[Music] hello everybody and welcome thank you for joining us here on tech now this is episode 80 hard to believe we've done 80 episodes already it's crazy this one is on one of our new shiny features in paris this is all about the process automation designer almost flipped the two around next month is playbook so that's why this is part one it is one of a two part series and we thank you for joining us hope you can come back on november 17th for that but we'll give you a reminder at the very end of that real quick your valuable time if you haven't met us before my name is chuck tomasi i'm from service now been here for about ten and a half years and was a customer for a couple before that i love building custom applications on the platform integrations are my thing as well and i spent some time in the community do lots of videos like this and many others thank you everybody who's watched those and more to come without more delay let's turn it over to craig steph for his introduction yes and i've been at servicenow for about six years i was not a customer unfortunately ahead of time but looking back on it i wish i was because i could have used servicenow in a lot of situations back in the day uh but i've been uh you know hosting this with chuck for a long time um i forget how many episodes i've actually been on now but i do yeah yeah it was like 200 no uh i've done a lot of uh cloud um stuff servicenow as well as a lot of orchestration so in the past and that's more uh that's where my my interests lie and i'll turn it over to euron hi there my name is jaron guess i'm a manager in platform engineering i've been with the company for about three years and prior to leading the playbook experience team i was working on the agent workspace as an engineer before joining servicenow i was a co-founder at a data security startup i've also worked in health and financial industries and when i'm not coding or leading a great team of codings coders for other i play a lot of piano singing songwriting gardening hiking camping and cooking very happy to be here chuck and crap thank you for having me my pleasure i love having the subject matter experts on because they sound way better at whatever we're discussing than i do we are going to be talking about process automation designer actually when i say we i mean yarn's going to be covering all that good stuff we'll add some colorful commentary and if you've got questions we'll pull them from the q a if we don't get to your question during the show we apologize ahead of time there are usually more questions there than we have time to answer we will get those offline and post those back to the community and even send you notification with a link right to your question and our answer so you can come back and see that if you post multiples yes you only get one email we were very smart about that uh also going through this want to remind you one more time we do have a podcast that was launched in august of 2020 called breakpoint very happy about that and shortly after our webinar here is done we will be recording a follow-up discussion with yaren about process automation designer and playbook so you'll want to subscribe to that podcast and find out what we say that didn't get said here that or if you do have other topics in mind please let us know we interview product managers and customers and special guests and oh boy we've got topics lined out well into 2021 lots of ideas but we're always open for more so if you've got ideas let me know this is the podcast for you audio so there's no powerpoints no demos no update sets i think i'm going to use that as a tagline for an audio podcast we should all uh there's a lot of meetings that could go with a lot less of that so yeah [Laughter] we're going to try and get through the powerpoint on this but we do have a demo because this is video we want to share that with you developer.servicenow.com is where you can go if you want to learn more about and work with play with test learn about process automation designer playbook a number of other features that are on the platform you can get a paris release totally free that runs all this stuff turn on plugins do whatever you want risk free from your organization this is your sandbox if you mess it up like i frequently do blast it and start over it's it's kind of a fun process to go i z booted that's what we call it z boot the instance and wipe the slate clean go over to developer.servicenow.com not just for the free pdi but also for the api docs examples learning plans the resource if you're getting into the now experience components the whole reference library is over there great place to get started and and go so i am pleased as punch to turn it over to yarn at this point great thanks chuck so this is part one uh this is a two-parter we're gonna come back next month uh this overview is on process automation designer and playbook today we're just gonna focus on process automation designer we're going to touch a little bit on playbook as well so just some legalese to get out of the way um in case anyone feels like taking a nap this is just our standard safe harbor notice everything that we show here anything that's coming is not a promise things can change and so forth and so on so the great bill mcdermott has said behind every great experience is a great workflow and that fundamental principle is what's behind process automation designer and playbook experience now these are fundamentally two different products uh however they work together extremely well process automation designer which we're going to focus on today is a no code designer for authoring cross enterprise workflows in a single unified process it's a builder lets you build processes those processes can run totally independently however playbook experience is a ui platform for viewing and interacting with business process workflows in real time you can think of it as a ui layer on top of any business workflow that allows two-way interaction real-time updates when you put these together you get a really great system that allows uh process owners to build processes and agents to interact with them in real time but today as i mentioned we're going to focus on process automation designer or as we lovingly refer to it as pad for short so what is the problem that we're trying to solve here well the fact is it requires too much service now developer expertise to connect multiple processes and services across the