The Vancouver release of ServiceNow is now available and comes with many new features and updates. In this video I'll walk you through some of my favorite new platform features and give you a closer look at the ServiceNow Vancouver release. At the end of the video, we'll also share some exciting events where you can find NewRocket this fall. If you think there is a platform feature that I should have included, I'd love to hear from you in the comments below.
Upgrade Your Service Portal to ServiceNow Employee Center
Ready to take advantage of some of the new Employee Center features in the ServiceNow Utah release? Now is the time to upgrade your ServiceNow portal. Employee Center adds a lot of new features on top of the Service Portal framework, as well as a new and improved theme. In this video you will learn how to upgrade your Service Portal to Employee Center. I'll also compare some of the differences between Employee Center and Employee Center Pro, as well as showing some example portals built on top of Employee Center. Let's Meet If you're interested in learning more about how NewRocket can help you create an extraordinary user experience using Employee Center, I'm opening up some times in my calendar over the next few weeks. If you'd like to meet with me, please click the link below to schedule a meeting. Let's Meet Employee Center Lookbook If you'd like to see some additional examples of what an Employee Center portal can look like, NewRocket has created a Employee Center Lookbook that you can download for free. Download Lookbook
Top 5 Features in the ServiceNow Tokyo Release
The Tokyo release of ServiceNow is available for developer instances and comes with many new features and updates. In this video, I will walk you through my favorite new platform features and give you a closer look at the Tokyo release. Including updates for: ECMAScript 2021 Service Portal UI Builder App Engine Translated Notifications If you have any questions about how to best take advantage of the new capabilities of the Tokyo release, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team at NewRocket.
Employee Center
Last week I had the privilege of having ServiceNow Product Manager, Matt Metten, visit the San Diego office and talk about Employee Center and some of the new features introduced with the Rome release. Learn more about the capabilities of ServiceNow's Employee Center and Employee Center Pro in my latest video! Additional resources: Benefits of Employee Center Employee Center release notes Employee Center Pro and Employee Center with HR Service Delivery
Creating Custom Components
Last week I invited ServiceNow engineer, Darren Richards, to host a dev talk about creating custom components using the Now Experience UI Framework. If you’re interested in creating custom components, understanding ServiceNow’s Now Experience UI Framework, also sometimes known as Seismic, be sure to check out the video and let me know your thoughts below! Additional resources: Now Experience UI Framework Now Experience UI Builder Fundamentals Create Pages in UI Builder Build My First Now Experience UI Framework Custom Component UI Builder - Theming
How to Use GraphQL in ServiceNow & Service Portal
Overview GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs. GraphQL offers many benefits over REST API's, including: Fetching data across multiple sources from a single API call Returns only the data that is requested Supports validation and type checking Autogenerating API documentation In this video, I'll show you how to construct a sample GraphQL query to fetch data in ServiceNow and then how we can use GraphQL inside of a ServicePortal widget. GraphiQL To start, I would recommend you download GraphiQL, a GUI for editing and testing GraphQL queries and mutations. You can download it here: https://www.electronjs.org/apps/graphiql The GraphQL Endpoint is: https://instance-name.service-now.com/api/now/graphql Documentation In order to use the documentation and auto-completion, you'll need to enable the glide.graphql.introspection_enabled system property. Service Portal Widget You can download the widget update set here: It's compressed as a ZIP file, so remember to uncompress before uploading. Example GraphQL Query [crayon-656b4b3c19962441439145/] Further Reading https://graphql.org/ https://www.howtographql.com/ https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/paris-application-development/page/integrate/graphql/concept/scripted-graph-ql.html If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to comment below.
