for the next example, I'll only highlight the things that have been added or changed so we won't have to shrink down all of that code to get it to display all on the screen at the same time. So here we've added a few more items, specifically favorite movies. So in the schema, we've added a type of array, and the items inside of that array must be strings. On the input object on the right, we see that we've added some favorite movies, but one of them is in a integer format and not a string. So let's take a look at that. We now get valid equals false. And specifically, back to the message and data path portions, we see invalid type, number-- it wanted a string-- and data path, under favorite movies, position one. So arrays start at zero, so that would be the second item that was submitted is the problem item. Now, there are quite a few other additional JSON schema attributes to add value and to fill out the schema definition. Specifically-- I won't go into a variety of them, but one to look out for is called additional properties. So if we set that to false, any extra items that are submitted in the input object, if they don't have a specific definition, we can error out on those. Now let's move this stuff out of theory, get it into our instance, and build some scripted REST API checks and responses. So prior to this step, we must import a library into our instance. So like any good TV baking show, I'm going to skip over that step of selecting the open-source library and also the import to script include process and I'll go right to the code execution. Now, as a side note, if you don't recognize this interface, it's called the Xplore toolkit and I do highly recommend it for scripting and working with data on the platform. It's available from the ServiceNow Share out on the Developer Portal. Now, once our script is proven to work, we can just start coding away and start creating scripted REST APIs, right? Well, not so fast. I want to have a quick chat about architecture standards first. So when I've demoed this and implemented this in the past, one of the common questions is, why not just use the table API? That way, if somebody wants to integrate with ServiceNow, we just point them at the docs, give them a service account, and then they do all the work. We don't have to do anything as the ServiceNow team. My response to that is, as a whole, what needs to happen is the organization has a requirement, the organization needs to get some work done, and the organization needs to support it. So we get to kind of think about which teams should best pick and choose to support that. So I typically recommend centralizing as much of the development and centralizing as much of the pain as possible, and that allows us to reduce friction. What we don't want to have is making a junior Linux admin on another team that's writing an integration inside of a Python script have to learn the table API, do four lookups to get various sysIDs of locations, users, change request numbers, CMDB CIs, other things like that. We want them to just go right to building their query. What this also does is it increases happiness, can reduce the time to value, and also reduce costs and time on the other teams. Another advantage to building things in scripted REST APIs is that you can conform to the culture of your organization. I've worked at places where they had shorthand codes for locations. Everyone referred to people in every system by the employee ID. And so, by building it into a scripted REST API and not the table API, we get to choose which value we use for each of these things. And third, we get to continue turning ServiceNow into the control tower. We get to put ServiceNow at the center. Now, whether that data lives in ServiceNow or only an up-to-date copy of that data lives there, it allows all the developers across your organization to have access to all that data with a single service account. A fourth thing is also that it makes people love and trust the platform more when it's easier and lower friction to get access to the proper data. So don't underestimate that part either. I've seen, at some organizations, where the data center operations people get tired of the table API and they just want to-- they go the other way with their APIs. They replicate CIs, incidents, and changes out of ServiceNow into their custom database, do all the work in that custom database, and only feed back the very minimum updates and states into ServiceNow. So that way, the ServiceNow record only has the bare minimum of updates and activities. Also technical-- flow triggers are great, but everything's asynchronous and you have very limited control over your inputs and your outputs, especially for a flow trigger that uses an HTTP GET. So here, we get better control, better logging, better error handling. For example, if we wanted to open up an incident or an event or alert when APIs are sending in bad data, in a scripted REST API, we'll have control over that. So overall, before implementing this, I do want to recommend getting buy-in from the top technical people responsible for your instance to make sure that what we're doing here conforms with the roadmap for all internal and external data flows. So anyway, back to the tech demo where we'll be doing some validation directly in a scripted REST API. So here we have a HTTP POST example. So above, what we're doing is just grabbing the body that's sent into the POST body. We're loading up the schema definition that's stored somewhere in the instance-- it could even be directly in the POST record here-- doing the comparison, and then checking to make sure if it's valid. So again, here, we'll take that next step that we didn't do in those earlier examples and build out our error message. So I'll zoom in on that part. And notice, again, we're using the data path and message fields. One of the favorite features that I have inside of a scripted REST API is the ability to control specific error messages. So there's a one-line command that gives you the option to just send a error, but here we see the four-line option to set specific HTTP status message and the details of which is the concatenated string of that error array above. So if there is no error, we can begin processing away. If there is an error, we stop the transaction and reply very specific things back to the developer. So let's take a look and see what the remote developer sees during this error process. So when I'm coding integrations, I always make sure everything looks good using Postman and, like we saw, the Xplore toolkit to make sure all the data and authentication works. Now, in this example, I've set three errors intentionally in what I'm submitting. And what comes back from our scripted REST API is exactly this, the HTTP 400 error. What we see is, under the message, we see that static string that we programmed in. And then, under detail, we see the specifics. Where was the problem? Under first name. What happened? The string is too short. It was only one character long. It needs to be at least two. And then it loops through all the other errors as well. So this was a basic scripted REST API example, but like I started with, this could be used outside of these APIs and could be used anywhere on the platform where you want to validate parameters. For example, critical script include function, we can validate that everything's within range before we do any expensive processing or any record inserting or updating. Thank you for watching. If you want to continue the conversation, please reach out to us out on the ServiceNow Community Forums, out on the SNDevs Slack community at sndevs.com, or find me on Twitter. I'll see you around the community. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Dev-ternships: The best way to grow your ServiceNow Team
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Thank you for joining me for this talk about creating Dev-ternships as a way to grow your ServiceNow team. Finding the right talent for your team is always a challenge, no matter the industry. Now, I am Sharon Barnes. And nowadays, I am a developer MVP with two years of ServiceNow experience, as well as over 12 years of training and management experience. Now, my previous career, I was a training manager and branch manager for Eastern North Carolina ALM insurance company. And I transferred from that non-technical career to ServiceNow, because I felt overworked and underpaid. I'd had a friend working on the Now platform, who had talked about how much he enjoyed it for years. But I always assumed that it was out of reach for me, that the career was just for people with specialized skills or technological genius. Well, that friend asked me to help review his k-19 workshop for wording and screenshots. And I ended up completing and understanding the workshops content. I had just built a virtual agent with no degree or intensive training. I realized that this was learnable. And within one year of study, I was employed with a partner, New Access Innovations. And New Access allowed me to leverage my skills as a trainer and as a ServiceNow developer to found a Dev-ternships. Now, we're going to go over several points today. First, why we built a Dev-ternships. Second, what we built for version 1 and the structure around that program. And third, the future improvements that New Access will use for its next iteration. Now, why we built it. Well, I've participated in hiring for technology, insurance, and retail industries. And I see some of the same trends across all of them. First, great talent is rare and expensive. I'm sure you know of multiple openings that have been unfilled for months. Second, cultural fit is essential. Now, most businesses continue to scour resumes or search LinkedIn for the person with the most experience and certifications. Hiring firms and researchers are beginning to realize that in many industries, the most qualified candidates can actually damage a firm when they don't jive with the company's culture. And third, what people claim as their skills does not always equal reality. With a good interview process, you can help prevent this, but a few can slip through. Now with a Dev-ternship, you can train entry level admins and developers with precisely the skills you need them to have, as well as make sure that they are a fit for your company culture and the team that they will be working with. Now, beyond these programs, New Access identified one more issue they wanted to solve, a lack of diversity in ServiceNow candidates. According to Nelson Frank's career and hiring guide, individuals of Black, African, and Caribbean descent represent only 3% of available developers. Studies have shown that diverse organizations have better outcomes than their less diverse peers. And the industry of information technology is limited in that regard. Therefore, it's in our own best interest as leaders of our organizations to encourage and empower minorities and women to enter into our industry and grow the diversity of the ServiceNow ecosystem, so that we can achieve those better outcomes. Now, what we built. We created a network to recruit from historically Black colleges and universities. Second, we created a repeatable system to train interns on specific skills. And the system is flexible enough to allow substitution of different curriculum, forum, different departmental internships. And third, we created survey metrics for continual improvement of the program. Now, the