enterprise it's tough to organize you require a developer to connect these different disparate services together once they're created it's really tough to modify you end up having to copy and change and you can't tweak them on your own you often have to bring in a developer again and once those processes are running it's tough to see there's a lack of visibility across all the nested relationships between these services this is uh exemplified well in this next example say simple services within servicenow that's our bread and butter uh vpn requests payroll requests facilities requests relatively easy to design on the platform however often these processes spin off other processes for example set up office desk for employee sorry set up office for employee involves ordering a desk requesting a phone setup getting accessories this branches off even further getting a desk requires getting something from the warehouse disassembling and transporting it little by little your process branches off until you have a really complicated set of the dependencies that's hard to organize hard to see process automation designer layers on top of all this breaks these different pieces into lanes across the enterprise to make it more of an effortless experience for you to connect your different services so the product vision is what you see here it's a way to provide business process owners a builder to digitize visualize and manage end-to-end workflows across business services so what do you see here well at the top level there's a process that process is broken down into lanes kind of a kanban style overview within lanes you have activities activities are the actual pieces of the process that do the actual work now each of these activities behind the scenes is powered by flow designers so if you're familiar with flow designer you're halfway there flow designer is what does all the heavy lifting and you can think of these activities as a very user-friendly encapsulation of what that flow is doing behind the scenes it exposes just what's needed for the process owner a low code you know citizen developer to do their job without having to know the nuts and bolts of what's happening behind the scenes this is a good time to go over who are the different folks involved the roles involved in process automation well you start with a developer the developer is going to be working in flow designer working on flows flow actions and activity definitions within pad each of these activities that you see here are instances of an activity definition so a developer is going to be building those activity definitions using flow designer in order to automate individual pieces of the business process once those activity definitions are created the process owner can work within process automation designer to build processes in order to organize the pieces of the business process into a cross enterprise workflow so they will use the activity definitions that the developer has provided to build these automated processes next you have a workspace admin which might not necessarily be a workspace admin could also be an admin for any type of user experience they're going to work with playbook experience to work on playbooks this is to in order to configure the appropriate views of the business process for the right users you know again next month we're going to do much more of a deep dive into playbook but allows you a lot of granularity to control exactly what that user experience is and how different users different roles can experience the same process in different ways that's where that playbook experience admin or a workspace admin would do that configuration finally you have the agent the agent is the one who's actually working most likely an agent workspace within paris release but future playbooks can go anywhere anyone who's actually consuming that playbook they're going to be working on the activities that are shown in playbook cards in order to complete the individual tasks within the business process so the business process can involve automated tasks and it can also involve manual tasks that an agent has to perform so that's enough of the high level overview the problem that we're trying to solve in our strategy from here i'm going to jump right into the demo to really show some of the nuts and bolts of how this works now uh for the sake of this demo um we're going to be using some demo tables that were created by an upcoming creator kong lab called elevate your process design by building cross enterprise workflows we'll give some more details about this at the end of the presentation but if you're interested in anything that you see here today and you want to really get more of a hands-on experience and build some of this yourself i highly recommend that you participate in that lab and that lab creates a set of tables under this application called improve work pretty straightforward you have an issue table where employees can file issues about things that come up on the job and then a task table that's attached to those issues to actually work on the issue at hand so just and it also comes with a workspace experience called improve work just to see that in action now process on administration process automation is under a new uh heading here called process automation first thing you'll notice is that flow designer has been moved under here as well so we have flow designer we have process automation designer we have flow administration and we have process automation administration uh under the administration side you can see active processes today's executions activity definitions trigger definitions but we're going to start with the actual designer itself and this is my local instance running paris now when you launch a pad you'll see any of the process definitions that have already been built but you can also go ahead and create a new one creating a new one is simple you give it a name a description an application you can choose an existing trigger or create a new one triggers are either when a record is created a record is updated or either or if you choose one of these you then map it to a table in this case pick any table when a record is created you can narrow this down based on conditions something anyone who's worked with flow designer or business roles it's all very straightforward for the sake of the demo though we're going to work with this demo process definition that came with the improve work lab now