Suppose your company is using ServiceNow for daily employee tasks or customer services. In that case, you will soon be surprised with many new capabilities and features of the platform that will make your interaction even smoother and more accessible.  

But if you’re a ServiceNow admin or developer, you should get in dept with the new San Diego Release, its highlights, and key advantages, so you can make a strategic plan which will fit your company’s needs the best. 

In this article, you will find an overview of the key features and improvements in the new release, and the top picks of our experts at Do IT Wise.

What thrilling new features are coming in San Diego? 

The new release promises to add new levels of productivity, automation, and innovation in organizations, offering many new features and updates.  

“ServiceNow San Diego release is continuing the trend of developing а wide variety of solutions that require low or no coding skills providing a controlled and safe environment, templates, and interfaces to administrators, developers, and builders of all skill levels. A lot of the features are aimed at validating changes and reducing upgrade time, improving error handling, debugging, and usability. The release also focuses on process automation, security, and improving Artificial Intelligence to speed up and free up the repetitive tasks improving both employee and customer satisfaction.”, shares Ivan Mihov, ServiceNow ITSM Technical Consultant at Do IT Wise. 

Let’s see what our top picks from San Diego are: 

1. Next Experience

Next Experience is the new name for the Now Experience UI Framework and the latest Unified Navigation, which is introduced in San Diego and marks one of the most significant changes in the release. 

Unified Navigation enables you to access content across your instance in a single pane, simplifying navigation between the different tools and dashboards. In addition, notifications and preferences settings are also enabled. 

With the update, you can also enable your users to personalize their experience with light and dark mode or choose between the comfy and compact options. 

The UI Builder is also updated with many new exciting features: 

• Low code JSON editor 

• Component Formula Editor with a wide array of functions and logical operands to configure components 
• New layout functionality for building structures using the updated layout system that lays the foundation for supporting accessible page layouts in future releases 
• Enhancements to component styling, enabling to confine component CSS using declarative options that reference theme variables associated with an experience using the updated layout system

2. Sensitive Data Handling 

Given the time we live in, data protection comes at the forefront of every online service or interaction. In San Diego, you are provided with the feature to mask sensitive data that your clients might send you in messaging channels or block messages from your agents with clients’ data following predefined rules that match your business needs. This way, you can ensure being compliant and minimize the risk of data misusage.

3. Language Detection for Case Management

Having world exposure feels like a dream for your business, right? But how does it sound to be able to reply to customer requests in their local language?  

With the new ServiceNow release, you will be capable of detecting languages using AI and routing the cases faster to agents with the right vocabulary skills using Advanced Work Assignment. In addition, save costs by leaving the language-specific email inboxes and portals behind. Moreover, the algorithm can suggest relevant supplementary articles or materials to the user, triggered by the used language. 

4. Configuration Management Database (CMDB)

Configuration Management Database Workspace is introduced in San Diego and will be automatically installed with the new release. It is a centralized space to access various dashboards and tools to support tasks in your organization. Use CMDB Workspace to search and explore the CMDB, examine health and recent activities related to CIs, Application Services, Discovery, and Service Mapping.

5. Incident Management Best Practice – San Diego plugin 

The Incident Мanagement best practice – San Diego plugin enhances the integration and workflows for incidents and problems. This plugin enables you to update the progress of the reported incident and problem to the agent and caller and support: 

• Enhancement to Caller and Company fields 
• Enhancement to known error articles 
• Enhancement to Communicate Workaround 

6. Multi-factor authentication with Single Sign-On

Since many users in your organization are logging in to your corporate network and accessing your ServiceNow instance, there is a stronger need for secure authentication. MFA with the combination of SSO provides enhanced security for your instance. This capability provides flexibility to conditionally enable MFA for users. For SSO-based logins such as SAML, OpenID Connect, and Digest, you can enforce MFA for authentication. MFA with SSO can be configured on-demand based on your requirement. With the help of authentication schemes and identity providers, you can enforce MFA for specific users with a specific login mechanism. For a lot of customers, security is one of their top priorities. Expanding ServiceNow’s MFA and SSO functionalities provide better flexibility to customers. 

7. Field Service Management

Manage the location-based work more efficiently with the enhancements in Field Service Management. Appointment booking now considers capacity and reservation rules defined in the Capacity Management module while displaying slots for booking appointments for the first time or rescheduling an appointment. Reduces response payload time by displaying only available slots and enables the assignment of crews to work order tasks while booking an appointment. Also, you will find many more enhancements in Soft booking, Dispatcher Workspace, Contactor and Crew management, Scheduling, and many more. The additional functionality for Appointment booking provides Crew managers with advance options, a clear view of the appointments, and greater flexibility while booking appointments. 

8. HR Service Delivery Case and Knowledge Management

With Anonymous Report Center (ARC) employees can submit sensitive complaints or misconduct cases anonymously using the Anonymous Report Center (ARC) portal. You can use the Completely Automated Public Turing (CAPTCHA) or Google reCAPTCHA V2 to verify that a human is submitting the complaint. From the Employee Center, employees can choose to submit a complaint through the Employee Center or use the Anonymous Report Center (ARC). When using the ARC, the user is signed out of the Employee Center and directed to the ARC. The possibility of submitting anonymous sensitive complaints is great functionality that brings even more versatility to the ServiceNow HR application. 

9. Natural Language Understanding 

Create an NLU model that the system uses to recognize and process user utterances, intentions (intents), and objects of, or contexts for, an action (entities). The model dataset can be trained iteratively using utterance examples so that the system predicts the optimal intent output for a new utterance. The model’s life cycle is managed with model management phases that can guide you through the iterative process of building, testing, publishing, and maintaining your Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models. With the additional NLU features, ServiceNow provides additional benefits to create, test, and train models that are more accurate and provide more human-like behavior.

10. Virtual Agent Conversational Interface Home

Implement Conversational Interfaces to support your users with virtual and live agents through the chat channels they prefer. Increase the productivity of your IT organization by deflecting the more common, easier to resolve user issues, to a 24/7-available Virtual Agent bot. 

 The Conversational Interfaces Home application makes it easy for you to quickly get started and work towards achieving positive outcomes with your implementation. Navigate through an intelligent experience that is uniquely tailored to where you are as a user.  It is ideal for first-time users who have never installed or configured Conversational Interfaces, or for the most experienced user looking to expand full capabilities and maintain existing implementations. The conversational Interfaces Home application brings users faster and easier up to speed with their implementations. It is more intuitive and provides a one-stop shop for Conversational Interface implementations. 

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