Platform Foundation Academy Session #1: What's new in Quebec for the Now Platform?

all right i think we're going to get started if andrew is ready absolutely ready wonderful okay hello and welcome this is our very first session of the platform foundation academy uh we're starting this um to start engaging with our customers and partners about anything that is platform or core platform technology um you may have already seen some of the other academies that we're offering about par or virtual agent academy and this is a new one in the series we want to cover topics like atf source control cicd and many more and to kick off this series we have a wonderful andrew barnes who will be presenting some of the latest features um that we've had in um in the latest release that is quebec and be sure we're going to be covering rome features in one of our future sessions but i will um let me just quickly give you an outline of what the academy of format does and what makes it a little more different from other formats that you may have seen so the academy format will give you a like the best sides of an office hours combined with actual presentations or maybe even some small demos in the future so the first part that andrew will present will be an overview a smart presentation and we're going through a specific topic and then we'll open up the floor to questions so feel free to start typing in the questions that you have in the q a panel and we'll then start answering them after andrew has done his presentation i am so happy that you're here and i give my word over to andrew oh thank you so much lisa i will go ahead and start the screen share here of this little powerpoint and get us rolling so as lisa said this is our very first episode of the platform foundation academy um and our last slide um we'll have the details for the next one but it will be at thursday july 22nd will be our second one and i believe that one will be daniel going over some good practices for atf but let's get into our topic for today which is quebec what's in it for me um some of you may have already uh gone to quebec and some of you may have seen other quebec presentations so i tried to weave in some of the platform foundation topics into this presentation today that are a little less loud and obvious i will touch on some of the larger ones but i wanted to touch on some uh potentially overlooked things that are in quebec um as lisa said i'm andrew barnes i'm a senior staff platform outbound product manager and this is a fairly new role for me uh joining uh into the outbound product management team uh and lisa um why don't you introduce yourself real quick all right um my name is lisa holmstein i am now from product manager for the platform i've been in this role for about one and a half half years now i'm located in germany and have been in the servicenow ecosystem for about five years oh fantastic um and if you've never met me i have been in our ecosystem for a little over seven years um i've been at a couple of customers as an uh platform owner and enterprise architect an implementation partner and prior to joining the outbound team here at servicenow which i've been at for coming up on three years um i was in our developer uh program uh championing uh for developers so let's get into quebec our agenda for today is uh well let's start with the safe harbor uh i don't believe that we're going to touch on any future statements here but in case we do um please make sure that you don't make any purchasing um you know dollar based decisions off of anything that we say because we may be talking about something that is forward-looking it's where we hope to go to but we're not promising that we will that will be exactly is so we've handled our introductions and we're going to get right into quebec so let's let's jump right in so one pretty cool feature in paris was universal request and then uh but with quebec it has been enhanced and i'm pretty excited to talk about universal request because it solves a problem that i have experienced previously you know when working at a customer of servicenow you have you know multiple teams and organizations using servicenow at many of our customers and those organizations are using different aspects and parts of our platform and universal requests really helps flatten the differences between those different areas so you could have some folks working in incident you could have you know customer service management it could be hr it could be a request so there's lots of different work streams that could be happening for our customers intake and switching between those record types um is a is a pain point for your agents what universal request tries to do is ease some of that pain between transitioning from say an hr case to an incident because it was misrouted it wasn't really an hr case and this customer's request really needs to be handled in the incident table and so what universal request allows that agent to do is they can translate that ticket from an hr case into an incident and it's a very simple modal dialogue that you can see here on the screen for the agent to perform this action so they're going to you know transfer this from hr case to incident and they they set a couple of pieces of information you know which department the service why they're transferring this and then that record gets transformed into the target systems uh record and the hr agent didn't need to know details about how to translate that into an incident so this is really powerful and allows for that sla to to cross the boundaries of departments right because they're tied together with this universal request you can set slas at the universal request level which transcend the individual hr case or incident