when you open up you'll see this is our modern ui built in the same technology that's powering agent workspace you'll see that our different stages of our process are broken down into lanes they can be stages of the process they can be areas of the organization it's really up to you how you want to build it each of these lanes in addition to having a label and description can have a start condition or rather a when to start this is similar to anyone who's worked with a powerpoint animation you can fire it off immediately as soon as the process starts after the previous lane finishes uh or with previous this gives you a lot of flexibility to have lanes running in parallel uh you can have the first lane the third land fire off at the same time when the process starts and the second one waits to the first because the factive processes aren't always linear so we allow that level of flexibility lanes can be moved you can insert lanes before and after anything you kind of expect from this sort of environment now the activities within the lane those are represented as these cards um and they're the things that do the actual uh functionality now you'll notice that they're color coded and categorized here instructional and record these are largely to do with the activity experience the way the activity is experienced so we're going to dive more into that next month but the thing to keep in mind is that because these activities are powered by flows and flows are essentially a black box you can't see what's going on inside them unless a process owner i can't they can do anything and everything so we needed some way to categorize them some way to give some uh contract experience contract as to how these should be displayed rendered in the front end and that's where these experience types come from so if we look into one of these for example in the analysis lane we have an introduction when you pull this up you'll see it has the same when to start configuration so you have that same flexibility in terms of having things fire off immediately after previous with previous but a lot of the power comes from under this configure activity section this is going to open up a modal first thing to notice here is the activity definition so as i mentioned these activities are instances of activity definitions in this case it's an instance of the instruction activity definition this is our most basic activity definition it just provides some input or rather some output to a user telling them to do something anytime you open up one of these activity definitions you can see a little bit more about it including the description what the table it is designed to be fired off of the table that you see in the top of activity definition is the input table the record that fires off the process so if you want certain activity definitions to only work in processes for certain tables you can do that below that you see the automation plan this is the flow or flow action that's doing the actual work whatever flow or flow action you choose that flow or flow action has inputs and those inputs are what is shown to the process owner so if i jump back over to this activity configuration panel you can see the inputs here are a message and a wait for user input toggle they come from the flow that's powering it so you can build all of your complicated logic into flow and expose just the things that you want the process owner to see and worry about as inputs now these inputs can be hard coded text like you see here but you also have this powerful pill picker tool if you use flow designer you're very familiar with the pill picker it lets you insert dynamic anything now you can see here activities which is grayed out allows you to reference any prior activities that ran before this activity and you can access any of its outputs that it has generated but you also have access to context which is the parent context the process itself what its state is or in this case what input record fired it off so say for example we want to include the record number in this description well we can dive deeper into here filter by number and add that and all of a sudden this message which is giving the user some information has the record number there as well in addition you have a wait for user input toggle this is just basically whether you want the user to click mark complete or skipped whenever they've done whatever the step that they're being asked to do is whatever this manual process is you can optionally set this to no and it will just move on to the next activity automatically the next activity we see in this lane still issue type this is an example of a very common scenario which is the activity definition wait for condition this is powered directly by the flow action weight for condition everything in servicenow tends to be a record records tend to have some conditions before they're considered quote unquote done so in this case you get to define using the condition builder here what is the definition of done with this activity so you can see this pill picker again we're tied to the issue that kicked this process off the actual iw issue and we're adding a condition on it to say a condition on it to say let's wait until the issue type is assigned so here are the issues that it can be as soon as a agent or anyone working on this issue assigns an an issue type this activity is done and it will move on to the next one you can see here an example the pill picker and use again to pick that parent record that firing the playbook off or the process off now another thing to keep in mind across all these activities uh is every activity uh for the most part pretty much every activity will always have what we call an associated record that's a record that is associated with whatever that task uh that needs to get done and i'm using the term task loosely not necessarily the task table again this is servicenow a record is the unit of truth we want this to be totally decoupled it doesn't depend on playbook to complete this process it doesn't depend on anything so all these records that are waiting on you could update them directly using the platform ui using workspace using mobile and it will just move forward and we'll show where you can find those records in a bit now in the next stage uh under remediation we have an example of a automated create record activity definition anytime you see an activity definition that is prefixed with automated it means