New Enhancements of ServiceNow Orlando Release
Written by Harini Krish
Lead Technical Content Writer
2020 has brought with it the Orlando release in the ServiceNow Platform, which has a lot of great capabilities. These range from added intelligence to driving development at scale, to making it faster to create integrations. All of these make it easier for us to create and configure solutions for your enterprise at the same time, providing a great experience and unlocking productivity.
Here are some of the top features that come with the Orlando Release:
Mobile Branding
With new and enhanced UI themes and custom branding, you can give customers and employees mobile applications with your unique company identity. A mobile dashboard to display data in a graphical form. Adding reports and analytics widgets help users to easily identify the trends and turning points through the indicator score and visual representation.
Some of the improvements are:
Contextual link to the virtual agent
Change logo or theme according to your needs
Mobile Dashboards
Photo Search for Articles, Services, or Items
Scan QR or Bar codes
Mobile analytics
Agile Development Support
With the new and improved support for Agile Development now you can track and update your scrum tasks of the present sprint. Some of the enhancement includes:
A. Atlassian Jira Integration for Agile Development: Enable bidirectional synchronization of records between ServiceNow Agile Development 2.0 and Atlassian Jira by integrating the two applications.
B. Microsoft Azure DevOps Integration for Agile Development: Integration of Azure DevOps to Agile Development enables you to do the following:
- Synchronize work items between Agile Development and Azure DevOps.
- Strategize, track, and update your work from a single application.
C. Scrum Programs: With Scrum Programs, you can have a centralized view to:
- Plan and compare the workload of multiple teams across sprints.
- Set, view, and adjust dependencies between stories across multiple teams.
D. Performance Analytics Content Pack for Agile 2.0 Improve your Agile & SAFE processes and practices using preconfigured dashboards for Agile sprints, releases, ARTs, teams, and epics, with data visualizations.
- Quick start tests for Agile Development 2.0 & Essential SAFe
E. Customer Service Management (CSM) With CSM, you can raise customer service for resolution. CSM lets you increase customer satisfaction, efficiencies, and better product and service quality.
New in the Orlando Release
Case Management
Customer Project Management
Case entitlement derivation
Proactive Customer Service Operations
Proactive case flows
Service health status
Priority of cases
Proactive Customer Service Operations dashboard
Outage tracking for Customer Service Management
Service-aware install base
Contracts and entitlements for install base
Install base in Agent Workspace
CSM Agent Workspace
Ribbon configuration
Response templates
Agent Assist
External user approval for change and request records
Virtual Agent
This platform provides user assistance through conversations in a messaging interface. You can build automated conversations to help your team get information and perform common work tasks. Delivers better self-service experiences with intelligent with virtual agents across any channel, so customers and employees can quickly get what they need. Better predictions and automate actions with virtual agents that are fully embedded in the Now Platform. Customers and employees are empowered to initiate workflows with dynamic conversations that deliver results by automating requests for quick resolutions anywhere, anytime.
New in the Orlando Release:
Multiple chat branding configurations in a single instance
Integration with Microsoft LUIS (Language Understanding)
Notifications in Virtual Agent
Reusable topic blocks
IBM Watson Assistant Chat integration for Assistant V2 API
Source Control
Source control is improved now, prior to Orlando pushing and pulling from Git is limited using dev studio. It also has a number of major limitations that make the process quite frustrating. Still, in Orlando, it is much better some of the new features include Editing a file outside of the studio and in IDE of your choice and later on the instance will Validate any changes we make outside of ServiceNow. In previous releases, if you touched a file in Git, it would fail with a checksum error. In Orlando also we can now move files to any folder in the repo as well as adding supporting content such as automated tests in the same repo as the application.
Plus, you can commit the files of our choice to the repository instead of pushing all the files in the application at once.
Widget Diagnostics
one of the challenges of upgrading your instance is identifying the areas your platform has deviated from the out of box an in service portal that primarily consists of which widgets have been cloned or modified, with this new tool you can quickly and easily review the widgets and customizations of any given page, now all of the widgets will get a colored outline indicating the widget and the level of customization:
- Green represents an out of box widget
- Yellow is a cloned widget
- Blue is a new custom widget
- Red is a baseline widget that has been altered in some way
Extension for Visual Studio
One of the common problem people face while developing in Now Platform is the lack of using the IDE of your choice, there have been independent efforts to create plugins in the past, but nothing has been officially supported but now with Orlando ServiceNow is adding an official extension for visual studio, so now you can edit your code offline in visual studio and later sync it with your instance and also enjoy the cool features of the Visual Studio like IntelliSense.
Summary
Regardless of the ServiceNow release, you are planning to upgrade; Royal Cyber ServiceNow experts can do all the heavy lifting for you. We can design, implement, and provide ongoing managed services across your ServiceNow platform. To learn more about how we can streamline your business processes with the Now Platform, you can email us at [email protected] or visit www.royalcyber.com