record so lots of cool stuff there one of the one of the enhancements in paris um or in quebec is the properties that you can set for universal requests so you can control the type of transfers the agents can do so there's some very handy properties there that allow you to limit to say what level of granularity you can you can switch to and if you can switch something outside of your department or not so you may want your hr agents to be able to just transfer it to the uh you know topmost level in a in a different department or drill down to the actual services uh so those properties are really useful so uh like all along the way of talking about how agents are fulfilling interactions with customers you know you ask for something you're you're handling a request of some form so what i'm showing here is a picture from a workspace and in that workspace we have a contextual sidebar and in that sidebar one of the new options is what the the next best best action is and to handle the next best action is something called guided decisions again this is a feature that i believe was introduced in paris but really has gotten some great enhancements that that make it something that i want to pursue in quebec and one of the most important one of those and i've got a little picture of it in the bottom right here is that previously the guided decisions in its first release was was limited to you know a single guided decision tree at a time so you had to have the whole package together of concept of what you needed all in the same decision tree what is enhanced in quebec is that you can link decision trees with other decision trees which is a really powerful tool so previously you had to end on a you know a guidance node but now you can you can continue to leverage moving from one decision tree to another decision tree and that allows you to make these modular and interact with each other in powerful ways without having to have that big entire picture up front with another enhancement with guided decisions in quebec is that you can perform you know conditionals after the guidance nodes have completed uh and continue on in case of for example if you were running uh if if the the guided decision tree told you to perform some action um like you know inspect uh inspect their computer um remotely and if that fails then you might need to execute a different guided decision tree and so that's one of the capabilities that quebec has added to this decision oh yes i think there could be a question around guided decisions for our customers they may have seen that guided decisions are currently located in the csm part of our docs does this impact their option to use it if they're not a csm customer so my understanding is that guided decisions was created by the csm area which is why it's located in that area of the docs but it should be available for uh general platform use that is awesome um along that vein it was tied to a playbook previously in quebec and that has been separated in quebec um you no longer have to tie a guided decision tree to a given playbook you can instead as i have in the the image here it can be in the contextual sidebar conditionally so i don't need to know that a given record is going to interact with this guided decision in my playbook you can still have them in playbooks but now it can be separated out and just be conditionally based which opens up lots of opportunity for using and leveraging these guided decisions to help agents solve problems faster so along along that vein of workspaces and agents is you got our first deliverable configurable workspace in quebec so the quebec workspace for csm is a configurable workspace which is really quite exciting i have long wanted workspaces to be fully configurable and now they're starting to be fully configurable with the addition of configurable workspaces in quebec you've likely seen some information about ui builder already in this release if you've seen any of our quebec release information you've probably seen something about ui builder but i think it was worth a mention that configurable workspaces are able to be configured through ui builder and is really going to enhance your ability to deliver those great experiences for your agents through customizing and configuring the workspaces to be the way that your agents will most optimally be able to work so i'm really excited about that feature which is enabled by ui builder ui builder is our new interface builder it is was available prior to quebec but in a very limited fashion the quebec version is is what i would consider our our first real release of ui builder and i look forward to talking to that more in the future there's a lot of depth with ui builder and you've probably heard some things about it already but i i couldn't talk about the configurable workspace without mentioning ui builder there's tons to explore there my good co-worker brad tilton has done lots of information about ui builder and will continue to do so into the future but that that what you see what you get kind of ui interface builder is really exciting to see and deliver power for you one thing near and dear to my heart as a platform owner previously is you know managing moving to a new version of servicenow and so while we're talking about a new version of servicenow quebec how how could i not mention some cool features about how you upgrade in the upgrade conversation itself so upgrade center is quite quite a bit uh quite a bit more powerful nowadays the reason that i want to mention upgrade center is because handling upgrades can be challenging for some organizations and the purpose of upgrade center is really to help uh you know make upgrades faster and easier so some of the things that are