just that there's no agent interaction as soon as this activity fires it's going to do its work it's going to complete move on to the next one so create record it doesn't require the user to provide some input into what record they want to create or fields it's automated in this case we are creating a task an iw task and we're going to attach it to the iw issue the parent issue so you can see the pill picker was used to form this association with the parent issue the pill picker was used again to populate the short description please remediate or issue and so forth and we assigned it to a good old able tutor just to to work on this this is another weight for condition this is a little different because we're not waiting on the parent record now we're waiting on the record that came right before it in that last automated step so here you can see the activity section is no longer grayed out we can see all previous activities that ran between it before it and we can dive into the automated create record see all of its outputs see its record and map it to that record so when that record is has a state that is closed complete closed incomplete or closed skipped this task is also done uh wait for closed notes that's going to be another wait for condition on the issue inform requester is another instruction instructional card the last one that's different is an automated update record similar tomoday automated create it will automatically update in this case set that work issue to close complete set the work notes to task closed after informing requester so how does this all look you know now that we see how this is built how does the user interact with it now that's the primary interface as i mentioned is playbook which we're going to show more of next month but i am going to show at least a brief part of it so that we can visualize what's going on here so if i see improve work and i go over to our improve work workspace that was included in this lab i can go ahead and create a new issue you know give it some description the coffee maker is broken save this record and i can see that the workspace admin has added a playbook tab up to this related item of this form they've configured playbook to be embedded in this form if we switch over to it we can see the playbook itself now in this case uh the playbook is being rendered as a accordion the top level of the accordion correspond to the lanes in that process we can see the analysis lane is in progress the first activity within there is an introduction here is that activity represented as a card within playbook we have a title we have a tagline we have an icon we have a little indicator that's in progress and we have the actual instructions how this is configured again we'll show next month but for the sake of this demo we're going to go ahead and mark that as complete it's going to move to the next step and ask us to fill in the issue type now i could just fill in the issue type from details here i could fill in the issue type from the platform for uh forms and lists but instead we don't have to go anywhere all the information we need is right here in front of us so i'm going to fill in the issue provide some location save it now because it has an issue type it finishes goes on to the next lane and we can see it skipped right through the first activity in that lane the create iw task because that was an automated step there was nothing for us to do we can still expand it and see what was done but we're going to go for our next task here waiting for this task to be completed so here we're waiting for abel to go and complete this task whenever that's done this will automatically complete we even have a link to go and view this task and a new tab to see what it's waiting on we could complete it ourselves but let's go ahead and just see what abel would see if we impersonated him now because we are the user who's assigned to this we actually have a one-click button where we could close it directly without having to leave the playbook at all without having to open up a new workspace tab if we closed it it would move on to the next step that's just a small preview of how configurable this user interface actually is let's switch back to our admin and we can wait for some close notes coffee maker is fixed now the work notes have been provided closed notes rather and you can see this is updating in real time the closed notes have been filled in the task that was created is marked as done everything that you would imagine is done is being completed we have another instruction telling us to let the requester know that everything's been done and accept the solution hey i i hit him up on slack it's all good that's complete the automated task has now finished as well and it's gone and closed that record pretty simple example now i'd like to show i'm going to kick off another one and show some of the tables that are going on behind the scenes to show some of the flexibility here so let's just kick off another one now this first card doesn't look like it's a record right there's no issue attached there's no record number there's no assigned to that you can see here but everything is a record because when we click mark complete or skip we need something to be updated for this to move on we're not calling a pad api specifically we're just updating records that's a big thing to understand with working in pad is that records are the units of all the work so if i go back to my platform ui and i type in process automation again under process administration process automation administration that's a mouthful if we go to today's executions and we open up this one that's running now we can see that this introduction card is in progress and it has an associated record with this is a flow data record i'm going to open up that in a new tab flow data records are a really powerful uh table and record that we use throughout pad and and flow designer as well it's a way to collect any arbitrary information from a user to use within the flow say that you want to call some api within the flow and you need some message or title or something from the user that you want to collect you could create a table just to collect that information but you quickly end up with a whole lot of tables instead you can create a data definition a data definition will define what data i want to collect and then when this flow data step is marked as complete the flow can actually go and proceed and