Custom Native Mobile Apps on ServiceNow
I get asked a lot about mobile and how to deliver branded mobile experiences on ServiceNow. For years the answer has been to use Service Portal since it's responsive and can be themed to function really well on mobile devices. This has worked quite well for many use-cases, but it still requires accessing through a browser or ServiceNow Classic, and it's still not the same experience that we've all come to expect from a native mobile app. 54% of employees expect their employers to provide mobile-optimized tools Source: https://research.servicenow.com/ Some of this has changed with the release of the Now Mobile app, but it is ServiceNow branded, lives in the app stores under ServiceNow's name, and requires entering of the instance name and credentials. It may be great for roled users, fulfillers, or users at least familiar with ServiceNow, but there are still many use-cases when using the Now Mobile app does not seem ideal. Consider, for example: Local governments or municipalities enabling anonymous citizens to report issues Universities using ServiceNow for managing student requests Product companies offering support via ServiceNow to its customers Enterprise organizations wanting to provide their employees with a tailored and branded experience In many of these cases, it seems the ideal scenario would be a dedicated app, in the app stores, with the organization's branding, and with the specific features for that target audience. This compelled us to explore what it would take to develop cross-platform mobile apps. Apps fully integrated with ServiceNow, with custom branding, feature specific UI's, and taking full advantage of the mobile capabilities such as geolocation, maps, push notifications, and camera features. We've chosen to build our current platform on React Native, as this allows for both iOS and Android apps with a single code base, but we're also exploring a version in Swift and Java. In the video above, you can see some of the example apps that we've been prototyping. The goal of the project has been to follow the same conventions as Now Mobile, leveraging the same APIs, ensuring a sustainable architecture. As of this writing, we have not yet released any publicly available apps into the store... but we are working with some of our early adopter customers on some innovative new mobile solutions. To learn more about these projects and our native mobile capabilities, please contact us or visit newrocket.com for more information. I would love to hear your comments or feedback below. What are some use-cases where a mobile app could really improve the user experience?
Creating Extraordinary Service Portals on ServiceNow
Check out our new Service Portal showcase video, featuring some of the 70+ portals we've designed and developed over the past 3 years. If you're interested in talking to us about your Service Portal project, you can book some time on our calendar here: https://calendly.com/newrocket/60min Or visit our website newrocket.com
Secrets of the Simple List Widget
By now, you've probably already used the Simple List widget. It is one of the default widgets on the OOB portal homepage. Similar to the Data Table widget, it is used to display a list of records from a table. However, there is a lot more to this widget than you might think. In this post, we will cover some of the secrets of the simple list widget. To give you a quick sample of its capabilities, there is an OOB demo page available at: https://yourinstance.service-now.com/sp?id=test_list Features Include: Display records from any table and filter Support for image fields Show primary and multiple secondary fields Limit the height with scrollable body Trigger an event Customizable actions To get started, let's first create a widget which shows the payload of the event that get's triggered when clicking a record. HTML: [crayon-656b4b3c1d068560970912/] Client Script: [crayon-656b4b3c1d070429904270/] Now if you place this widget on the same page as the Simple List widget, and if you don't specify a "Link to this page" in the Instance Options, you will see the JSON representing the record you clicked on. With this event, it'll be very easy to trigger a modal window or other user interaction, but for now let's proceed to adding some List Actions. LIST ACTIONS The Simple List widget supports adding additional actions for the records in the list. For some reason this related list is not visible on the form by default, so we'll need to add it: Pull up the Platform View of the Instance Record of the Simple List Click the hamburger icon > “Configure” > “Related Lists” Add "List Action -> Parent List" Now you should see the List Actions Related List When adding List Actions, you are able to include properties from the record in the URL field using double brackets: [crayon-656b4b3c1d072749726179/] However, there are a couple of unfortunate limitations: You cannot link to an external URL You cannot use URL prefixes such as “mailto:” or “tel:” Clicking a List Action does not trigger an event This limits the List Actions to just linking to other pages, but hopefully this will get fixed in an upcoming release. DEMO Here is a quick video demonstrating how to configure some List Actions on the Simple List widget. FURTHER READING https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/london-servicenow-platform/page/build/service-portal/concept/simple-list-widget.html
Founder of