first step to a great internship is recruiting. Getting quality people into your program. And recruiting takes more time than you think, because the go-getters apply early. So three months out to get approval from your schools, get the job posting up, distribute flyers to the students via that university's regular communication system, and schedule info sessions. About two months out, hold those information sessions. These should be led by somebody passionate about the program. And at the same time, start collecting resumes. Around six weeks out, you're going to want to run the interviews with your selected candidates. And by four weeks out, inform the interns that they've been selected for the program. And that at the start of the semester, they're also going to be starting working with you. Now, the overall structure for our internship was broken down into three phases. The first was eight weeks focused on learning the fundamentals of ServiceNow development. Then, we had one week of exam prep to help them earn their CSA. And the last three weeks were for building their capstone project, an application based on their interests. Now, we covered 10 topics. And our goal was really for them to gain more than their CSA. We wanted to ensure they had the experience to become effective admins. So we included a variety of topics, including ITIL practices, gathering requirements, participating in sprint planning, and just overall, understanding the development skills needed for the bigger picture of how ServiceNow allows people to work better. Now, our course was set up with a weekly tempo. We created a scoped application on the Now app platform, incorporating knowledge articles of the weekly curriculum. And the interns had a primary instructor throughout the entire program for a main point of contact, as well as having weekly lectures for members of our team to act as subject matter experts for each of the topics. We added gamification to the midweek review session to increase engagement. And just overall, we wanted to ensure that there were interactive elements, so that it was more than just instruction to go study remotely, but a constant feedback and engagement throughout every week. Now, we got our content from a variety of sources. And this is the most common question I get asked. We combined hands-on exercises from the developer site, as well as Now Learning with readings, videos, and lectures, as well as making sure that the students had that one on one mentorship to guide their learning. Overall, it worked. But you can constantly improve from experience. And I want to call out several points where we found for improvement, so that you can avoid them when you build your own programs. First, target schools with a solid science and technology programs. We noticed that the number and quality of applicants from these schools with that focus was better. Second, we wanted to make sure there was more practical experience. Make it feel a little bit less like a class with fewer theoretical exercises and more time on the real work needed by businesses. Third was business value added. Having the capstone driven by actual business needs. By having it driven by their interest, well, we ended up with a 100% sports related projects, which are fun but not exactly applicable to our customers. Now, looking at how this changed the format of our internship from the three phases into four phases, with the first three weeks focused on CSA prep. Consolidating that foundational information down to a shorter period of time. Six weeks of shadowing their mentor, being able to complete some of that same work and stories that their mentor is doing. The next two weeks are all about that capstone program tailored to that business scenario. And then, the last week is for the certification. And we placed this at the end, because we had noticed that some of the interns were demotivated by the difficulty of earning that certificate in the middle of the program. Now, these changes mean that for our first three weeks, we had to really consolidate the information down. So rather than it being a weekly schedule, we've switched to three times a week going through that lecture cycle of labs and quizzes. Now, overall, I want to thank each of you for your time today. Because with Dev-ternships, you were training entry level admins and developers in precisely the skills you need them to have, as well as making sure that they are fit for your company culture and the team that they'll be working with. And while they're gaining these skills through the paid internship with the company, your company is benefiting from the opportunity to grow their ServiceNow practice. Thank you for your time. And I hope that this information will help you in creating your own Dev-ternships programs. If you're interested in a little more information later, feel free to contact me, Sharon Barnes at SN Devs. And I look forward to hearing about the success of your programs. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Use “No” to pull the weight of future stress
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello and welcome to Using No to Pull the Weight of Future Stress. Today, we're going to talk about having a conversation with our process owners, our stakeholders, and improving that conversation so that we feel more comfortable expressing our boundaries about using best practices, not going against them, not making upgrades harder for ourselves, and those kinds of things so that we can deliver a better product for the customer that also means less work down the road for us. My name is Dave Atwood. I am a solution architect for Cummins, Inc. We make really big, giant diesel engines if you're not familiar with us, also some really small ones. I've been in the ServiceNow space about 5 and 1/2 years. And I have been onboarding processes quite literally since day one, since I transitioned from process owner to ServiceNow developer and then continued developing that process. So I've been working on this for a while. And this is a conversation that I've been thinking about quite some time. And I've asked people in the community have you spent training on this? Do you spend any time thinking about it? And a lot of folks answer no. And the ones that don't answer it as no don't tend to have formal training or any of that. It doesn't seem to be too popular a thing out there. But I'm sure there are ways to do it. And so I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to do this better because I see my coworkers, I see partners we work with all compromising in ways that are going to make my teammates lives and myself, our lives a bit harder on the platform, maintenance, upgrades, all of that. So we can do this better and make it better for everybody. What are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about why this is important. We're going to talk about why we don't want to say no, some things we certainly shouldn't do. And the real need is shaping the conversation and learning to redirect. So why is this important? It's important because we want to deliver the best thing both for us and the customer. And being somewhat of a selfish person, I think I'm more important than they are. But I realize the outcome for them is more important in the grand scheme. So I want less maintenance. I want to make upgrades easier. I want to do them more often. But I can't do that if a customer comes in and says, I want to do this only this way or I compromise and let them do something that's not up to best practices. So I think we can make everybody happier. And it requires us to do something we don't like to do, which is express boundaries and say no. I love this quote from Henry Ford and I think it highlights the entire problem. If he had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have told me they wanted a faster horse. People don't always know what they want because they don't always know what's possible. And so if we can change the conversation, maybe we can give them something better than they expected was even possible. So, again, why are we saying no? We're saying no because as a developer, I want less maintenance. I want to protect my instance. There are best practices to consider. ServiceNow is always changing the way they do things. And staying up to best practices means I have an easier transition to whatever new thing they come out with. Sure, it didn't work with Workflow and Flow Designer, but whatever. There are lots of other cases when it does. There's value here. If you do with what they want the way they want it, you lose that opportunity to do better because the way they want it puts them in a box. And that box is hard to get out of it. So by changing the conversation and getting them out of that box, you really expand their options. The customer cares because they don't want to wait as long for the work. They want it done yesterday. So keeping out of the box, keeping to better standards means we can deliver it faster. They can have more control or feel like they have just as much control or even more because part of that is giving them choices. They have choices. You build it the way they tell you, there's no choice there. They just did a thing and you-- they demanded a thing, and you did it. There's no choice there. Choices help them regain that feeling of control. And that makes them happy in the end. They feel like they had a say in what was done, which is really important when you're moving them out of that space. Better performance-- again, standards, doing it out of the box, all of that leads to better performance. Not to say that custom code is always super performance intensive. But there's a lot of bad stuff you could do in there that is. Again, more options for future expansion of work. Getting them out of that box makes it better to add on things, easier to add on. And going back to the first line item there, shorter time to ROI because I spent less time developing something. And to the company as a whole, that really matters. It may not matter to them that much. So we need to say this more often. We need to be more expressive about it. But when we do it, we can't actually use the word no. No is a giant brick wall dropped right in front of them that they're going to run into a full speed. And that's not comfortable. So we need to make sure that we're comfortable saying it and they're comfortable receiving it. So to do that, we shape the conversation. And I like to sit down-- or rather, email-- any time anybody says, hey, Dave. We want to move something new. And I say, great. Let's have a quick, half-hour conversation about some of the basics before we get into the real meat of it. Get to know you-- that kind of stuff. And in that conversation, I want their high-level goals, because their high level goals are what they really want to achieve. It's not about the doing it the way they've always done it. It's not about the way they think they want to do it on the platform, because they've seen somebody else's process, or whatever. Focusing on goals gets them out of that rut. It gets their mind thinking of it. We'll try to do a little bit of that more later on, but getting them out of that rut to start with is important. That initial pull that gets their vehicle out of that space-- that's super important. So then, we get into some of the priorities. And I make it clear to them up front, these are what I care about. And I feel like getting that out of