added in quebec for making future upgrades easier so you have to be on quebec in order to take advantage of these things in the upgrade center for your next upgrade but once you once you get in there and see what you can do with the upgrade center i think you will be pleased with the power that it gives you which is some of the things you can do or preview what a future version is going to look like so as soon as you move to quebec and you can leverage the upgrade center you can start using the upgrade center even for your quebec patches and you can preview what that patch is going to look like so it's going to pretend to do an upgrade without actually doing an upgrade and predict what the outcomes of that upgrade will be which is hugely hugely powerful from a time estimation of what work needs to be done in order to accomplish the upgrade that's that's going to be a huge time saver and it really centralizes all that information about the upgrade all into one place for you so how long the previous upgrades took it predicts how long the next upgrade is going to take based off of which upgrade you're you're choosing it brings in all of those uh skipped entries all together to be reviewed in one place the performance of the upgrade it's really centralizing a lot of data from a lot of places in the platform all together to help you manage upgrades better when you're talking about uh you know the customizations you've made in servicenow one thing that has been added in quebec and this is where i will likely talk a little bit about a future thing is app customizations so if you're in studio one of the things that has been enhanced with quebec is the ability to customize a store application so along the top bar there we've zoomed in a little bit here and showing you that there's a new option to create a store app customization and what that's going to do is create a customized version of a given store app which you can see here on this screen is you'll actually have two version numbers you'll have the you know the stores provided uh version number and then you'll have your version number and this allows you to work on that store app in studio which you previously couldn't do one of the forward-looking statements uh will be that that handles the store apps the next step along this progression is handling plugins so that's going to be coming in a future release most likely very very soon which should cover all of the different application types should be covered then with that enhancement that's coming uh to a future near you so that you can manage all of your development work as a developer in servicenow all in studio of the one of the enhancements that you get along the way with being able to do that store app customization and the servicenow provided scope customizations and plug-in customizations along with your existing applications and the global app bundles that are possible is you can take advantage of ci cd capabilities that there weren't lots of new features in that in quebec but as we're adding opening up these other areas uh for leveraging and studio and source control and app repo that allows you to move away from update sets and move towards using centralized source control automated testing and then what i have on the screen here is the scanning system so the instance scan is another automated tool in the platform now as of quebec which you can run scans against your instance or applications or update sets you can run these automatically based off conditions so you can set up things like when i close an update set it automatically runs a scan for me and tells the developer right then the results of that scan even without even having to move it to another instance and you get to configure what those scanning definitions are so there's some that are shipped out of the box but you as an organization get to define what is important to you and which which practices you want to scan for so there are a couple of great in-depth things talking about instant scan but the idea behind it is to measure things on the platform be it you know code or app performance coding standards you know there there's lots of opportunity with instant scan to automate the inspection of applications and performance on the servicenow platform so that you can pinpoint areas of improvement early in the development process and then you've probably already heard of app engine studio but when i was thinking about talking about the the ci cd capabilities one of the things that you know popped in my mind is managing uh you know low code delivery at scale and with app engine studio uh which is our new uh interface for low code developers to work in the platform one of the things that's baked into this is using those ci cd capabilities to help those citizen type developers those low code developers get their work deployed up through the pipeline and that's automated as part of app engine studio and can be scaled to things that aren't in app engine studio which is why i wanted to mention it here so as you move forward with the maturity in your organization you can look at leveraging the same type of capability that's built into app engine studio for automated deployments up your pipeline with things not in app engine studio and i have another addition to that the instance scan that you've seen before can also be added to the queue to the pipeline publishing pipeline within app engine studios so whenever for example your citizen developer wants to publish his version of the application that he wrote you can run the same instance scans that you've been creating for your regular developers before that's an excellent point lisa thank you for bringing that in absolutely the out of the box provided pipeline for app