ServiceNow Orlando – What’s Next?

Now that most of us are firmly ensconced in Madrid and/or New York, we’re just in time to start planning for Orlando. I took some time to look at a recently released overview of upcoming features to see what looks interesting.

Link to overview vid –

Here are some highlights:

Knowledge 20 – The video opens with some reminders to prepare for Knowledge 2020, which I’m unfortunately going to miss this year. Additionally, there’s an invitation to check out the Customer Success Center – A great resource to check how other implementers and customers of the platform may have done what you’re already trying to accomplish. Just a reminder that good developers copy and great developers paste.

Mobile Improvements – Next up was some discussion around mobile, including reskins and branding enhancements for your mobile app. This will be most relevant for implementations that boast a fully realized installable mobile thick client rather than those whose mobile experience is limited to the device’s browser.

Natural Language Processing and Virtual Agents – The platform continues to promote the ongoing development of its artificial intelligence features including Predictive Intelligence and Natural Language Understanding. Honestly, my historical blocker for experimenting with this is the limited PDI availability for experimentation. Basically, if you don’t work in a shop that has already purchased features like this, you’re not likely to get much exposure or experience on the backend. (I’d love to be wrong about this, so please call me out if I’m missing something.)

Analytics Q&A – Another limited feature cited which promises to look at user keyword search or other query data and provide automated reports. This is expected to help administrators better understand their customer’s behavior on the platform. To be released in Orlando with a limited set of customers with likely a wider release later in Paris.

Developer Portal – Speaking of, not like I think anyone who bothers to read what I write hasn’t, you should take the time to visit the (newly overhauled!) Developer Portal and spin up your Personal Development Instance. and tinker! I’ve always been a big fan of just spinning one up and experimenting. Highly rewarding for those that like to learn hands-on.

What’s most interesting to me and where am I going to be spending some additional time?

VS Code and Developer Experience – I probably haven’t been paying as much attention to this as others, but apparently Jelly and AngularJS are both viewed as legacy or soon to be legacy – Orlando introduces the ‘Now Experience’ for developers allowing them to build custom components using the VS Code editor + Now CLI for web components. There is no additional charge to implement this.

Taking my development career journey back to something involving Microsoft tools brings this full circle for me. So, it’s with no small bit of nostalgia that I’ll be taking a deeper look at the future of web development in ServiceNow.

I’d love to hear you thoughts about Orlando features you’re looking forward to or even any other experimentation you’re doing on the platform. As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them here or address them to john@benedettitech.com.