the way early lets us reference that time and time again during the process, which makes it easier to say, because they'll understand why I'm saying it. So protecting the instance is my number-one priority. Because if the instance runs poorly, any of those things, then I have to spend a ton of time on it. I have to ton to spend a ton of time on maintenance. I don't want to spend a ton of time on maintenance. I certainly don't want to do super basic maintenance, like adding approvers or changing them every week. So next on there-- limiting the time my team spends on it. If I can build something that hands it off to them and lets them keep approvals changing every day or every week and they can do it and don't wait on me, we're both happier. They're happier, because they have control. They don't have to wait on me. I'm happy, because I'm not wasting my team's time with super basic stuff. Delivering the best product for the customer is obviously something that has to be on here. It is what we're here for. But it's third on my list, because if I don't do number one and number two, I don't have time to do more of number three. Most people understand these things. Most people aren't going to be a jerk and run roughshod over them. Some people still do. That's the way it is, sometimes. But at least this gives us a starting point to refer back to. When you say, well, maybe I could do it that way except for a few problems, they understand what those problems would be, and they understand why you're bringing it up. The last thing on the list is maybe the most dangerous. Encourage your customer to dream. This is a great way to get them out of the rut. You get them out of focusing on the way they've always done it, or the process they built up in their mind, or whatever, and they start focusing on the high-level things they might be able to do. You ask them to dream for that pie in the sky, and they start thinking. They start really exploring what could be done. And you have to be clear, you can't do all of it. I mean, ServiceNow is a great platform, but it does have some limitations for any number of different reasons. But most people, again, understand that. And most people will be surprised at how much you can do, because they're used to other tools that aren't as flexible. Or they had a custom app built that didn't have long-term development support. So something was built, and then it was done. There was no more changes. There was no more improvement. There was no more room for any of that. And so on ServiceNow, hopefully you're able to help them with continuous improvement, and you can work on a phased approach and really expand their thinking about what's possible. So we want to do these things to set the stage, because it sets us up to be able to express that there are limitations. But when we express that, we can't say, no, because that's a brick wall. So how do we do that without actually saying no? First off, we don't want to use the word but. If I say, that sounds really good, but that also goes against best practices. They don't hear any of the first part of that. They hear, but it goes against best practices. And so find other ways. Yes and is one of my personal favorites. Maybe, perhaps-- any word that goes on there. I used the but statement until fairly recently when somebody pointed it out to me. And I was like, yeah, that's exactly what I do. And so now, I try not to use it anymore. I also like to reference my three priorities. Unfortunately, that would take longer to develop than this other option. That references the ROI piece from earlier. May cause significantly more maintenance-- that's against my number two thing I care about. Would break an out of the box process-- that's against my most important priority, which is protecting the platform. So when you say these things, people reference back to what you said. You set the stage up for you to be successful as you redirect your customer. And that's the important part-- set yourself up to be successful as you express those boundaries and those limits, and hopefully, the customer understands you better. Choices are, again, really important. People like to have that control. You can point out the maintenance short for them. I mentioned approvals earlier. In our desktop process, we do worldwide approvals. I don't want my team doing that kind of basic work. They change too often for me to really want to be bothered by it. So we gave the desktop team lead the ability to do that. And now he goes in every day or every other day and adjusts approvals as people move around in roles in the company. Everybody's happy. He gets to do it on his own timetable. We don't have to deal with it on the regular basis. If you have to, you can redirect your product owner, but that's dangerous. Sometimes, if they don't come talk to you about it before they make a decision, they'll override you, in which case, you're really down a hole. So it's dangerous, but still, sometimes, an option. And the most important thing, again, going back to it-- focus on the goal. Don't focus on how you got there. Focus on that goal itself. Sometimes you do run into cases where there are a few milestones along the way to that goal. Those are probably also goals in themselves. So it should be a relatively easy goal-- goal to goal to goal process. Not always, but hopefully, most of the time. So this is kind of the beginnings of my thought process and my time I spent thinking about the onboarding conversation. It's a complicated one. It's a complex one. It's the very first time most of these teams really interact with us on a serious basis, so it also sets the stage for the entire relationship, which is why I think it's so important. Hopefully, using some of the things you've learned here today and maybe some further conversations we'll have, you can have a better conversation and have better outcomes for your team, for your instance, and for everybody that comes after you who has to take care of it. I really appreciate your time today. Thanks for listening to this and being here. If you want to reach out to me and talk about this more, I encourage it. You can reach out on sndevs. I am ReposadoDave. It's an amazing community of 10,000 people or more. Some of us are developers. Some of us are product owners or stakeholders or VAs or any number of different roles. We all interact with ServiceNow on a regular basis, usually beyond that of a user. And we're also all here to help out and talk, and you'll find so much good information here. And if you do make it to a Knowledge in-person, you can probably meet some of us, because we always hang out at Knowledge. Again, thanks for your time today, and I'll see you next time. [MUSIC PLAYING]
How to make your code available to citizen developers
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, my name is Philip Swann. I am a Managing Consultant at Rangoon. I've been working in ServiceNow since 2014 and in GRC since 2017. I'm also a two time ServiceNow Dev MVP and host of the "Phil Goes Deep" YouTube channel. In this session, I'm going to talk about how to make your code more available. We've all been in the situation where we've written some really nice code and it's really good. We're so proud of it because it works. It works really well even when we test it. And maybe it didn't work to start with, but it does now. And this code we've spent ages writing looks so good. If someone here was to look at this code right now, they would definitely be able to read it. It follows consistent naming conventions, includes meaningful comments with beautiful formatting. It's modular, performant, secure, elegant. But guess what? None of that matters. Gartner published this research back in 2019. And you have seen ServiceNow investing massively in this space. But this is not why citizen development is important. Citizen development is about partnering the people who need the solutions with the people who build the solutions and increasing the speed to value. Citizen development matters because if we do not respond to this demand, the business will be left behind. And business doesn't wait around. Servicenow.com has a page about citizen developers and it discusses these four stages to create an application. Back in 2020, I embarked on an adventure to convert the entire core application of GRC to Flow Designer in 24 hours. Why? To learn. To discover whether it was possible or consider if it even made sense. To be able to answer for myself what is Flow Designer good at? Where does it help? Where are the strengths and where are the weaknesses? As someone who loves to design and build solutions that solve business problems, I am someone who writes code and I want to make that code more available. No matter if I am building an application from scratch or if I have an existing application that I want more people to use more effectively. The problem is when you write code on ServiceNow, it is like gold. And your scripts include, now it is buried somewhere deep in the platform like some kind of hidden treasure that there is no map. There is no X marking the spot. Somewhere there is someone in the business who really needs it but they cannot find it. And even if they could find it, they would not be able to use it very easily, not without writing more code. Even yourself and your fellow developers could be forgiven for forgetting you wrote it. So your beautiful, delicious, elegant code is literally useless. It's useless not because it cannot possibly be used but because it is not practical and thus it is not being used. Or it is being used less than it should be or used less than it could be. So this person out in the business makes a request for a new function which someone else writes or they build. But they don't think about all the things you thought about and they don't build it the way you built it. And maybe it's not so beautiful or it's not quite as performant and it's not quite as secure. Now you have two functions doing the same thing in two different ways. I'm not saying that nobody can write code like you. I'm saying that they should not have to, especially if you already have. Especially if you have spent time solving that problem really, really well. This is the problem. We the developers, the ones who create the workflows and design the applications from the ground up, are not making our code available. Maybe we are not even making it available to our fellow developers and we are not making it available to ourselves, because we wrote a function and forgot about it. So writing code is one thing, but once we start to expose it, we are also documenting it. Flow Designer doesn't just give us the benefits of reducing our reliance on code by providing a lovely UI. It also helps to organize and communicate our application's functions and endpoints. And here is the main point I want to make. It's time to start thinking about our solutions in a new way. Script include is an API. Our public methods are the endpoints. If you build your application with Flow Designer it in mind, your code will become more available by default. But what if you have already built it? You and your customers can still benefit from these simple steps today. First we need to abstract the complexity. Focus on and expose the simplicity. In this example, I will be using the classic class pattern. Special thanks to Travis for his blog on codecreative.io for explaining the various interface design patterns for script