engine studio is just that it's the out of the box provided but you can enhance it exactly as lisa said to run automated tests to run instant scan as part of that pipeline absolutely you can do i'm talking about atf our upcoming uh episodes episode two and three are coming up two weeks and four weeks from now uh i hope you uh have enjoyed this little presentation and now we get to the really fun part which is uh questions and answer session before we do that i would love to have you um answer a couple of questions on the quebec release and specifically on how you're currently working with um with your processes how are you doing your your releases how often do you do your releases which release are you on currently and so on so let us know um the post should be showing up for you just now and we're super interested in uh where you're currently at um and how many of the tools some of the tools that andrew just described to us you're already using or are planning to use i love bowls yes yes awesome please please answer the questions ooh which releases your your production instance currently at that's a good question we got some orlando coming in you've already got some paris or some quebec users which is great that is awesome then you get to use the new features how often do you upgrade your instance um that is that's a good question i know the answer but it's a really good [Laughter] question i love your your area behind your desk lisa it looks great thank you i can even choose the colors if i want to that is just so so fancy so uh while we're doing the poll uh we got a couple of questions answered and let's i want to look at them because i didn't get to look at them yes while you do that i want to highlight that you can also please raise your raise your hands if you want to ask your questions um out loud and then i can give you permissions to speak so don't be afraid of us we're not fighting most of the time yep lisa told me i was not allowed to buy anyone today on this call and buy people later so the uh thomas asked about the transfer ticket window for the universal request yeah that is an excellent question and it combines some of our topics today it it does and i i believe that you answered it quite well which is if it is a glide model um then yes a quebec enhancement to atf added the capability to interact with those uh glide modals so and i suspect it is a glide modal window i haven't tested it i haven't tested it yeah i don't know i'm not i don't know for sure but if it is then you should be able to do it now and otherwise then it would need to be the custom ui yes test and in that case if it is a custom ui you should be able to explore it with the page inspector all right um i'll see we're ready to close out the poll yes i think so it's been three minutes and most of the people have answered awesome all right um i'll just open this so whoever wants to see it can check the results and we'll continue with casey's question casey asked will guided decisions only tie into agent workspace or is there any possibility to do that in legacy platform or service portal so here's what i found i haven't found an option to do that however in one of our documents and this is with no confirmation at all i'll have to check it out um further but i've seen that there's supposed to be an api for guided decisions i couldn't find it so far maybe it's still on the roadmap but if there's a an api to call the guided decision then you should be able to um call it from other workflows as well but i will find that out for you yeah and so i doubt that there will be much capability to pull it into the legacy platform unless it's through api because the interface itself is definitely a now experience component and so the the visual interaction with it uh is is going to be limited to places where you can surface now experience components so let's let's go through our poll you're able to look at them which is great we've got fairly fairly good balance between paris and quebec for where you're currently at uh what was that 50 and 40 percent yes uh 50 paris 40 quebec and then other [Laughter] orlando and or older and then how often do you upgrade your instance oh wow that's a great response there which is 81 uh that makes me very happy to see that makes me very happy to see because we have invested a lot of um effort in the past years to help our customers speed up their um their upgrades and seeing that most i'd say the majority are up to four weeks for the upgrade process that is a good number as well so we're trying to help you shorten those upgrade periods and make you more more current i guess so it seems like it's working at least for the people who are here 70 percent is four weeks or less which is great that is amazing yes and most of you have heard of the upgrade center now i would love to know if you've heard of it before andrew told you about it freezing of questions two people did not listen to him at that point and then atf have you looked everywhere it's in speed oh hopefully that so have used atf but not instant scan which is since many of you aren't on quebec yet then that is a makes sense right not lots of users of instant scan yet but hopefully that is a feature that is a little bit exciting to you there's lots of power there hidden in instant scan and it's not just about inspecting code yes so let's get to questions raise your hands more questions what would you like to talk about that's you know core platform servicenow stuff so don't don't ask us questions about uh you know how you should handle your incident management better because while i have opinions it's not what we're here to talk about all right tapas is writing does the instant scan also help in quantifying the code