Exploring ServiceNow Features and Applications

I believe the best way to understand what ServiceNow is and does and how it works is to just get in there and start using it. That's why in this video I'm going to answer the question, what is ServiceNow, through a live demonstration. I'll let the platform and its user interface speak for itself. A sort of hands-on welcome to ServiceNow. Later in the video I'll provide step-by-step instructions on how you can get your very own instance of ServiceNow. that you can use to get your hands on the platform and the user interface and continue to learn more about ServiceNow. So let's get to it. Okay let's start at the beginning by logging into our instance and to do that open up your favorite browser any of the major browsers will work. I'm just going to open up Google Chrome and then we will put in the URL to our instance that we want to connect to. Hit enter and that will take us to the ServiceNow login screen. Before we log in, let me explain just a few things about ServiceNow instances and that URL we just put in. When a company purchases a ServiceNow license, what they're really buying is a cloud-based platform and suite of applications designed to provide IT services. It's like purchasing a cloud-based IT department. The platform takes care of all the compute resources, scaling, security, redundancy, failover, the database, and the data backups. This allows the company to focus on what it does best, which is its business and its customers. The platform also includes an impressive suite of applications that come out of box to provide common IT services. We'll take a look at those apps in just a bit. To access the ServiceNow platform, a company is given one or more URLs that point to their ServiceNow. instances. An instance is a full stack deployment of the platform. In most cases a company will request multiple instances, one for production, test, and development, for example. Simply hit the URL with your favorite browser like we just did and you're ready to log in and start using the system. To log in you'll need to have a user account created on the instance. Users are then granted roles in the platform to manage their privileges, what they can and cannot see and do. I'm logging in with an admin role which will allow me to see and do pretty much everything. Now let's learn to navigate applications and interface. So what we see here is what ServiceNow calls their next experience user interface. This is the primary UI for the applications and for the platform. This is where you'll spend most of your time working and this is where we'll spend our time in this. demonstration. Just so you know though there are other UIs available to access your platforms. There are mobile applications both for Android and Apple and then there's also a service portal, employee center, other UIs that are geared for specific types of users. But this is where the next experience is where you spend most of your time. And let's sort of get ourselves familiar with what we have here. Starting at the top with a navigation bar and I'm just going to quickly run through these. Working my way from right to left. First you've got your user menu, pretty common. You can see who you're logged in and you can set up any user specific configuration or preferences that you want to sort of tailor the way you want the UI to work for yourself. Show notifications, you can see any notifications that you have. You can set up notifications within the platform and tell the platform how and when. You want to be notified as certain events and tasks are being completed within the platform. The contextual help is nice. Depending on where you're at in the platform, you will see a list of knowledge-based articles or help tools that you can use to help figure out how to solve the problem that you may be facing. The application scope picker, this is an administrator or developer type thing. Most people won't see this. You can think of a scope as... like a container around an application that's then used to limit who can get in and who can get outside of that container. And then it's also used as you want to deploy your applications up to the different platforms. The global search is great. You can enter pretty much anything into the search. It's going to search the entirety of the platform to find and give you a list of results related to what you're looking for. So, for example, you can search a user's name to quickly access. potentially that user's account. You can search for an incident number, for example, to quickly locate and pull up an incident. It's a pretty handy search that they have there. This next section here is what they call their contextual app pill. It's just always there and it will sort of give you a textual representation of where you are within the platform. The star you'll get familiar with anytime you want to create a favorite for one of the screens that you're on you can click the star and it will add that to your favorites list so you can very quickly then get back to that page maybe the next day or the next time you log in. The admin menu, not going to spend time here. Nothing much there other than some specific tools for admins and I see that because I logged in as an admin. Workspaces. Workspaces are pretty cool. You can think of a workspace as a single screen that's got several different widgets on it that are designed and built specifically for a certain type of work that you may be doing. So for example, there are Workspaces. There's a workspace for the CMDB, for example. You'll be able to go in and you'll be able to see kind of a picture on a single screen of what's going on within the CMDB. We'll talk more about workspaces as we continue through. History. The application is keeping track of everything you're doing when you're moving around within it. And it keeps a list of the last 30 screens or 30 places that you've been. So you can very quickly go to your history and get back to something that you were on previously. Favorites, as I mentioned, anytime you're in the application, you have the ability to mark a certain screen or certain application module as a favorite that will then be added to your favorite lists to allow you easy access to get back. And then the all-powerful All Menu. And this is the menu where all of the applications that come with ServiceNow, whether they're out-of-box or whether they're custom applications that you've developed on your own, you can add those to the All Menu. And then you can go into the applications via the all application navigator here and we will spend most of our time looking through this list of applications. Just quickly to understand the breadth of the application offerings that ServiceNow provides, they divide their applications into what they call workflows. There are four primary workflows targeted for the specific needs of the groups. IT workflows, for example. The platform comes with 79 applications that support internal IT functions. There are 43 applications that they've grouped together in what they call employee workflows specific to the needs of employees. 