includes. Note if you want to make your private functions truly private, you might want to look at the module revealing pattern. So first of all, put all your public methods at the top of your script include. These are the methods which you wish to be consumed from outside the script include. Consider these as our API endpoints. Have them return a call to the private function on a single line. The private methods are denoted with an underscore prefix, and these should only be called from within that script include. Even if the private method is extremely simple, just return the function call with those parameters passed in and this helps to communicate how the API is intended to be used. So we abstract the complexity, focus on and expose the simplicity. For each public message you want to be consumed, now in Flow Designer create an action. Ensure that you are considering the categories and creating them as required according to the design and plan of your application. Here I just use example ABC. Once we have created an action, we can specify the relevant inputs and outputs. Then just put a script step to cool our API and parse the inputs and return the outputs. Now we have created a wrapper for each of our script include endpoints, and we have also been able to enforce the validity of the inputs. And we have organized and published our code. Just take a look at how available our code is now. Once our actions are published, you can see how Flow Designer organizes the application for us. Let's create a subflow. We have the application scope. Here it is CCB1132 named according to this session. Thanks for watching. Next we have the category, example A, And the actions in that category with the info and annotation. When creating the subflow, we can assign that to one of the categories that we created earlier or we can create a new one if necessary. So what I've shown you today is nothing new. Flow Designer has been around for a while. And the concept of citizen development is not new either. What might be new is some of the thinking and the simplicity that allows us as developers to make our code more available, especially for the low and no code community, with just a few simple steps. So we can continue to do that heavy lifting and write the code we love to write while enabling the business to take full advantage and achieve maximum value from the results. In case you missed it, three simple steps. Firstly, organize our script include as an API. Put those public methods at the top so we know how we expect to interact with our API. Then we create actions for each of those methods in Flow Designer using categories to help organize them. And then that functionality is available to be consumed within our applications or by citizen developers. Thank you for watching. Please enjoy the rest of Knowledge '22. And if you want to get in touch, please check out the sndevs.slack.com or #PhilGoesDeep on LinkedIn and YouTube. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Yes, you can design a great user experience
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everyone. I'm Sarah Toulson, and I'm here to tell you that you can, in fact, design a great user experience whether you are working from the Service Portal or the new Next experience. A little about me-- I currently work with the awesome people at Servos. I am absolutely living the dream, serving state and local governments through digital transformation on the ServiceNow platform. I've been on this platform for four years or so, and before that, I went on a very winding journey that includes over 10 years in graphic design and many years spent in the public service sector. That being said, today, I'd like to take you through the basic process that I use to put together a front-end design. We'll talk about gathering the information you need, taking that information, and planning the layout, and then we'll attack the scary subjects of colors, fonts, and putting together styles into a mockup that you can show your stakeholders. Unfortunately, due to our limited time I'm not going to be able to get into the weeds as much as I'd like to give you guidance on font pairing, inspiration, or some of the other details that go into this process. I do have a pretty robust list of resources on my website that can help, but please reach out to me if there's more specific guidance that you need. With that, let's get started. First things first, getting that intel-- here, we're looking to use a series of workshops or conversations to figure out exactly what we need the portal to do, what the priorities and challenges are, and what general direction we need the design to go in. The more information you have up front, the easier those design decisions are going to be for you to make. Here's a short list of what you're going to be looking to collect and establish-- the personas, the functional requirements, brand styles, and organizational culture. Though we're ultimately talking design, I'm going to start us off talking about function. Why? As much as bad typography triggers me, and as important as the design is to the overall success of the project, a pretty design that does not deliver the functionality needed or get the users what they need easily is a failure. So here are a few things that have helped me gather requirements specific to the front-end interface. The first thing I do, I pull up the out-of-box portal that you're going to be using for your project, and I review the major functionality of the site with the team or the stakeholders. You're then going to go through the portal piece by piece, page by page with them to discuss what functionality exists versus what they need. Bring your personas into play here. For example, when Mary comes to the portal, what's the most important thing she needs to be able to do? Your other option is to address each widget or feature individually and ask, for example, what links need to be present in the header navigation. Last, you'll want to use this workshop as an opportunity to suggest functionality that may not be present but that may be a possible solution to some of the challenges they've articulated. One of my favorite examples of this is to put the SC Popular Items widget on the landing page as an easy front-page way to display the most-used catalog items without additional searching. Once you know what the portal needs to do and the content you're going to put in it, it's time to have another workshop to talk design. In the meeting, you're looking to do three things. First, establish those final decision makers. Double-check to ensure that there's no one above the current team you're working with that will have potential veto power over your design. This can really hurt project deadlines if objections are raised late in the development cycle. Next, look to establish the design direction. This is most easily accomplished in a series of questions. Start by asking, do you have an existing site design or brand guide you want me to use? If yes, most of the design work may be done for you. However, you still want to review this with the team to ensure it contains the information you need. Most brand guides are limited to print, and they lack specific direction for a website. So you'll want to ask follow-up questions to determine how they want to handle that. One of the best ways to handle these information gaps is to ask them if they want to emulate their current public site. If this is the direction they want to go, you want to review that site with them and ask if there's any specific elements they want to include or avoid. Afterwards, explore that chosen website to find styles and see how colors, fonts, features, and accents are used. If they do not want to emulate their current site or if they think their brand guide is a little outdated or lacking, set aside time to conduct a lightning demos workshop with the team. The concept here is very simple. You have the team members come to the meeting ready with sites and apps that they found and that they like and would like to see emulated in your project. During that meeting, they're going to share their findings, and the team is going to discuss the different options. And out of this, the team should arrive at some conclusions for a design direction, some style guidance that they want you to take. And last, during the design conversation, take the time to review any and all assets you've been given, including logos, brand designs, and approved images. Try to get these items ahead of time so you can figure out what styles the brand guide, again, doesn't cover so you can ask for specific clarification. Now that you have all the information you can possibly gather to help inform your design, it's time to start putting it together. So what exactly is a wireframe? A wireframe is an illustration of a page's interface that specifically focuses on space allocation and prioritization of content, functionality available, and intended behaviors. Notice I said nothing about colors, fonts, or styles in that definition. Before you get started, here's a few things that I do to prepare both my team and my wireframing app for success. First, define the scope of your wireframes and subsequently your mockups. Wireframing an entire site can be really long, arduous process, so provide boundaries to the design process by specifying how many and what pages will be designed, deadlines for providing feedback, and limited number of feedback sessions. You also want to ensure that the team is on the same page about the purpose of the wireframes versus the mockups. Remind them in reviewing the wireframes the purpose is just to look at the functionality and the layout and make sure everything's as it should be and not to worry about styling at this point. Later, I'll give you some pointers for presenting your wire frames and mockups. And of course, set up your wireframing tool. Not everyone uses wireframing software on a day-to-day basis, so here are a few examples of software programs that you can use. Really, anywhere that you can draw a box and place text in it is going to do the trick. It doesn't take an artist to put together an intuitive wireframe, and honestly, this can be just as, if not more, important than whether or not you get the button color correct. Now, onto some best practices for putting together those wireframes. Think of your wireframe as an outline for your site page the same way you would outline a long research paper. This is what visual hierarchy does, and there's a few ways you can help to establish that. First, divide your page by functional sections. The portal design I have up to the right is a good example of the divided sections of a site. Here, I use titles, but you can also use alternating background colors and other tricks to establish these boundaries. Next, employ white space or the negative empty space on a site to separate your content and provide focus. Increased white space can help direct the user's attention to a particular item. White space is not wasted space, though I've heard many developers comment to the contrary. It helps give your users the chance to focus on only a certain amount of content at a time, which can really help prevent them from getting overwhelmed. And last, use visual cues to help direct users to different degrees of detail on the page. Just like in a research paper outline, use different indicators to help the user determine where on the scale of importance the item