use it which will make sense in a moment when i show an example the most basic data definition is a manual activity in this case there's actually no information you need to collect from the user at all you're just waiting for them to say that the state is done so when we talk about playbook next month we're going to go over these declarative actions that can be configured to run server scripts are very similar to ui actions and you'd see that this mark complete button all it's doing is changing the state of this flow data record to complete if i actually go and change it to complete here manually we could see it magically just goes on to the next step now one of the big takeaways here is you don't need playbook you could actually go through forms and lists update these records mark them as complete but what fun would that be now let's go ahead and show an example of using that flow data record to do something more powerful this is a pretty straightforward basic example say we want to send a slack message and as part of this process so let's jump into flow designer first to do the work now i'm going to jump over to subflows and i went and created this ahead of time given the time constraint now this subflow is going to take in a reference to a task record you're going to take in a record a channel that you want to post to on slack and it does a few different things here first thing first it's going to create a flow data to collect some info from the user now its data definition you can see here is a slack message so you can always create new data definitions by going to sys flow data definition and create a new one i created one for this demo called slack message call it slack message and here is where you define the data variables that you want to collect in order to do some work so i added a new variable called message of type string because that's what we want the agent to provide to us back in flow designer world we can see that okay we have this create flow data step um it's going to create a new flow data record with a data definition of slack message now we have this assigned to field uh as i showed before the moment i clicked complete on this this moved forward and in fact if i went and created a new one and chose that slack message and hit save we'd see the message field that it's waiting on anyone could just go and fill in a message here mark it as complete and go and send that slack message we want some permissions over this so that's where assignment group and assigned to comes in you can specify a specific user or a specific assignment group that has the permissions to actually complete this task and do the work so i'm going to use the pill picker and say you know what the only one who can actually submit this message is going to be the one who is assigned to the task record that was passed in i could do assignment group as well the next step is a wait for condition we're going to wait for that flow data record uh to be complete skipped error cancel wait for it to be done essentially and now we have a little fork in the road if that state is complete meaning they do want to actually send this message nothing went wrong the process wasn't cancelled uh the agent didn't decide to skip this step now we're going to post the message and you can see here i'm just posting to a demo web hook url that i set up for this let me actually open up slack for that to work and um for the actual message well you can see skipping ahead to the channel comes from the inputs as well for the message we had a uh write some scriptable uh functionality here in the future we're expanding pill pickers to work with these data definitions but within paris you do have to use a scriptable interface for that so we can see we're going to return new task has been created we're going to access the subflow inputs ask access the task and its number put that in the message but then we're going to actually add the message that was collected the syntax here is uh you know we're going to get access now you do get a telesensor so you don't have to memorize this you type in dot you can see the previous steps so we're going to access that first step where the create flow data record was created we're going to then dot walk into the record that was created as part of it um this is the one piece that you do actually you know you'd see this in here as well you see vars but it is something to remember that's where we get the variables and then you access the actual variable that you defined in the data definition that won't come up in intellisense you're going to have to just actually look it up based off of the definition that you created again that was right here we called it message so that's going to append the message into the slack message and that's it now we could go and test this let's go and choose any random record now the channel that i have set up for this web hook i called it sandbox and we're just going to run it now i didn't get any message yet because we haven't provided the message yet but if we view the flow execution we can see after this create flow data step it created a flow data record and here it's assigned to some itil user um the state is pending the message is blank i'm going to go ahead mark this as complete save it and there we go new task has been created and there is the number here is the message now we're going to encapsulate that flow logic that we just did in a reusable activity definition so under process automation under administration we're going to go to activity definitions and hit new call it send the slack message it can run in this case it does what can be the thing that kicked it off can be anything uh flow or action okay let's choose flow and let's choose the slack flow that we just created and we'll hit save here we can see the inputs from that flow the task will let the process owner specify but the channel we're going to go and specify for them so this will be pre-filled now we do need to configure this for the playbook experience so that the user will actually see a message and something meaningful i'm just going to fill up this activity experience tab real quick but we're going to explain everything i'm doing in next month's session so i'm going to say that this should be represented as a record i'm going to set the associated table to that flow data use the pill picker to map it to the outputs of that flow you can access every step within the flow tie to that record