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Top 5 Features in the Paris Release

This year’s Paris release is full of great new functionality and updates to the ServiceNow platform. Needless to say, there were a ton of features to cover, so instead of compiling an enormous list, I’ve put together this video of my personal top 5 features. I bet at least a couple of these will surprise you! Check out the video. Let me know in the comments below if you agree or if you feel there is a big feature that should have made the list. The official release notes can be found here: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/paris-release-notes/page/release-notes/family-release-notes.html

Reach App by NewRocket — Hackathon 2020

This year our NewRocket team had the opportunity to build an application for ServiceNow's Hackathon during Knowledge 2020. They had roughly 48 hours to build a functional app that fell within one of five specified categories. Choosing the Social Good category, our team developed a dynamic, personalized hub with relevant information and resources. Introducing Reach! People from all backgrounds are feeling overwhelmed trying to find reliable information and local resources under stressful conditions. With a new set of challenges, comes an opportunity for innovative solutions. Using ServiceNow to Help Others in Need The Reach application uses core platform capabilities, the CSM application, and personalization algorithms to make a difference locally, by creating a dynamic, personalized hub for information and resources. The Reach suggestion algorithm uses user preferences to feed content into the dynamic layout algorithm which embeds widgets into the proper location on the page - resulting in an attractive, personalized experience. This personalization complements and extends the concepts of campaigns and user criteria. The layouts themselves are easily configurable through modifications in the theme style sheet. This overcomes the static layout limitations of the current Service Portal framework. Community organizers can control content and moderate content contributed by the community. Because of the flexibility of the suggestion and layout algorithms, nearly any type of content can be easily surfaced throughout the site. To make the system even more adaptive, future versions could use ServiceNow’s machine learning to drive suggestions. Reach can be customized and used by cities of any size - whether they’re promoting summer events or resources for natural disasters. The personalized home pages can revolutionize the corporate intranet. Reach: The app that helps people reach information and one another, just when they need it most.

Top 5 Features in the Orlando Release

This year's Orlando release is full of great new functionality and updates to the ServiceNow platform. Needless to say, there were a ton of features to cover, so instead of compiling an enormous list, I've put together this video of my personal top 5 features. I bet at least a couple of these will surprise you! Check out the video. Let me know in the comments below if you agree or if you feel there is a big feature that should have made the list. The official release notes can be found here: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/orlando-release-notes/page/release-notes/family-release-notes.html

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?

Service Catalog Item Wizard in Service Portal

We've had a number of clients ask about structuring catalog item forms as more of a "wizard" that only renders one section at a time. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that I could use the GlideForm API to programmatically hide and show the different sections (containers). So over the past couple of weeks, I've been working on a new widget that simply interacts with the out-of-box catalog item widget, and uses the API's to add all of the wizard-like capabilities. I think it turned out pretty cool, it's fully themeable, and best of all, it does not require cloning of any widgets. I still have a few more features to add, and I'm also considering adding an accompanying library of Variable Sets that provide a more graphical UI than the out-of-box catalog variables. If all goes well, I may end up including the widget in our RocketFuel library of widgets, so if you're interested in adding some wizard-like capabilities to your portal, feel free to contact me and we can schedule a demo. I'd love to hear what you guys think in the comments below. Is this a useful widget? Does this improve the user experience of the service catalog item form?

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

SCSS Variables in Service Portal

Learn how to streamline your stylesheets in Service Portal by utilizing the full power of SCSS. In this tutorial, I'll walk you through how to use CSS Variables in your widgets, so that they can be overridden in the Theme and Portal records. This is very useful when creating highly reusable widgets, themes or in situations where you have multiple portals sharing a theme. SCSS is a subset of the Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets (Sass) specification and is an extension of CSS. Every valid CSS stylesheet is valid SCSS. SCSS supports the following: Variables Variables are a way to store information that you want to reuse throughout your stylesheet. You can store things like colors, font stacks, or any CSS value you think you want to reuse. SCSS uses the $ symbol to make something a variable. Nesting SCSS lets you nest your CSS selectors in a way that follows the same visual hierarchy of your HTML. Operators SCSS has a handful of standard math operators like +, -, *, /, and %. Mixins A mixin lets you make groups of CSS declarations that you want to reuse throughout your site. You can pass in values to make your mixin more flexible. Functions SASS supports the use of functions by providing some keyword arguments, which are specified using normal CSS function syntax. Quick note: The order of CSS that is shown in the video is based on the Kingston release. In Jakarta, the Theme variables were loaded before the Portal variables. For further reading, check out the following resources: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/helsinki-servicenow-platform/page/build/service-portal/concept/scss-primer.html https://sass-lang.com/guide https://devhints.io/sass https://www.tutorialspoint.com/sass/index.htm

Building a Better Service Portal: Lessons from the Field

Service Portal provides an incredible new opportunity to improve service experience in your organization. It offers a fresh and modern approach to development. But with anything new, there is always a learning curve and some growing pains. Fortunately, with the right knowledge, delivering a new service portal experience to your organization can be a smooth and rewarding journey. After helping dozens of organizations deliver Service Portals, we want to share what works and what doesn't. If you are starting your service portal journey, this session will help you take the right path.