falls and further help them scan the content quickly to find what they need. A couple of other things to consider when putting together your wireframes is that you want to limit the number of choices available to your users, and you want to prioritize the placement of features and content to more quickly address those most pressing needs. As much as possible, ensure that your users only have to consider four to six items at one time. Keep this in mind for features like lists or groups of cards, especially if there are other content types nearby. If you have more than this number of items, use pagination, tabs, and filtering to help them narrow down those choices as much as possible. As I mentioned you want to ensure that the biggest pain points are clearly addressed early. If this means putting a link or button to that one catalog item that is submitted incorrectly 80% of the time right there on the landing page, that's what you do, even possibly using those visual cues to highlight that particular item. And last, I love to use my landing page as kind of the entry point or the triage point for the rest of the site. You're looking to give them an introduction to the different types of content available and by triage providing them with the most used or most useful content and services right there from the start, like I did at the top of the design scene here. All right, now that we've laid everything out, we have our nice boxes that tell us where everything's going to go. It's time to start putting those styles into place so we know what everything looks like after it's developed. So what exactly is a mockup? It's a high-fidelity model rendering of a product, or in our case, it's a picture of the pages that make up our Service Portal. First, let's talk colors. Overall, the thing you want to make sure that you do here is give every color a job. Start by working from the information provided by your team. If your color palette is limited, you can expand it by taking that main color and creating various shades, lighter and darker. I have been given portal projects where I was only given one color to work from, so I promise you, you can make it work. Next, strive to balance how the colors are used across the site. The 60-30-10 rule works really well here. 60% of the colors should be neutral and easy on the eyes. I tend to use a shade of light gray or a very light shade of the main brand color, which is used mostly alongside white for backgrounds. Next, 30% should be that secondary color you use to create visual interest. This is your main brand color, usually, that you're going to be using for links, buttons, and that sort of thing. That last 10% should be the accent color. This is your bright pop that provides differentiation and really calls attention to different things. And last, try your best to associate colors with a given functionality consistently. Interactive elements should be the same color. If you have headings the same color as your links, for instance, that can get confusing. You can see here on the screen, I've shown a bit of a color palette brand guide. We took the colors that our client gave us and expanded them into different shades and then assigned those colors to different functionalities, including links, text colors, and the brand primary colors. Next, let's talk about fonts. This could be a presentation in and of itself with all the nuances, voices, and styles out there. The big takeaway here is to use balanced variety to establish that visual hierarchy. First, consider all of the use cases for typography. You have the main body text, which is the majority of your site, but you also need to consider different heading sizes and how they're used in page section titles or in panels, for instance, but also the small text on your buttons and links as well. You also want to make sure that the fonts you choose are legible. I have up there a good use case for these different items. If you can't easily read the font at different sizes, you're going to have a hard time communicating effectively with your user. And last, use font weights and styles to establish that hierarchy. You can see there on the right that this can easily be accomplished with only one font. This particular client has Gibson as their typeface, and they show a lot of differentiation just using different font weights or thicknesses and different styles like all caps. If you use more than one typeface as I've done in many portals, choose a distinctive typeface for your headings and a steady, legible typeface for body copy. Open Sans is one of my go-tos. This next part is the hard part for me because there are so many little use cases and details that we could go into that are all considered elements. The big takeaway here is to remember that you're ultimately trying to put together a cohesive design where all the moving parts work together. Start by styling your common elements. These are your links, your buttons, your panels, and the other piece is provided to you by that bootstrap design. Next, consider the state changes and how they're going to look. These are your hover effects and such that are going to change when the user interacts with the UI. Taking the time to consider the state changes can really go a long way to making your site feel more dynamic and reward the user for interacting. And last, consider content changes. There's a lot of dynamic content on Service Portal sites. One of my friends, who is a phenomenal developer but very much not a portal person, really helped me see the importance of this attention to detail. At one point, I showed him one of my designs, and he peppered me with questions. What does this look like if there are no items on the list or 20 items? How about if the short description for one of those requests is really, really long? You want to have a plan for how the design changes as the content changes. All right, once you've put it all together, the hard part is still in front of you. So here are a few things that I do to get through presenting a mockup to a project team or stakeholders and handle the feedback that comes with it. First, put this in front of your internal team before you put it in front of a stakeholder or client. This is going to help you ensure that you fix anything obvious that you missed, and it's going to help you get a good idea of what kind of feedback you can expect. And it's free practice. As you go into the meeting, inform your stakeholders of when they can ask questions and how feedback is going to be taken. I tend to review a page section by section, like about as much content as you see depicted there on the screen, and then I will ask for questions before moving to the next section of a page. They're going to interrupt you anyway, but it does help. As you walk through your designs with a nice, calm voice, note the use cases, functional requirements, and other decisions that led to the design as presented. Showing the rational explanation behind the visual design can often move stakeholders to see the reasons behind your choices and move them towards approval and help you avoid unnecessary adjustments. And as a bonus note that I forgot to put on this slide, some of the common pushback that you may get includes disagreements with the features placed specifically on the landing page or disagreement with the general design direction. Make sure your project manager or your other leadership is on board and ready to support you and be ready to back up your decisions with the direction and the decisions given to you by the stakeholder team members. If they suggest a change that would be detrimental, ask them what use case or requirement such a change will support. This is going to help you understand the need for the desired change and possibly find a better solution. All right, again, I hate how limited our time has been because there is so much depth to different tactics and topics that we've covered here today. If you have any specific questions, please reach out and let me know. I'm happy to help you become more comfortable with the design process however I can. I hope this is encourage you to see that the process of front-end design is a skilled, practiced endeavor, just like any of the other development work you've done, and I hope this also provides you with a roadmap for putting together designs that you can be proud of. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Using Advanced Work Assignment to get the right query agent on the job for users
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, good day. In this session, I'm going to present how we can leverage the advanced work assignment concept in ServiceNow to assign the right query, right work item to the right agent so that we can increase the productivity of the agent. And by finding the right agent to the end user I will contact, they'll be getting the best services using this topic. Coming to my introduction, I'm Chandra Sekhar Maganty. I'm working as senior associate in PwC India Acceleration Center. Coming to my experience, I'm having 12 plus years of experience in both the academic background as well as professional background. During my academic experience, I've trained around those instruments on ServiceNow for developer certification and admin certification. With the help of ServiceNow, we ran the program which is called ServiceNow Academic Partner Program in India. So during my professional experience, I had worked with several ServiceNow models like ITSM, CSM. And in PwC, I'm part of enterprise technology solutions, where I mostly work with [INAUDIBLE].. And during this session, I'm going to walk through with the advanced work assignment configuration. And I'll be giving a demonstration. And then we'll be having some few takeaways. So before going to the configuration, I just want to brush up a few terminologies which are related to advanced work assignment. So the first term which I will be going with is service channels. So service channels is a medium where an agent-- sorry, the service channel is a medium where the end user will be having a interaction with the agent. It might be through a chat or interaction, or else, it might be a type of case. It may be an incident as well. So we have three service channels, which comes up with these, which is case, incident, and chat. So every service channel will be associated with queues. We'll be having a different set of queues which will be checking the conditions and which will be written in true or false, based on the conditions we describe in the queues. Next we talk about is eligibility criteria. This is where we can have multiple assignment groups which are associated with the queue. And based on the time we give the assignment. And then as I mark eligibility criteria will be assigned to the particular group. And we'll be selecting a right agent using assignment rules. And coming to the assignment rules, this is where it will be deciding which agent need to be assigned to the end user's work item with my pay queue. It might be an interaction, or else, it might be a case as well. So it depends on maximum capacity, which has been allocated to the agent or as it might be the last assigned work item, which has been given to the agent. And also, how much time we need to give the-- how much time the work item should be present in the agent inbox. And coming to the use case, which I'm going to present today. I'm taking a Spanish customer, Spanish contact. So that