If you are already a user of ServiceNow, you know well that the platform has a new release twice per year to improve and provide even better solutions for your business. After San Diego, we are now landing in Tokyo – the newest version with general availability from Q3 2022.
In this article, we have gathered some of the most exciting new features and upgrades you may expect in the Tokyo release, according to our experts at Do IT Wise.
What new features will be available in Tokyo?
Just like the city that is named after its iconic landmarks, the new ServiceNow Tokyo release has some thrilling upgrades and new attributes that will help you improve your instance even further.
There are many great features in Tokyo that did not make the list, these are just the ones that stood out to us based on our experience using and developing ServiceNow. Links are provided at the bottom if you wish to see the rest of the features coming in the Tokyo release.
Now let’s dive into our top features within Customer Experience, Technology excellence, Operating excellence, Automation & low-code, and the Now Platform, picked from Anni Filcheva, ITSM Technical Consultant at Do IT Wise.
Document Intelligence
ServiceNow was taught how to read!! This feature has been expected heavily by the market, and it will probably be going to excite a lot of HR and Finance departments in organizations. This machine learning (ML) solution provides assistance to quickly and accurately extract data from attachments and populate case fields to eliminate manual data entry and minimize mistakes. Like in the example below, the system reads a receipt or a purchase order and parses the information so that later decisions can be made or trigger workflows based on the data.
Document Intelligence does require some setup and model training before it can be used effectively. Once set up, it can scan your uploaded document and pull information directly from it using definitions and keys that tell the machine-learning solution what we are looking for, such as data in tables, totals, names, etc. Once the ML solution has been trained using the definitions and keys that have been created, you can see the accuracy of the solution improve as more training is completed via the Document Intelligence dashboard. As of the Tokyo release, only JPEG, PNG, or PDF formats are supported.
Manager Hub
HR Service Delivery
One of the main differentiators of ServiceNow compared to other platforms is while many focus only on the employees, ServiceNow also focuses on the people’s managers, which is reflected in the Manager Hub that is now available in Tokyo.
The purpose of the Manager Hub is to enhance the manager’s experience with a comprehensive single place for viewing teams’ journeys, daily stats, pending learnings, important dates, and even receive notifications to act on employee tasks and requests.
People leaders can have a one-start shop to find data from across the enterprise that tells them what is going on with their team and what they need to know or do as leaders.
ServiceNow delivers a unified employee experience providing personalized support across any department of the organization, which improves the visibility of the team`s needs and relieves the pressure on the management so that they can focus on their people.
Multi-lingual notification support
No more code-based solutions for this one! The translated notifications feature is incredibly useful for companies that support users across the globe or operate in other countries. Those of you who used the previous notification version know how difficult and frustrating it has been, but as of Tokyo, ServiceNow finally has a native way of sending notifications in multiple languages. How to build those translations is basically to create translated “versions” of the email notification, and if the recipients’ preferred language matches some of the languages, the email is sent in the translated version.
To enable this feature, you will need to install the ‘Glide Notification Translation’ plugin. Once installed, set the property glide.email.outbound.static_translation.enabled to true, and you will see a new related list appear directly on the Notification records.
Admin Center
This new solution built on the Now Platform is designed to help customers achieve faster time to value. Admin Center streamlines the customer journey with a centralized admin experience, working as a single destination for platform owners and administrators to better understand ITSM and other platform capabilities. The Admin Center is a page dynamically displaying – among the others – the status of applications, whether they are ready for update or installation, or the weekly notification digest from a security perspective, reviewing events such as the number of failed logins, external logins, security elevations, impersonations, antivirus scans, and many more. As a part of the Center, there are buttons for Dashboards, Knowledge Bases, and Visual Task Boards.
Service Operations Workspace for ITSM
This exciting capability is an enabler to support a service operations transformation within your organization through a unified experience for IT Service and Operations Management. The SOW (Service Operations Workspace) was launched as part of the San Diego release, using the Next Generation User Interface, and provides a configurable workspace that delivers a common experience for multiple ITSM and ITOM workflows. This feature replaces the previous workspace, brings the missing configurability, being UI builder compliant. This is a workspace for L1 and L2 service desk agents and operators with a respective landing page and with visibility of service outages and assignments that allow you to prioritize and plan the agent’s work accordingly. Hence your managers can now define learning objectives for L1 agents to gain capabilities, knowledge, and skills. It also enables the option for configuring Virtual Agent and Agent Chat.
As a recommendation, all new ITSM customers should consider deploying the Service Operations Workspace instead of the ITSM Agent Workspace or UI16 when they begin their implementation.
Of course, Tokyo has a lot more to offer to make your work, work better. You can find more information about the new features in the Release Notes.
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