93 applications that are built to support functions related to customers. Those are called customer workflows. And then 23 applications that they call creator workflows that will help you and your developers. enhance the application and build additional workflows and application to support the needs of your specific business. Each of those four workflows are then subdivided more narrowly into groups of applications. And you can see here, I'm not going to go through all of these, but you can see the breadth and the depth of the application offerings that exist within each of the four primary workflows within ServiceNow. And all of these applications... are accessible from the all menu that we just talked about. And I'll scroll through some of those. We won't be able to go into each of those in detail, naturally. There's too many to do that. But let's take a look at just a few of those. As you can see, there really is an amazingly impressive list of applications that come with ServiceNow out of the box. And all of those are accessible from this all menu here. I'm just going to scroll through these. and let you get your eyes on some of these. Self-service, the way this works is you can go into any one of these applications and expand and then see the specific modules that exist within that application. So all these offerings are available within the self-service application. There's the app engine which allows you to, it has the tools that allows you to create and customize applications. There's the employee center for tasks that employees would need. Integration hub which allows you to Build and use tools that import data in from your legacy systems, for example. Predictive intelligence, process automation. There's the Service Desk application suite. A lot of people know ServiceNow for their functionality related to managing incidents, problems, and changes. Those applications are here. There's the CMDB. We'll spend some time talking about the configuration management database that's built within ServiceNow. Service Catalog. Knowledge articles that you can build to help your users. Figure out and understand processes and how to get tasks completed. Asset management, inventory management, contract management. Lots of reporting that's available within the platform. Artificial intelligence modules that allow you to automate things. There's tools for that. There's your automated test framework. I haven't spent much time talking, but if you don't find an application that serves your needs, The platform is fully supporting the ability to design and develop your own applications right on the platform. Let's see, what else do we have? Just tons and tons of applications. There's the user administration application workflow. And as I said, if you need an application and you can't find it here out of the box, you can do one of two things. You can go to the ServiceNow store, which is kind of like what you'd use to your Apple store or your... your Google store and you can see a list extremely large list of applications that are available to add to your platform some of these are for purchase some of those some of these you can just add but again just an extensive list of IT service applications that you can add to the platform to get your work done it really is an IT department in the cloud And now just a quick note on how to work with all of these applications. As you can see, there's no way one person can understand the entirety of ServiceNow and all that it does and all of its applications. And I'm speaking now more to the developer and the IT folks in the audience, but there is a whole set of certification options that are available, whether you're wanting to enhance your career or whether you're a company that needs to get your people trained on these. on these tools and applications that are part of ServiceNow. Here are the five main groupings for the certifications that are available. They offer all the training you need, certification testing centers that you can go and get certified. But I was going to just show you the implementer one. It is the certification that is specific to certain applications. So we just scroll through the list of applications. You can come in and you can choose to get yourself certified. in any one of these application areas that cover all of the modules that would be related to that specific application function. So tons of applications that come with the platform. And now we'll look into diving into some of those and getting a little more familiar with how the applications themselves work within ServiceNow. As you begin working in the different applications within ServiceNow, you're going to find yourself spending a lot of time working with lists and forms. A list is a display of multiple records from a database table or database tables, and a form is a display of a single record from a database table, and is used then to see the details of that specific record and then maybe make modifications to that. I'm going to show you how lists and forms work. by going into the incidents application. So I'm going to go back from our home page and I'm going to go to our all menu and I'm going to I could scroll down and find the incident application by searching. I can also use the filter here to pull up any applications that have incident menu item. Here's the incident application right here and you can see I can create a new incident. I can look at different group filters of incidents but I'm just going to go to the all menu for the incidents application that's going to pull up. the list view of all of the incidents that are currently out there in this instance of ServiceNow. Starting at the top bar here, first of all, the contextual pill here shows me that I'm on the incidents page here. I could favorite that here if I wanted to. It looks like I already have. It shows me here the table that I'm looking at. This is the incidents table. Starts with a list control menu here. This is a menu item or menu, a list of menu items that applied to the entirety of this list. So the view menu item, you can create multiple views of a list. So for example, in this case, incident has several views created and these are tailored views specific to potentially the way you're accessing mobile or a particular group that needs to see a list a certain way. Maybe certain attributes are important to some groups and not others. So you can create different views of lists that then can be pulled up to help boost the productivity of the user so that things are set the way that they need them to be set. Lots of ways to apply filters to the list. I will show you some of those. I can do grouping by, I can group the list items by any of the fields within the table. I can choose the chunks in which I want the list to show, whether I want 10 rows per page or 50 or 100 rows per page. I can refresh the list from here and then I can create a favorite of this list view, add it to my favorites and it allows me to quickly get back to... that list. Just to the right of the list controls menu they have the what they call the condition builder. It looks like a filter here. This allows you to build fairly sophisticated filters and apply those to your list to help get to the data that you're interested in. So for example I can choose a field I'm going to say state where the state is new and we'll build an AND condition here so you can can combine these conditions with AND or OR statements and we'll say the category is software. You can type in to filter that down category is software. You could then save this. You could add a sort. I'm just going to go ahead and run it and apply that filter to the list. So you can see now my list is filtered out to only include things where the state is new and the category is software. I also want to point out the breadcrumb for these list views. The breadcrumb on a list view is actually a listing of the filters that are applied to the view. So we can see here we start with all on the far left. That would be all the incidents. And then we apply to filter where state equal new and category equal software. You can go through and you can manipulate your filter from any point. So if I want to remove the category equal software part, I can just click on the greater than there. And now I just have all. and state is new so I'm looking at all incidents where the state is new if I want to get back to all incidents just click back to the all so their bread crumbs are very very handy in understanding what you're seeing in the list and then also how you can manipulate through the filters to get back and forth to different levels of detail another way to in to filter is this simple search box up here so again they give us a drop-down list of the displayed fields that we have currently displayed and again I can say where state is new very quick quickly create a filter that way again here's my menu my my breadcrumb all and state is new I'm gonna go back to all continuing over to the right we let's take a look at the personal is a personalized list this allows you to personalize for yourself the way that this list Appears on your screen so this will not impact anyone else This is not like a saved view that some other person can come in and look at this is just specific to the logged in User and if you