contact will be trying to connect to the live agent through Virtual Agent. And also, she'll be creating a case in Spanish language. So how it works is when our work item, is created by the end user, service channel constantly will check whether it is a chat, it is a case submission or not. Then it will decide what service channel it is. Then it will go with the queue, whatever queue is associated with the service channel. It might have separate views. And it will select the correct view based on the conditions which we write and then use. And I prefer going to the queue. It will check the eligibility criteria. It will check what groups are there in the eligibility criteria and what time we have given, the time we have given to the eligibility criteria. And after selecting the correct assignment group, using assignment rules, it will select the right agent. And it will assign to that work item. So that's how it works. Before jumping into the demo, I'll show some basic configurations which are required for data [INAUDIBLE]. So before discussing the configurations, I'll be showing the person as the first person I contact. So we are having a contact, Tokyo. So we can see language. Tokyo's language is English. So she would be expecting a better service by providing the Spanish-speaking agents whenever she creates any work item. It might be a case. It might be chat, interaction, or anything else. And we have two persons, two agents. So one is Professor. Professor is one of the agents. So I've created a skill in CM and underscore skill table. The skill name which I've created in Spanish. And I've assigned that skill to the Professor agent, Professor record. And next user is Berlin. Berlin is another agent. In the same way, I have assigned a Spanish skill to the Berlin record as well. So two agents are having Spanish skills. And Tokyo, language is Spanish. Now come to the configurations. So first configurations would be Chat and Case. So the configurations which we'll be talking about in service channels is giving the capacity, giving the capacity. So for the case service channel, I've given 50 capacity. So it indicates that an agent can handle a maximum of 50 cases at a time. At any moment, they can handle at max of 50 cases. So if it's having or if it's already allotted with 50 cases which are in that New and the Open state, then no other work item will be assigned to that agent. So I want to talk about Agent Capacity Override. Agent Capacity Override is nothing but if any agent, if we feel any agent is capable of handling more than 50 cases, then we can create a record in this related list by providing the name and by providing the capacity. Whatever capacity we provide here, it will override the default capacity we've already checked. And next thing I want to talk about is the Layout. In the Layout, we can configure the fields which we want to display on the card, which will pop up in the agent inbox in Agent Workspace. So these are what we can configure, particular fields. Next thing I want to talk about is queues. So let me open two queues, one queue for Chat and one queue for Case as well. So any service channel can be associated with multiple queues. How a queue will be selected once a work item is created is it will check the service channel. And it will check the associated queues which are assigned-- which are associated with the service channel. And it will check the conditions. If a condition is return true, then it will go to assignment eligibility. So before going to Assignment Eligibility, we can specify conditions in two ways, one is Advanced by writing a script, which I've written the script for the chat. And another one is a Simple condition mode, a normal condition mode by simply providing different conditions. If condition is satisfied, then it will go to Assignment Eligibility. In Assignment Eligibility, we'll be providing the assignment groups. We'll be providing the assignment groups. We can have one or more assignment groups. If we are having multiple assignment groups, then it will check the eligibility. Once an assignment-- once a work item is created by the end user, if this queue is returning true, then it will go to the Assignment Eligibility. And it will check the eligible time. So I've given 0 seconds for Heist 1. So it will be going into Heist 1 one assignment group. And then, there is one assignment group. Based on the assignment rules, it will search for the right agent. If at all-- if none of the agents are available, then after waiting 45 seconds, it will go to Heist 3 assignment group. And it will search for the agents in that. So that is about queues. Next time, we're discussing the important part, Assignment Rules. This will decide to which agent or to which agent the case should be-- work item needs to be assigned. So we are having two conditions here, one is by Most Capacity and another one is Last Assigned. So based on this, a work item will be assigned to the agent. So in our use case, I'm taking Most Capacity. It indicates that whichever agent is having less number of work items in his bucket, that agent will be selected. So Rejection Handling section, we'll be having a few options like Allow Agents to Reject. Once a work item is created, if that work item is bumped up to an agent inbox, we'll be having two options, accept and reject. Reject option will be there only once we select this option. What else? If we don't select this option, the agent option will not be there. It will be having only accept. That's it. And Timeout is nothing but how much time a work item should be present in the agent inbox. For our use case, I've taken 30 seconds. So for 30 seconds, a work item will be present in the agent inbox. And Reassign on Timeout option is nothing but after 30 seconds, what happens if an agent is not accepting the work item or as he's not rejecting you? So what happens after 30 seconds? If I select this option, it will search for next best available agent to assign that work item. So that is what this option is. Next option is Skill Handling. So I enabled Skills. And I've enabled Enforce Mandatory Skills. So this indicates that in order to assign a work item to an agent, that agent needs to be mandatory. He needs to be having those skills in order to handle that bucket item. So that is what Skill Handling is. Next is Presence States. We are having three states, Available, Away, Offline. These are the states where agent can select. Once he logs in, probably, he'll be selecting Available option so that he can take up work items in order to work. Away is nothing but when he's going away from the system. Offline, once he's logging off, he'll be selecting the Offline option so that no other-- no work items will be coming up in his inbox. So Reject Reasons are not-- we will be having four reject reasons. First one, it will automatically timeout after 30 seconds elapses. And the other three options are agent selectable options. If at all an agent is rejecting any work item, then he needs to provide any of these options. It is a drop-down choice list. He needs to select this. We can create other reject reasons also by simply clicking on them. But then, yeah, I'll go with the demo. I'll go with the demo. First, I'll create an interaction record. I'll connect to the live agent. Then I'm in Tokyo. Tokyo will be connecting to the live agent. So let me click on Virtual Agent. Let me try to connect to the live agent. Yeah, it is waiting for the live agent. I'll switch to the agent inbox. Yeah, so this interaction record has come to Professor's inbox. So it will be reset, I've given 30 seconds. So it will be there. This work item will be there for 30 seconds. And this is the card. As it is interaction, this is how I configured the interaction card here. So it will wait for 30 seconds. After 30 seconds elapses, it will go-- it will search for the next best available agent, which is Berlin, because Berlin is having the Spanish skill. So yeah, this is how it works. He can accept it if he can't reject it. If he accepts it, so he will be having an active chat. He will be interacting to the agent. He will be interacting with the end user. And let me do that. Yeah, so agent has provided a Hola option. Hello to the Tokyo customer. So Tokyo can provide her query there. So yeah, Berlin received whatever message that Tokyo has typed. And he can provide whatever he wants to do. And there are a few options there, quick actions to be precise. We are having response templates, which are predefined as response templates. Agent can transfer to another agent. He can create the case through the interaction. Several options will be there which we can use. If he wants to end the interaction, so I can simply click on End Interaction, End Chat. It will end the interaction. So interaction is sent here to the Tokyo customer. So next few skills I'll be discussing is creating a case. So Tokyo is trying to create a case. Tokyo is creating a product case. So I need to select an asset. And I'll try to select an asset. I'll provide some short description then subject. So yeah, the case is created. So a case will be popped up in any of the agents. It let me switch to agents window. It is not there in Professor's inbox. So it would be there in Berlin's. Yeah, it is there. So it will wait for another six seconds. So Berlin didn't accept that case. So let me switch to Professor's inbox. Yeah, in Professor's inbox, a case has popped up in this box. So we can accept it. Or else, we can reject it. Or else, we can just leave it. If he leaves, it will search for another agent. If none of the agents are there, it will go to assigned work items. Then the question is, if none of the agents are accepting the new case, then how that case will be handled, so how the manager can assign that case. So let me go to manager's perspective. So managers will be going to Unassigned Task Work Items module, where it will be showing the unassigned work items. So let me filter it with Created. So this is the case which is not accepted by any of the agents. So we can Open the Record. So manager can see. In the Offer Details section, manager can see at what time that case has been assigned to which agent. In this, it is assigned to Professor this time. And it is assigned to Berlin at 12 13:56. So manager, case manager, can see all these details. And he, case manager, can assign manually here by providing Assigned to or as Assignment Group. He can do that. So that is one thing I wanted to present. And also, case manager can see Agent Presence & Capacity. We can see-- case manager can see all agents that are available, all agents are offline, and what are their Capacity in Use. We can filter it with Available. So Professor is available for both Chat and Case. Berlin is available for both Chat and Chase as well. And this is the Capacity in Use. And another important thing I want to show is Operations Dashboard. So Operations Dashboard doesn't come with a basic AWA plugin. We need to install another plugin for AWA Dashboard. It is Advanced Work Assignment Performance Analytics Dashboard will be there. So once we install that plugin, we can have access to this out-of-the-box dashboard. This dashboard, we can see-- case manager can see what work items are waiting, how many agents are available at this point of time, how many work items have they accepted for the day, what is the average wait time, everything, how many agents are online, how many agents are offline, available agents, everything. Group-wise, they can sort it out by group-wise, queue-wise. Anyways, any piece of information regarding AWA will be provided in AWA Operations Dashboard. Yeah, that is for the demo. I'll go ahead with the few takeaways. Yes, the first take away I want to focus is skills can be managed from skill determination rules, which we have created a few skill determination rules, or else can be managed by using business rules as well. In my demo, I've used skill determination rules for chat. And I created a few businesses rules for case skill determination rules. So another important takeaway is we need to enable Virtual Agent in the portal so that end user can contact live agent, can interact with the live agent. And after installing skill determination plugin for AWA we'll be getting two business tools, out-of-the-box business tools, skill determination work case and skill determination for interaction. By default, both of them are inactive. We need to make them active in order to work on skill-based sorting. And for better visibility of work and agents' presence to the manager or else admin, we need to use AWA Operations Dashboard, which comes with the Performance Analytics, Content Pack, Advanced Work Assignment plugin. We need to install this plugin as well. And in my demo, I went with the Spanish language. So I need to install the Spanish language plugin as well. And a few more plugins are Advanced Work Customer plugin, Skill Determination plugin. And if at all if I want to have instant service channel and case service channel, then I need to install Advanced Work Assignment plugin for CSM and Advanced Work Assignment plugin for ITSM as well. Yeah, these are the takeaways. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Where employees and agents get the best UX – Employee Center and Workspaces
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] According to Gartner report, only 13% of the employees are fully satisfied with the experience they're getting. There are over 87% of the employees that are not happy with the experience they're getting. This is not a good thing. So this might be due to many reasons, and one of the reason is that they are not getting a unified employee experience. User experience matters a lot. I am Sai Srikanth, and am a design lead at Kaptius. At Kaptius, I lead the Design Studio Team to deliver solutions and also help our clients to get full value out of the platform. And we also provide good user experiences and app engine solutions. So when we talk about the experiences in ServiceNow, it offers Employee Center for employee experience. This is standard multi department and dynamic portal for service delivery and engagement. It can easily scale to support all departments and services. Employee Center comes in two offerings. In the basic one you get the multi department service delivery, whereas in Employee Center Pro you get employee communication and engagement in addition to service delivery. Let's quickly see the basic picture of Employee Center. You can push your catalog items, knowledge articles, employee communications, and quick links to your Employee Center, and all your departments are added as form of topics to the taxonomy, and each topic has its own dynamic topic page. And you also have some page configured widgets. Don't worry. Let's go ahead and see it in action. Now I'm logged in as an employee, and this is the Employee Center group. On the top, I have my tasks and also my requests. And here you can see your department, and each department has its own topics and sub topics. I browse IT, and this is a dynamic topic page for that particular department. As you can see, it is organized into topics and sub topics. You can find all the information you need for that particular topic. You can filter it by article, and also you can filter it by catalog items. This is a sub topic in our IT topic, and it has all the content so you get all you need at one place. I'll go back to the home screen, as you have learned to explore. This is the content experience, and each of this content is actionable. You can add your campaigns to this as well. And here you have your search, which supports the enterprise search where you can search across your organization. You have your popular topics within organization, and you can also have your recommended items. This is the quick links. You can add the links within your organization so that it can act as an interact. You can put your video content and also any links to the My Applications, and you can have your upcoming events. And this My Active Items is kind of a mini dashboard where a user can get the holistic view of what's happening with his tickets and if he has any to do task. So it's easy for him to take any action quickly. So when I click on the task, it takes me to do, and I can just simply click on the button by reading the stuff. So this is how the Employee Center looks like. Let's see what's under the hood. So as we were discussing, in Employee Center, everything is linked to the taxonomy. Let's go ahead and explore the taxonomy. So this is our employee taxonomy linked to the Employee Service Center. We would suggest you to create your own taxonomy and create your departments as single topics here. Let's explore the employee taxonomy. Here you have the IT department as a child topic. In each topic you can have the taxonomy linked to it and ordered, and also can add cool icon and the banner images. And for this topic, you can add the child topics and also you can link the content to it. You can link to your catalog items, knowledge articles, and also the quick links. You also have the ability to feature the content. So this is how you can organize your stuff within the employee sector. You just create the records, and it creates a dynamic topic basis for you. Now, let's explore one more cool thing, activity configurations. It's the mini dashboard that you saw in the Employee Center. You just need to create a record here and define few things. Let's take an example of requests. As you can see, we just gave the name, and also we link the page to redirect it to once you click on it. The summary view script shows the count of that particular box, and this list view script populates the data for the cards. Let's go ahead and see what we are talking about. So this is the account you see on the card, and this is the data you see. So it's just that easy to configure the things in Employee Center. And you also can configure the To Do page, your Ticket page, you can add new request filters, and all of this by just creating records and configuring the things. Now, are employees happy? And it's equally important for us to make our agent happy as well, and Workspace does exactly the same. So this improves the agent efficiency, and it enables your agent to work on multiple issues concurrently into the layout. It improves their productivity. And this Workspace built with the new UI Builder boosts a lot of things. When you're talking about the Workspace, we have two different things. One is the Agent Workspace and HR Workspace which just have a few components, and which cannot use the full capacity of the UI Builder. In configurable Workspace, they can utilize the full capacity in the power of UI Builder. Let's take an example of CSM and FSM configurable Workspace. You have access to many components and you can create awesome experiences. And you can create your own components as well inside the UI Builder, and this UI Builder is not only limited to Workspace, but you can create your portal experience in this way. Let's see it in action. So this is the UI Builder where all the magic happens. You can create your experiences by defining the app shells. You can differentiate the experiences page on the app shells. And now for this demo let's consider CSM and FSM configurable Workspace. So for every experience or Workspace, you can create the pages and there are many existing templates for you to create the pages very easily. And there is one more cool thing. You can show different views for the same URL on the page, and this view is called variant. And this variant can be defined using the audience. You can simply create a variant and add your audience to it. Let's go ahead and explore components. You have access to lot of components, and all of these components can be added to your experience and they are configurable. Using the data resource, you can add and fit the data. Let's quickly go ahead and add one. You can see your scope here, and you can see many operations that you can pull from that fits the data. You also have client state parameters and also page scripts can be defined. Let's quickly go ahead and add a component and let's see how you can configure it. I'm adding a button to my experience. Another use case is to link it to the native UI. Another use case is to link it to the native UI. So this is the button. Let's go ahead and configure it. In configuration tab, you can pass on the data to your component and go ahead and add the label. While adding the data or inputs to your component, you can either add a static content or you can dynamically fix the data. Go ahead and dynamically fix the data. So as you can see, the data is dynamically fixed. And also, you can write the script to do the same. OK, we got the user's full name. Now let's straighten it. Right. We are done. So you can see it's reflecting on our product. And in the style step, you can define the styles for your component and you can also add your own CSS. And this event handler is a place where you define what should happen when you click on your component or when you interact with your component, and you have many options in this event handler. For now, let's take link to destination. I select my destination and we are done. So whenever the agent clicks on this button, it takes him to the native UI. It's just that simple. You have a lot of components you can add to your experience and make it beautiful. And if you want to create your new components, you can use the Now UI framework. There are a lot of good resources on developer channel-- service on developer channel, and also there are good blogs in the community as well. So there is no limitation for UI Builder. You can go crazy and create awesome experiences. So now both our employee and agent are happy. So here are the few takeaways so that you can crack on to implement this for your organization and also for your customers. For Employee Center, please check the licensing. And also while you are installing the plugin, use the out of box fix script to fix all the restricted corner accesses. And we would recommend you to create your own taxonomies and organize the content into topics and sub topics. There is a lot of stuff you can configure using Employee Center. You can configure your activity configurations, To Do page, Ticket page, and there are a lot of out of the box widgets you can use. And for the Workspace with UI Builder, you can create your own components using The Now Experience framework. And the UI Builder is not only limited for Workspace, but you can create different experience like portal as well. If you are using the [INAUDIBLE] Studio, you can create the Workspaces in just a few clicks. If something is not loading in the UI Builder, you can go ahead and repair the plugin and it works fine. So these are the few takeaways, and I hope you got something useful in this session. Thank you so much.