coverage for the atf test cases wow so no it's not so instant scan it doesn't doesn't uh interact directly with a atf so they are two tools that can be used for some types of similar things uh so you can use instant scanning to sort of test some things and they should be used in concert um is atf is is there to be testing you know outcomes and is the process working and are my forms the right way and instant scan is is more about you know can i uh you know inspect parts of the platform against some guidelines that i have defined and so those are are different scenarios and maybe an example would be good one of the things that you could see is um using like whenever you one of your admins or whoever or one of the users creates a home page instance scan could help you uncover that and make sure that you're using dashboards or maybe more modern reporting versions or whenever you're creating a for example an after update business rule you might as might as well use a flow for that so instant scan can help you uncover that or maybe you have some guidelines set up on where you want your developers and admins to configure whether fields are mandatory be that on the client side or on the server side and instant scan can help you mandate those guidelines that you set for your developers so those are i think some of the options or scenarios for which you can use instant scan for example yeah i would be so i've heard other folks ask about you know do i have code coverage for atf and my my thoughts on that is do i care so there's lots of code in servicenow there's lots of code that i've written in servicenow do i want full coverage for all the code and servicenow that we're not using no i want coverage for things that we're using so i build my test cases to test the things that i'm using and performing and care about and i don't use it to inspect areas that i'm not utilizing so if i have code that's not being used do i need to test it probably not because i'm not using it all right there's another question in the chat and michael is asking if we're actively accessing and reviewing the ideas portal so not me personally but we as a team yes there are different teams involved there are mechanisms in place that look at idea thresholds those are different per topic too so upvote those issues that are near and dear to your heart the more upvotes they get the more likely they are to cross the threshold and make sure that they get into the queues for development or at least evaluation so our product managers to that was an excellent answer lisa um our product managers absolutely use the idea portal to help them with their road mapping that's one of their input points is reviewing the idea portal deciding whether or not they are going to add that item to their backlog or not and part of our release process is tracking and reporting up on how well we're doing on how much of the given release so our future well let's stay on the current release our quebec release part of the release process was uh for each product was showing how much of what you delivered in that release came from the idea portal so it is absolutely a place that you should be using and interacting with um and voting for the things that you think are important don't don't just say everything's important vote for the things that you think are important and and encourage your your friends and co-workers to do so as well um so it is it's supposed to be a collaborative space uh and it is being utilized by the decision makers for each product to help prioritize right while we're answering more questions um i want to launch another poll because more polls this is the as this is the first session that we're doing we also want to get your opinions like michael says let give us your opinion let us know which topics platform topics you're most interested in interested in and we'll make sure to cover those topics in this academy going forward so this is supposed to be an interactive thing we want to know what you're interested interested in which topics help you be more successful this is a multiple choice so you can um multiple select multiple select i'm learning the difference i'm writing questions i've been writing certification questions all week i know all the differences between multiple choice and multiple select now so give us your opinions what do you want to know about what are interesting topics especially when it comes to best practices guidance how do you best employ those things in your daily work to be more successful all right so there's another question knowledge management all right so i'm i'm unfortunately we cannot help you with incident management because we're taking care of the platform um and incident does belong to the itsm suite i'm not sure about knowledge do you know andrew knowledge is owned by the itsm group as well okay so we'll have well it's available for everything in the platform they they do own that feature yeah yeah so that that would probably be um covered by one of their academies or office hours topics too okay so while we could talk about it it's it is really best to to go visit with them and give them their feedback because they're the ones who can most directly help you and improve the product in case it needs it yeah great i have about 20 minutes left we need more questions let us know what you want to know yeah if you run out of questions we've run out of time [Laughter] well ashley's got a question end to answer that in real time uh will we see more academy on universal request uh it certainly could uh that pro probably wasn't one of our options in the poll here oh i could have added that yes i'll make a note but yes it can be universal request is really cool let me put that on my list all right so