click it it allows you to go in and choose which fields you want to display When you're looking at a list of incidents You can move the order of those fields you can take fields off and add fields on and then there are some other Checkbox type options you can set down here to customize or personalize the way that you want the list to display Next to that we have the action on selected rows menu. If you notice the very first column in the list is simply a check mark. You can check box, you can select all the rows or you can come in and you can individually select any rows that you want to take some bulk action on. Select the rows, you can come up to the actions on all selected rows drop down and you can choose for example to archive or delete or do all sorts of things to groups of items. that you have selected and then finally on the across the top here the new button which will open up the incident form and actually allow you to create a new incident record so let's go back to the list and continue down the screen quickly to understand more of what we see on list view let's continue down our list view here and let's take a look at the column heading row here First thing you'll notice is this magnifying glass, which is an additional way to add filters. It gives you a search box under each column. So then you can go to a specific column, state, for example, and you can apply a filter that way. And you can do multiple. So state equal new, and let's say category equals software. There we are, back to where we're showing state equal new and category equals software again. building our breadcrumbs and allowing us to very quickly go back to see all of our list. Each column heading is a sort. Button so click it once sorts one way click it again. It sorts the other way each column also has a column context Menu or column options menu so for example here I'll go to the state column and I'll click that and lots of things that you can do Based upon this specific column you're looking at you can sort you can show a visual task board more on that later You can group for example by that column we can group this list by state we can see the different values that exist for state and how many incidents land within each one. We can then expand and collapse those. You can see that the state column has got the group by, the little folder there. I'm going to ungroup now to get back to our full list. So lots of things in the column context menu. I could show, for example, a pie chart based upon the state of the incidents. that I have in my list. So it's going to break down the incidents by the state. And there's lots of additional tools here you can use to build more sophisticated reports to meet the needs of getting at the data that you're interested in. Let's see what else do we have here for the context menu. Lots of configuration options here. You can import data into your list or your table. You can export data from your table if you need to share that or get it into an Excel spreadsheet or something like that. Some group options here you can always import and export any of the entities within ServiceNow via XML. So and then then there's one more level of context menu and that is the actual field or row context menu. So if I come down here to the state and I right click lots of menu items here. specific to the field or record that I'm looking at. So for example, show matching is just going to set a filter to show me only those states that are new. All, go back and show all here. You can also filter out. So if I want to see anything but things with a new state, I can tell the system to filter out new. So now I have a breadcrumb that says all in the states not equal to new. or this dates equal to null. So lots of things you can do from these list views, assign tags, you can copy the sysid of the record that you're on. We'll learn about sysids when we start talking a little bit more about the database. So lots of things. At the bottom, I don't know if you can see this on your screen or not, but here is the pagination tools, the ability to traverse through the chunks of records that you have to see everything that you need. So That's it, a real quick overview of how lists work. The great news is that no matter what kind of list you're looking at, whether you're looking at a list of tasks, a list of incidents, a list of tables, a list of users, a list of computers, all the lists work the same. So everything that I just covered in this brief little demonstration here applies to any of the lists that you look at across the board and service now. So now we're going to take a look at forms. So looking at not lists of records, but the details of a specific record and the tools that we have available to us when we're looking at a specific record to make modifications and changes. So let's take a look at that next. Where lists show multiple records from a table, a form shows a single record from a table. So let's take a look at forms. And to do that, I'm going to change the type of list we're looking at here just to mix things up a bit. I'm going to go back to my All menu, and this time let's take a look at the user. a list of user records. So I'm going to type user in my application navigator filter. I'm going to come down to the user administration application, and I'm going to say I want to see a list of users. So here you can see this list looks very much like the list of incidents except now it's showing us that we're looking at the user table. I'm going to go ahead into my field level filter builder here, and I'm going to pull up my user record. So I'm going to search under name. for Jeff Teese and I can see I've applied the filter where name starts with Jeff Teese and I'm going to go ahead now and open up my record from the list to display a form. So this is a form displays a single record from a table you can see it includes the many of the attributes from the table listed here. Another thing form forms can display are sections and related lists to the entry that we're looking at. So for example, if I scroll down here, this entry for Jeff's user record also has lists related to it. I could see, for example, the roles that are associated with my user record, the groups that are associated with my user record. other things. So as you're looking at these things, depending upon your capabilities and your privileges within the system, what roles you've been assigned and what groups you're a member of, you will have the ability to change the values in these. And then you can click the update button to make changes. Like with the list view, there is a form context menu here that allows you to do certain things specific to the record you're looking at. I can save the record from here. I can insert a new record into the user table. I can insert and stay, which is a nice method that ServiceNow provides of creating a copy of a record and then using it sort of as a template to build and create another record. So I can do that. Lots of configuration options here. Again, I can export the record that I'm looking at. Just like with lists, you can build multiple views for a form. For a user for example there are different views that can be built Depending upon who's actually coming in and viewing the user record they may want to see different attributes in different order They may want to include different related lists so you can create views save those and then Depending on the type of user they can come and see the form The way that works best for them continuing across the header bar here you can make you can include attachments to your record And you can personalize the form just like you can personalize the list to choose which fields you want to display specific to you, the logged in user. It doesn't impact anyone else. I can update the record from here. And then there can be one or more buttons here that provide functionality depending upon the type of record that you're looking at. Here we're looking at a user record, so we have the ability to set the password. Scrolling down here, there's the related links here. Depending on the type of the field, you can see you have different tools available to view and change the data that's there. For