Accelerate the self-service experience using Catalog Builder
## Transcript X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everybody. I'm Paul Morris. And today, I'm excited to talk to you about how you can accelerate the self-service experience using Catalog Builder. And I will also be sharing some of my tips and tricks for success with Catalog Builder. Now, I've been working on the ServiceNow platform for over 10 years. And typically, once a service catalog goes live, everyone is falling over each other to get their catalog items added to the service catalog. And us poor ServiceNow admins and developers, we can't get them in fast enough for the customer. No matter how quickly we try and get them in, it's never fast enough. You'll never find someone that wishes their cadence of catalog development was slower. Everyone wants more items in faster and better. So ServiceNow has a tool called Catalog Builder that's been sitting in every ServiceNow instance for quite some time that's just waiting to be used to help you guys accelerate catalog development. So what catalog development typically looks like. You've got a business owner, and they go out and gather catalog requirements to build a catalog item, which then gets put on the self-service portal. Traditionally, what happens, the business owner or someone on behalf of the business owner I gather there's those requirements. They give it to a ServiceNow administrator or a developer, and then they wait weeks or months. And eventually, they'll get a catalog item, their catalog item on the self-service portal. But that's just not quick enough in this day and age where everyone's working from home, and they want to be able to request things on the service portal. So here comes the Catalog Builder. So first, the catalog admin comes in and creates a template for the business group. And then the business owner, as they already are doing, they gather catalog requirements. But now with Catalog Builder, the business owner has empowered themselves to create the catalog item themselves rather than waiting for an admin or a developer to do it. They can even preview that catalog item in multiple channels after they create it to get that immediate feedback, and then take it through a pre-published flow, and then publish it to the catalog. This is done through a new user interface, which is a user-centric design wizard that takes the user step by step through what they need to do to complete a catalog item. It comes with a drag and drop form designer, which not even the ServiceNow admins get. And as I mentioned previously, they can preview what the form would look like in various channels. And best of all is they don't need to have a ServiceNow admin account to be able to do this. So is it a good idea to be giving every single business owner access to Catalog Builder to start building catalog items? Well, we want to pick who our builders will be quite wisely. Someone who understands the organization's fulfillment process. At the end of the day, they're not just building a form. They're also building the fulfillment process that comes after that form is built. We want someone that's going to be building the right items, not just what they personally want, really need to take into consideration what the business strategy is to make sure that the right items get built. Someone that has a sound understanding of process and a good understanding of ServiceNow so they can roll with the terminologies that are in Catalog Builder. They need to be motivated to build the items, because most likely they're busy and they've got another day job that they're doing. And they have the capacity to build those items. You're not going to be able to accelerate the development of catalog items if you've got a Catalog Builder that wants to build all these items for their particular business area, but they don't have the time to do it. So it's important to choose your builder wisely. So once you've chosen your builder, they're now going to be building catalog items instead of your ServiceNow admin that has a lot of experience and was probably doing a pretty good job. So how do we make sure that our new Catalog Builder is doing a good job? We create design standards. We need to first define what a good item looks like, put it in a document, and all agree that's what a good item looks like. So we can give it to our Catalog Builder, and they know the correct language to use. They know how to present the form properly, doing it in the same way every time. So you've got a catalog that is consistent across all your different items. We define the roles and responsibilities around the service catalog as well. It's one thing having standards. But if number one is making sure those standards are met, they're not going to be very helpful. So you want to make someone accountable for making sure that these standards are met within this service catalog and noting down what all the catalog rules are so everyone can work together. You may also wish to define what the Catalog Builder can and cannot do. The catalog Builder unlocks around 80% of the functionality in a service catalog. But the other 20% still needs to be done by an admin. So you want some sort of process on how to handle those edge cases if you want to design an item outside of what Catalog Builder would let you do. So without that design standards, you might get items of varied quantity, quality, and that's going to stop you from accelerating. So it's important to stop and have those design standards. So once you've got them, you can accelerate forward and increase your cadence on your catalog development. So it's not just about the Catalog Builder. The catalog Builder has access to this great tool. But there's a lot of other people that are involved in the entire process of managing a service catalog. So it's important that everyone works together. This includes other roles like the ServiceNow administrator, a catalog admin, and even the fulfillment team that are actually processing the items once they've been logged by end users. It's important to leverage the expertise of others, especially if you're a new Catalog Builder. Your ServiceNow admin already has years of design experience building this catalog items. So it's wise to leverage that experience. And let's not forget the domain knowledge of the facilities who are actually completing the requests. You need to talk to them and make sure that you're representing the correct process in your catalog item. So when the fulfillment team run through the process, it makes sense and it's correct. So we're working as a team, creating all these catalog items. But when it comes to building these forms, how can we accelerate the creation of these forms in Catalog Builder? One of my key tips for doing that is using question sets. So what is a question set? It's a set of predefined questions that you can just plunk on to the drag and drop form builder that might have a number of questions already set out for you to reuse across as many items as you want. So that saves a lot of time, so you're not constantly rebuilding the same form over and over again. And it also helps you standardize what these forms look like. Now, question sets can only be created by ServiceNow developers or possibly your catalog admin. As I mentioned in the third tip, you really all need to be working together and communicating to accelerate and push forward with your catalog development using Catalog Builder. So speaking of building these catalog items, where should we be building them? Should we be building them in straight into production? Do we need to test? It's a good idea to follow whatever your existing development lifecycle process is in ServiceNow. I know the key word there, development lifecycle, but development does include testing. Testing is still quite important. Yes, in Catalog Builder, you can preview what the form looks like straight away. But you can't test the workflow behind that without first publishing it, which then puts it on the service catalog for people to order from. And do you really want to be doing that in production? Probably not. As you're building questions on your forms, Catalog Builder lets you create dynamic behaviors to show questions and hide questions based on certain things, though the way those questions react to behaviors might be different in the Service portal to how it does in the agent user interface. So you really need to test it there as well. And again, you don't really want to be testing in production. The process behind the form, the fulfillment team are actually processing that needs to be validated end to end. So it is just best practice as you would with typical ServiceNow enhancements to migrate those changes through the environments from dev, test, and production. And that's actually a best practice today. Yes, you can build them straight into production technically. But just because you can, doesn't mean that you necessarily should. And your developer needs to be aware that there are some technical challenges around deploying updates with Catalog Builder. But you can read up on some of those in my ServiceNow blogs. So tip number 5 there, follow your development lifecycle process. So summarizing my top five tips. We choose our builder wisely. Once we've chosen our builder, we make sure that they have design standards before they start pumping out catalog items. Make sure they continue to work as a team, and don't work in isolation. Work with catalog admins, work with ServiceNow admins. You're leveraging question sets, so you can build those forms quicker and get more catalog items out. And you're following your development life cycle process, which is in the long term is going to get you more throughput of catalog items, because you're more likely to get them right the first time. Now, Catalog Builder has been around since Quebec. So if you're looking to speed up the development of your service catalog, leverage these tips and tricks that I've shared with you today, and begin your journey accelerating the self-service experience using Catalog Builder. Now, I'd like to thank everyone for watching this video today. If you want to get in contact with me, you can find me by email, LinkedIn, one of my favorite hangouts, Sndevs Slack. If you want to know or see more of my ServiceNow content, you can read my ServiceKnow-How blogs. And if you want to know more about, Kinetic IT, the company I work for, you can visit their website. Thanks, everyone, for listening or watching. And hope you have a great digital knowledge experience. [MUSIC PLAYING]