what was your uh what was your favorite nugget from quebec it could be a big thing it could be a spell thing what was your favorite put it in the chat or me i was talking to you lisa but but actually yes let's open it up there if you if you have used quebec uh let's open it up for everybody yes let's open it up for everybody yeah me personally nice it must be my team it's great that was good you got me there it is for me it's probably it's probably ui builder because the ui builder changes everything it is the biggest thing i think um it'll be so awesome of course app engine studio in conjunction with ui builder but ui builder building the foundation of the experiences we're going to see forward is just amazing right i'm closing out the survey and as it just says there it's ui builder is the favorite choice i guess we'll have to talk about ui builder that's hilarious so looks like we've got a fair smattering of things that are the second tier so automated test framework application development between dev studio and app engine studio ci cd instant scan source control uh well i apparently know what my future topics were going to be because you and daniel have got atf covered and so i probably i would probably be doing some source control ci cd and instant scanning that is awesome those are some interesting ones too uh for me uh i think my favorite thing in quebec uh for developers was uh script tracer oh yes in general though uh i think like capability i'm i'm pretty excited about decision trees like that's that's why i've talked about it today like i've wanted to have that kind of capability in our platform and i've i sort of made some uh passes at it myself previously that's the guided decision thing right not to be confused with decision tables that can be used in flow designer right correct sounds similar is not quite the same and i get them jumbled up like word-wise i know which one i mean at any given time the names of them are tricky they're so close uh but yes the guided decisions is the correct name which i i didn't say the first time here um it and that is is just so cool because you know when you're working when you're trying to solve a problem uh that's a you know a fairly routine problem having a you know that step-by-step interface to like walk me through what i need to to get from the the customer and and it's kind of like a playbook but it's flexible playbook like it's a flexible playbook that helps me get the right information from the user and and get them to the right place and i've i really i like that capability i think it's very very powerful all right if there's no more big questions i have a very last survey for you while we're closing this out and this is mostly about how did you like this session so feel free to stomp us now if you have any any final questions before we wrap this up please let us know raise your hands put it in the q a or in the chat and we'll make sure to answer that and and bring questions for two weeks from now um like if you have a you know a best practice question for a platform or you know we're going to be talking about atf so certainly bring your atf questions like and it can even be you know how how do best like not just like what are the capabilities of atf but like when to use it how to use it how to convince your team members have it you know that they want to use it bring questions like that so we can we can talk through uh not just the the technical bits but you know the the softer the software bits as well be sure to also check out the community post we're going to create specific events on the community for each of the future sessions the webinar register register registration link is the same as for this one so make sure to sign up for the future sessions and you can also leave comments this recording will be posted on youtube as well in the coming days we have our own playlist that i've started on the now community channel so make sure to follow that one if you cannot watch live you're always welcome to go ahead and watch the recordings after and please also leave us questions either on the community or in the youtube video um check out our initial session that we did last week we were we had the privilege of speaking in one of our colleagues teams office hours they are usually focusing on itbm and they asked us to join them to speak about atf and how to leverage it for upgrades and for servicenow use cases and some best practices so that was our initial session last week you can also watch that on youtube now and post your more atf questions there we'll catch up on them in the next two sessions on this academy as well and then finally um one more thing that i wanted to um tell you already we are um also um looking at starting a similar academy sometime in the fall which will focus on all things workflow and integrations so that will be flow designer integration hub process automation designer and these kinds of shiny things like specific spokes or maybe also topics like um instance data replication all kinds of workflowy or integrationy things so if you're interested in that be sure to follow us on the community so you will be notified when that starts and if there are no more questions i can see everybody hold their answers i am super happy about this i hope to see you at the next time which is in two weeks time same time in two weeks thursday same time slot awesome thank you so much so much yeah thank you so much everybody thank you andrew you

Channel: ServiceNow - Now Community

Views: 726

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: ServiceNow, ServiceNow Community, Quebec release, Now Platform

Id: oi6EynY6XQI

Length: 48min 52sec (2932 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 09 2021