example, true-false fields are displayed as checkboxes. Fields that reference other tables, like department here, always display this magnifying glass that you can use to look up in a separate table. The department table, for example. which department you want to associate this user to. You can also open the record from a field that is pulled from a related table. So in this case, the finance record is in the department table. I can get a preview of that record or I could fully open that record here, which would take me to another form showing me the finance record that this record is related to. So Lots of things here and then once you get down to the list again, you've got again some of your common list functions that we've already talked about. The ability to select multiple rows, the ability to take actions on rows, the ability to customize the related list to view the columns that you're interested in that would be specific to you. So forms in ServiceNow show a specific record allow you to view the record in whatever manner you want from different views. You can export the records and then you can make changes to the record depending upon the roles that you have set for your user profile in the system. to make updates and changes to records as you need to. I know we're getting long here just a bit on the video, but there are just a couple more things I want to show you in ServiceNow. One of those being the knowledge application in ServiceNow. So I'm going to go to my all menu, I'm just going to type in knowledge, and I'm going to pull up the knowledge homepage. What knowledge, the knowledge bases in ServiceNow are built. as libraries of important articles or documentation that you want to create and publish so that your users of all types can get access to help and information to help them better understand how to solve problems within the application. So knowledge articles or the library of knowledge are divided into what they call knowledge bases. You can see here in my little example system here, I've only got two knowledge bases and I've got zero articles in one and I've got 30 articles. 31 articles in the IT Knowledge Base. If you've got the appropriate permissions, you can create as many of these Knowledge Bases as you want to build a library of useful information that help people learn things and collaborate with each other. So I'm just going to go into the IT Knowledge Base and you can see that a Knowledge Base is then further divided and categorized into categories. So for example, our IT Knowledge Base has these categories available. Once you get into a category, it's there that the actual articles are associated and accessible. So, for example, I'm going to go into the devices category of the IT knowledge base, and I can see that I've got a set of articles specific to Apple. So, in this case, they're just one article, how to configure VPN for Apple devices. I can also use the search up here to search across all of the knowledge bases. And I'm just going to put in Apple here. And I will find that there it is, how to configure VPN for Apple devices. It searches through all of the knowledge articles for the mention of Apple anywhere within the article. So you can use that search to customize and pretty quickly drill into the articles to find the information that you're looking for. So I'm going to go ahead and go into this article we have on how to configure VPN for Apple devices. And you can see a nice article here written by, at the bottom, Wayne Webb. that shows me the process for doing this particular activity. I have the ability from here to flag this article. If, for example, there's something inappropriate in the article or something incorrect in the article, I can flag it here, which will then get that to a knowledge administrator to take a look at and fix for me. I can also create an incident from here related to this knowledge article that would then put that on a list, a task list for someone to come in and make maybe a correction. If I have access I have the ability to edit the article from here. Standard article viewing things like I can give the article a rating. I'll be able to see the ratings of the articles and those will move up and down on lists accordingly. Scroll through the article I can see like I said who wrote it. I can mark the article as helpful or not helpful. I can also leave a comment about the article to begin a collaborative discussion. about whatever topic it is that the article relates to. So back to the home. And so you can see the ability to create an extensive library of useful, helpful information that the organization shares to get people the things they need as quickly as possible to be more productive. Let's wrap up this demonstration by talking just a bit about the ServiceNow database. And to do that, I am going to navigate. to the system definition application and the tables module and here you can see a list of all of the database tables that exist within the database nearly 5 000 of them and i show you this just to make the point that the entirety of the ServiceNow platform is working against a single database everything i've demonstrated in this video all the applications in every it service is working against a single, common, enterprise-wide source of truth. And with the needed permissions, you can go into any of these out-of-the-box tables and make changes. You can see the fields that exist for each table and their data types, whether they reference or extend other tables. You can also create new tables to supplement what's already there, or build new custom applications as needed. And the core of the database is built around the CMDB or configuration management database. You can think of that, the CMDB, as a set of database tables and related processes that are designed specifically to make sure that your company knows what IT infrastructure, whether it's software or hardware or other things, is running and what services or what value each of them are providing. I've created a separate video introducing the ServiceNow CMDB and would point you to that resource for additional information. And with that, I think we should probably end the demonstration, although I hate to. I've enjoyed going through kind of an overview here for you, but there's so much more that I would love to talk to you about. But hopefully this has given you sort of a broad picture of what ServiceNow is, what ServiceNow does, how it works. And it piques your interest a bit to maybe dig in and continue to learn more I've got lots of other videos on my youtube channel ServiceNowSimple I would suggest that maybe you go to the channel and you can go into some of these some of my other videos that go into more detail about some of the things that we've talked about and Also provide introductions to some of the things that we haven't covered I do want to mention that one of the cool things that ServiceNow offers is the ability for anyone that's interested to join into their ServiceNow Developer Program. And what's awesome about that is it gives you then the ability to apply for and get your very own personal developer instance of ServiceNow that you can use to get your hands on the platform and the UI and dig in and continue to learn more. In fact, everything that I've demonstrated in this video was done on my personal developer instance of ServiceNow. So what I'm going to do... I've created a separate video that will walk you through the process of applying for and getting your very own personal developer instance I'm going to link that video right here so that you can then go off if you'd like to if you're interested and get your hands on the platform yourself and continue to learn more as always thank you so much for watching the video I've enjoyed spending this time with you I love your feedback I would appreciate your feedback let me know how the video was If I was in too much detail some places or maybe skimmed too much in others and I'll use that feedback as I continue to create more videos sharing interesting things about ServiceNow, so again, thank you for joining Please hit subscribe if you're interested in subscribing to the channel so you can get updates as I release new videos

that you can use to get your hands on the platform and the user interface and continue to learn more about ServiceNow. So let's get to it. Okay let's start at the beginning by logging into our instance and to do that open up your favorite browser any of the major browsers will work.

I'm just going to open up Google Chrome and then we will put in the URL to our instance that we want to connect to. Hit enter and that will take us to the ServiceNow login screen. Before we log in, let me explain just a few things about ServiceNow instances and that URL we just put in. When a company purchases a ServiceNow license, what they're really buying is a cloud-based platform and suite of applications designed to provide IT services.

It's like purchasing a cloud-based IT department. The platform takes care of all the compute resources, scaling, security, redundancy, failover, the database, and the data backups. This allows the company to focus on what it does best, which is its business and its customers.

The platform also includes an impressive suite of applications that come out of box to provide common IT services. We'll take a look at those apps in just a bit. To access the ServiceNow platform, a company is given one or more URLs that point to their ServiceNow. instances.

An instance is a full stack deployment of the platform. In most cases a company will request multiple instances, one for production, test, and development, for example. Simply hit the URL with your favorite browser like we just did and you're ready to log in and start using the system.

To log in you'll need to have a user account created on the instance. Users are then granted roles in the platform to manage their privileges, what they can and cannot see and do. I'm logging in with an admin role which will allow me to see and do pretty much everything. Now let's learn to navigate applications and interface. So what we see here is what ServiceNow calls their next experience user interface.

This is the primary UI for the applications and for the platform. This is where you'll spend most of your time working and this is where we'll spend our time in this. demonstration.

Just so you know though there are other UIs available to access your platforms. There are mobile applications both for Android and Apple and then there's also a service portal, employee center, other UIs that are geared for specific types of users. But this is where the next experience is where you spend most of your time. And let's sort of get ourselves familiar with what we have here.

Starting at the top with a navigation bar and I'm just going to quickly run through these. Working my way from right to left. First you've got your user menu, pretty common. You can see who you're logged in and you can set up any user specific configuration or preferences that you want to sort of tailor the way you want the UI to work for yourself.

Show notifications, you can see any notifications that you have. You can set up notifications within the platform and tell the platform how and when. You want to be notified as certain events and tasks are being completed within the platform. The contextual help is nice. Depending on where you're at in the platform, you will see a list of knowledge-based articles or help tools that you can use to help figure out how to solve the problem that you may be facing.

The application scope picker, this is an administrator or developer type thing. Most people won't see this. You can think of a scope as... like a container around an application that's then used to limit who can get in and who can get outside of that container. And then it's also used as you want to deploy your applications up to the different platforms.

The global search is great. You can enter pretty much anything into the search. It's going to search the entirety of the platform to find and give you a list of results related to what you're looking for. So, for example, you can search a user's name to quickly access.

potentially that user's account. You can search for an incident number, for example, to quickly locate and pull up an incident. It's a pretty handy search that they have there.

This next section here is what they call their contextual app pill. It's just always there and it will sort of give you a textual representation of where you are within the platform. The star you'll get familiar with anytime you want to create a favorite for one of the screens that you're on you can click the star and it will add that to your favorites list so you can very quickly then get back to that page maybe the next day or the next time you log in.

The admin menu, not going to spend time here. Nothing much there other than some specific tools for admins and I see that because I logged in as an admin. Workspaces. Workspaces are pretty cool.

You can think of a workspace as a single screen that's got several different widgets on it that are designed and built specifically for a certain type of work that you may be doing. So for example, there are Workspaces. There's a workspace for the CMDB, for example. You'll be able to go in and you'll be able to see kind of a picture on a single screen of what's going on within the CMDB. We'll talk more about workspaces as we continue through.

History. The application is keeping track of everything you're doing when you're moving around within it. And it keeps a list of the last 30 screens or 30 places that you've been.

So you can very quickly go to your history and get back to something that you were on previously. Favorites, as I mentioned, anytime you're in the application, you have the ability to mark a certain screen or certain application module as a favorite that will then be added to your favorite lists to allow you easy access to get back. And then the all-powerful All Menu. And this is the menu where all of the applications that come with ServiceNow, whether they're out-of-box or whether they're custom applications that you've developed on your own, you can add those to the All Menu. And then you can go into the applications via the all application navigator here and we will spend most of our time looking through this list of applications.

Just quickly to understand the breadth of the application offerings that ServiceNow provides, they divide their applications into what they call workflows. There are four primary workflows targeted for the specific needs of the groups. IT workflows, for example. The platform comes with 79 applications that support internal IT functions. There are 43 applications that they've grouped together in what they call employee workflows specific to the needs of employees.

93 applications that are built to support functions related to customers. Those are called customer workflows. And then 23 applications that they call creator workflows that will help you and your developers. enhance the application and build additional workflows and application to support the needs of your specific business.

Each of those four workflows are then subdivided more narrowly into groups of applications. And you can see here, I'm not going to go through all of these, but you can see the breadth and the depth of the application offerings that exist within each of the four primary workflows within ServiceNow. And all of these applications...

are accessible from the all menu that we just talked about. And I'll scroll through some of those. We won't be able to go into each of those in detail, naturally.

There's too many to do that. But let's take a look at just a few of those. As you can see, there really is an amazingly impressive list of applications that come with ServiceNow out of the box. And all of those are accessible from this all menu here. I'm just going to scroll through these.

and let you get your eyes on some of these. Self-service, the way this works is you can go into any one of these applications and expand and then see the specific modules that exist within that application. So all these offerings are available within the self-service application.

There's the app engine which allows you to, it has the tools that allows you to create and customize applications. There's the employee center for tasks that employees would need. Integration hub which allows you to Build and use tools that import data in from your legacy systems, for example.

Predictive intelligence, process automation. There's the Service Desk application suite. A lot of people know ServiceNow for their functionality related to managing incidents, problems, and changes. Those applications are here.

There's the CMDB. We'll spend some time talking about the configuration management database that's built within ServiceNow. Service Catalog.

Knowledge articles that you can build to help your users. Figure out and understand processes and how to get tasks completed. Asset management, inventory management, contract management. Lots of reporting that's available within the platform.

Artificial intelligence modules that allow you to automate things. There's tools for that. There's your automated test framework. I haven't spent much time talking, but if you don't find an application that serves your needs, The platform is fully supporting the ability to design and develop your own applications right on the platform. Let's see, what else do we have?

Just tons and tons of applications. There's the user administration application workflow. And as I said, if you need an application and you can't find it here out of the box, you can do one of two things.

You can go to the ServiceNow store, which is kind of like what you'd use to your Apple store or your... your Google store and you can see a list extremely large list of applications that are available to add to your platform some of these are for purchase some of those some of these you can just add but again just an extensive list of IT service applications that you can add to the platform to get your work done it really is an IT department in the cloud And now just a quick note on how to work with all of these applications. As you can see, there's no way one person can understand the entirety of ServiceNow and all that it does and all of its applications. And I'm speaking now more to the developer and the IT folks in the audience, but there is a whole set of certification options that are available, whether you're wanting to enhance your career or whether you're a company that needs to get your people trained on these. on these tools and applications that are part of ServiceNow.

Here are the five main groupings for the certifications that are available. They offer all the training you need, certification testing centers that you can go and get certified. But I was going to just show you the implementer one. It is the certification that is specific to certain applications. So we just scroll through the list of applications.

You can come in and you can choose to get yourself certified. in any one of these application areas that cover all of the modules that would be related to that specific application function. So tons of applications that come with the platform.

And now we'll look into diving into some of those and getting a little more familiar with how the applications themselves work within ServiceNow. As you begin working in the different applications within ServiceNow, you're going to find yourself spending a lot of time working with lists and forms. A list is a display of multiple records from a database table or database tables, and a form is a display of a single record from a database table, and is used then to see the details of that specific record and then maybe make modifications to that. I'm going to show you how lists and forms work. by going into the incidents application.

So I'm going to go back from our home page and I'm going to go to our all menu and I'm going to I could scroll down and find the incident application by searching. I can also use the filter here to pull up any applications that have incident menu item. Here's the incident application right here and you can see I can create a new incident. I can look at different group filters of incidents but I'm just going to go to the all menu for the incidents application that's going to pull up.

the list view of all of the incidents that are currently out there in this instance of ServiceNow. Starting at the top bar here, first of all, the contextual pill here shows me that I'm on the incidents page here. I could favorite that here if I wanted to.

It looks like I already have. It shows me here the table that I'm looking at. This is the incidents table. Starts with a list control menu here.

This is a menu item or menu, a list of menu items that applied to the entirety of this list. So the view menu item, you can create multiple views of a list. So for example, in this case, incident has several views created and these are tailored views specific to potentially the way you're accessing mobile or a particular group that needs to see a list a certain way.

Maybe certain attributes are important to some groups and not others. So you can create different views of lists that then can be pulled up to help boost the productivity of the user so that things are set the way that they need them to be set. Lots of ways to apply filters to the list.

I will show you some of those. I can do grouping by, I can group the list items by any of the fields within the table. I can choose the chunks in which I want the list to show, whether I want 10 rows per page or 50 or 100 rows per page.

I can refresh the list from here and then I can create a favorite of this list view, add it to my favorites and it allows me to quickly get back to... that list. Just to the right of the list controls menu they have the what they call the condition builder. It looks like a filter here. This allows you to build fairly sophisticated filters and apply those to your list to help get to the data that you're interested in.

So for example I can choose a field I'm going to say state where the state is new and we'll build an AND condition here so you can can combine these conditions with AND or OR statements and we'll say the category is software. You can type in to filter that down category is software. You could then save this. You could add a sort.

I'm just going to go ahead and run it and apply that filter to the list. So you can see now my list is filtered out to only include things where the state is new and the category is software. I also want to point out the breadcrumb for these list views. The breadcrumb on a list view is actually a listing of the filters that are applied to the view. So we can see here we start with all on the far left.

That would be all the incidents. And then we apply to filter where state equal new and category equal software. You can go through and you can manipulate your filter from any point. So if I want to remove the category equal software part, I can just click on the greater than there. And now I just have all.

and state is new so I'm looking at all incidents where the state is new if I want to get back to all incidents just click back to the all so their bread crumbs are very very handy in understanding what you're seeing in the list and then also how you can manipulate through the filters to get back and forth to different levels of detail another way to in to filter is this simple search box up here so again they give us a drop-down list of the displayed fields that we have currently displayed and again I can say where state is new very quick quickly create a filter that way again here's my menu my my breadcrumb all and state is new I'm gonna go back to all continuing over to the right we let's take a look at the personal is a personalized list this allows you to personalize for yourself the way that this list Appears on your screen so this will not impact anyone else This is not like a saved view that some other person can come in and look at this is just specific to the logged in User and if you click it it allows you to go in and choose which fields you want to display When you're looking at a list of incidents You can move the order of those fields you can take fields off and add fields on and then there are some other Checkbox type options you can set down here to customize or personalize the way that you want the list to display Next to that we have the action on selected rows menu. If you notice the very first column in the list is simply a check mark. You can check box, you can select all the rows or you can come in and you can individually select any rows that you want to take some bulk action on. Select the rows, you can come up to the actions on all selected rows drop down and you can choose for example to archive or delete or do all sorts of things to groups of items. that you have selected and then finally on the across the top here the new button which will open up the incident form and actually allow you to create a new incident record so let's go back to the list and continue down the screen quickly to understand more of what we see on list view let's continue down our list view here and let's take a look at the column heading row here First thing you'll notice is this magnifying glass, which is an additional way to add filters.

It gives you a search box under each column. So then you can go to a specific column, state, for example, and you can apply a filter that way. And you can do multiple.

So state equal new, and let's say category equals software. There we are, back to where we're showing state equal new and category equals software again. building our breadcrumbs and allowing us to very quickly go back to see all of our list.

Each column heading is a sort. Button so click it once sorts one way click it again. It sorts the other way each column also has a column context Menu or column options menu so for example here I'll go to the state column and I'll click that and lots of things that you can do Based upon this specific column you're looking at you can sort you can show a visual task board more on that later You can group for example by that column we can group this list by state we can see the different values that exist for state and how many incidents land within each one.

We can then expand and collapse those. You can see that the state column has got the group by, the little folder there. I'm going to ungroup now to get back to our full list.

So lots of things in the column context menu. I could show, for example, a pie chart based upon the state of the incidents. that I have in my list.

So it's going to break down the incidents by the state. And there's lots of additional tools here you can use to build more sophisticated reports to meet the needs of getting at the data that you're interested in. Let's see what else do we have here for the context menu.

Lots of configuration options here. You can import data into your list or your table. You can export data from your table if you need to share that or get it into an Excel spreadsheet or something like that. Some group options here you can always import and export any of the entities within ServiceNow via XML.

So and then then there's one more level of context menu and that is the actual field or row context menu. So if I come down here to the state and I right click lots of menu items here. specific to the field or record that I'm looking at.

So for example, show matching is just going to set a filter to show me only those states that are new. All, go back and show all here. You can also filter out. So if I want to see anything but things with a new state, I can tell the system to filter out new.

So now I have a breadcrumb that says all in the states not equal to new. or this dates equal to null. So lots of things you can do from these list views, assign tags, you can copy the sysid of the record that you're on. We'll learn about sysids when we start talking a little bit more about the database.

So lots of things. At the bottom, I don't know if you can see this on your screen or not, but here is the pagination tools, the ability to traverse through the chunks of records that you have to see everything that you need. So That's it, a real quick overview of how lists work.

The great news is that no matter what kind of list you're looking at, whether you're looking at a list of tasks, a list of incidents, a list of tables, a list of users, a list of computers, all the lists work the same. So everything that I just covered in this brief little demonstration here applies to any of the lists that you look at across the board and service now. So now we're going to take a look at forms. So looking at not lists of records, but the details of a specific record and the tools that we have available to us when we're looking at a specific record to make modifications and changes.

So let's take a look at that next. Where lists show multiple records from a table, a form shows a single record from a table. So let's take a look at forms. And to do that, I'm going to change the type of list we're looking at here just to mix things up a bit.

I'm going to go back to my All menu, and this time let's take a look at the user. a list of user records. So I'm going to type user in my application navigator filter. I'm going to come down to the user administration application, and I'm going to say I want to see a list of users.

So here you can see this list looks very much like the list of incidents except now it's showing us that we're looking at the user table. I'm going to go ahead into my field level filter builder here, and I'm going to pull up my user record. So I'm going to search under name.

for Jeff Teese and I can see I've applied the filter where name starts with Jeff Teese and I'm going to go ahead now and open up my record from the list to display a form. So this is a form displays a single record from a table you can see it includes the many of the attributes from the table listed here. Another thing form forms can display are sections and related lists to the entry that we're looking at.

So for example, if I scroll down here, this entry for Jeff's user record also has lists related to it. I could see, for example, the roles that are associated with my user record, the groups that are associated with my user record. other things.

So as you're looking at these things, depending upon your capabilities and your privileges within the system, what roles you've been assigned and what groups you're a member of, you will have the ability to change the values in these. And then you can click the update button to make changes. Like with the list view, there is a form context menu here that allows you to do certain things specific to the record you're looking at. I can save the record from here.

I can insert a new record into the user table. I can insert and stay, which is a nice method that ServiceNow provides of creating a copy of a record and then using it sort of as a template to build and create another record. So I can do that. Lots of configuration options here. Again, I can export the record that I'm looking at.

Just like with lists, you can build multiple views for a form. For a user for example there are different views that can be built Depending upon who's actually coming in and viewing the user record they may want to see different attributes in different order They may want to include different related lists so you can create views save those and then Depending on the type of user they can come and see the form The way that works best for them continuing across the header bar here you can make you can include attachments to your record And you can personalize the form just like you can personalize the list to choose which fields you want to display specific to you, the logged in user. It doesn't impact anyone else. I can update the record from here.

And then there can be one or more buttons here that provide functionality depending upon the type of record that you're looking at. Here we're looking at a user record, so we have the ability to set the password. Scrolling down here, there's the related links here. Depending on the type of the field, you can see you have different tools available to view and change the data that's there.

For example, true-false fields are displayed as checkboxes. Fields that reference other tables, like department here, always display this magnifying glass that you can use to look up in a separate table. The department table, for example.

which department you want to associate this user to. You can also open the record from a field that is pulled from a related table. So in this case, the finance record is in the department table.

I can get a preview of that record or I could fully open that record here, which would take me to another form showing me the finance record that this record is related to. So Lots of things here and then once you get down to the list again, you've got again some of your common list functions that we've already talked about. The ability to select multiple rows, the ability to take actions on rows, the ability to customize the related list to view the columns that you're interested in that would be specific to you.

So forms in ServiceNow show a specific record allow you to view the record in whatever manner you want from different views. You can export the records and then you can make changes to the record depending upon the roles that you have set for your user profile in the system. to make updates and changes to records as you need to. I know we're getting long here just a bit on the video, but there are just a couple more things I want to show you in ServiceNow. One of those being the knowledge application in ServiceNow.

So I'm going to go to my all menu, I'm just going to type in knowledge, and I'm going to pull up the knowledge homepage. What knowledge, the knowledge bases in ServiceNow are built. as libraries of important articles or documentation that you want to create and publish so that your users of all types can get access to help and information to help them better understand how to solve problems within the application. So knowledge articles or the library of knowledge are divided into what they call knowledge bases.

You can see here in my little example system here, I've only got two knowledge bases and I've got zero articles in one and I've got 30 articles. 31 articles in the IT Knowledge Base. If you've got the appropriate permissions, you can create as many of these Knowledge Bases as you want to build a library of useful information that help people learn things and collaborate with each other.

So I'm just going to go into the IT Knowledge Base and you can see that a Knowledge Base is then further divided and categorized into categories. So for example, our IT Knowledge Base has these categories available. Once you get into a category, it's there that the actual articles are associated and accessible. So, for example, I'm going to go into the devices category of the IT knowledge base, and I can see that I've got a set of articles specific to Apple.

So, in this case, they're just one article, how to configure VPN for Apple devices. I can also use the search up here to search across all of the knowledge bases. And I'm just going to put in Apple here. And I will find that there it is, how to configure VPN for Apple devices. It searches through all of the knowledge articles for the mention of Apple anywhere within the article.

So you can use that search to customize and pretty quickly drill into the articles to find the information that you're looking for. So I'm going to go ahead and go into this article we have on how to configure VPN for Apple devices. And you can see a nice article here written by, at the bottom, Wayne Webb.

that shows me the process for doing this particular activity. I have the ability from here to flag this article. If, for example, there's something inappropriate in the article or something incorrect in the article, I can flag it here, which will then get that to a knowledge administrator to take a look at and fix for me.

I can also create an incident from here related to this knowledge article that would then put that on a list, a task list for someone to come in and make maybe a correction. If I have access I have the ability to edit the article from here. Standard article viewing things like I can give the article a rating. I'll be able to see the ratings of the articles and those will move up and down on lists accordingly.

Scroll through the article I can see like I said who wrote it. I can mark the article as helpful or not helpful. I can also leave a comment about the article to begin a collaborative discussion. about whatever topic it is that the article relates to.

So back to the home. And so you can see the ability to create an extensive library of useful, helpful information that the organization shares to get people the things they need as quickly as possible to be more productive. Let's wrap up this demonstration by talking just a bit about the ServiceNow database. And to do that, I am going to navigate.

to the system definition application and the tables module and here you can see a list of all of the database tables that exist within the database nearly 5 000 of them and i show you this just to make the point that the entirety of the ServiceNow platform is working against a single database everything i've demonstrated in this video all the applications in every it service is working against a single, common, enterprise-wide source of truth. And with the needed permissions, you can go into any of these out-of-the-box tables and make changes. You can see the fields that exist for each table and their data types, whether they reference or extend other tables. You can also create new tables to supplement what's already there, or build new custom applications as needed. And the core of the database is built around the CMDB or configuration management database.

You can think of that, the CMDB, as a set of database tables and related processes that are designed specifically to make sure that your company knows what IT infrastructure, whether it's software or hardware or other things, is running and what services or what value each of them are providing. I've created a separate video introducing the ServiceNow CMDB and would point you to that resource for additional information. And with that, I think we should probably end the demonstration, although I hate to.

I've enjoyed going through kind of an overview here for you, but there's so much more that I would love to talk to you about. But hopefully this has given you sort of a broad picture of what ServiceNow is, what ServiceNow does, how it works. And it piques your interest a bit to maybe dig in and continue to learn more I've got lots of other videos on my youtube channel ServiceNowSimple I would suggest that maybe you go to the channel and you can go into some of these some of my other videos that go into more detail about some of the things that we've talked about and Also provide introductions to some of the things that we haven't covered I do want to mention that one of the cool things that ServiceNow offers is the ability for anyone that's interested to join into their ServiceNow Developer Program. And what's awesome about that is it gives you then the ability to apply for and get your very own personal developer instance of ServiceNow that you can use to get your hands on the platform and the UI and dig in and continue to learn more.

In fact, everything that I've demonstrated in this video was done on my personal developer instance of ServiceNow. So what I'm going to do... I've created a separate video that will walk you through the process of applying for and getting your very own personal developer instance I'm going to link that video right here so that you can then go off if you'd like to if you're interested and get your hands on the platform yourself and continue to learn more as always thank you so much for watching the video I've enjoyed spending this time with you I love your feedback I would appreciate your feedback let me know how the video was If I was in too much detail some places or maybe skimmed too much in others and I'll use that feedback as I continue to create more videos sharing interesting things about ServiceNow, so again, thank you for joining Please hit subscribe if you're interested in subscribing to the channel so you can get updates as I release new videos

Transcript for:Exploring ServiceNow Features and Applications

Transcript for:
Exploring ServiceNow Features and Applications