put in a little tagline i'll see and then specify that we want the form fields to be those vars i think that should be everything and now we're going to jump back into process automation designer and jump into that process and let's do it right after they fill in an issue type when i type in slack we'll see that send a slack message that we just created and if we configure this activity we can see okay which task is this assigned to let's use the pill picker to map it to that parent task channel is is all good all filled out and we can go ahead and update this and activate now let's go back into workspace and kick off another process we'll go ahead and mark this as complete fill in an issue type and now we have a new send a slack message uh activity waiting to load and here we go enter a slack message to post to the channel notifications from the slack message and we can put in a message and we'll hit send and right away new task has been created the number i don't know what went wrong not the most helpful of messages but you know either way it works so i hope you can see just how powerful this can be these are still relatively simple examples of allowing you to package up really complicated logic within flow encapsulate into a very easy to understand activity definition and then use that activity definition in a drag and drop manner as a process owner one thing to keep in mind here is that we don't want to to replace flow designer so you don't want to have a million activities that can do everything and anything like you see an integration hub you want to have really business specific use cases that solve something very specific fill issue type would be a perfect example now these examples were actually powered by a wait for condition activity definition but what we usually recommend is to actually even encapsulate this conditional logic into its own activity definition hide that from the user if it's called field issue type the process owner doesn't have to specify what that the issue type they're waiting for and what the table is they should really just see a pill picker here called issue type and they can sorry issue and they can map it to the parent record and that's it so it's really designed to have very specific um use cases so i'm gonna finish my screen share here and then some of the key features we showed this is a no code process authoring experience to model an enterprise workflow we are able to coordinate manual automated and integration process activities there's support for parallel and sequential processes you have data flow you can pass data between process activities using the no code data picker and we've integrated low code flow designer for extensible workflow automation and it's important to recognize that this is on the now platform so you can extend it with everything the platform can do from service level management to performance analytics to machine learning and we haven't even gotten to how flexible and configurable playbook itself is some things to keep in mind this does not replace flow designer before those barrage of questions come in flow designer is not going away there's a lot of active active development on it this is meant to encapsulate flow designer to make it more accessible for process owners who don't have to have strong developer acumen it's designed to solve specific business use cases as opposed to anything and everything and it's compatible with playbooks so it can allow users to who are fulfilling these requests and working on these processes to never have to leave anything to not have to navigate through forums and lists to get their work done and one of the powers there is that not only does it allow them to not have to leave the playbook to do all their work but we were able to pick data out of that flow in real time through those pill pickers that we showed before as the flow is moving on the ui can update regularly this really enables a lot of powerful flexibility you can have wizards as the form is regularly changing based on input from the user again we'll get into more of that next month um out of the box we don't ship a whole ton of reusable activity definitions because we want them to be really use case specific however there is use case specific content for itsm and csm content available today in the servicenow store if you are building custom applications and you do want to build processes around those custom applications you do need an app engine license and that engine entitlement process automation designer and and playbook itself are free they come with every instance but the licensing is is controlled based on the tables that you're working on there is a lot of development coming uh in cayman paris coming beyond quebec the ability to cancel the pre-a process once it's been running the ability to manually trigger a process based on some user action rather than some update record a much nicer enhanced ui lane conditions i didn't actually talk about activity conditions but that's another powerful feature you can configure on any activity switch to an advanced view and you can say only run this activity when these conditions are met and those conditions can come from previous activities and until those conditions are met you don't even see the activity in the front end so for example you could have five steps in a lane and the four subsequent ones all depend on the inputs of the first one and based on the action that the agent takes in the first one only one of those four might show up so you can kind of build forking type of logic using that power that same condition is going to be extended to lanes in the future uh the ability to do ad hoc activities based off of user interaction so actually from a front end some user interacting with this in playbook could actually add activities to a running process in real time um and additional start rules beyond that these are all the features that we are planning on delivering if you know things go well um that is it for me i'm gonna hand it back over to chuck i want to remind you that there is a related workshop to this starting today we are launching the creatorcon on demand content october 20th through the end of 2020 so we've got a little bit of time but the real fun is in doing these workshops this week there's some new content there including uh process automation designer ccw 1001 you should if you're watching this live you should have a link in your resources panel if not go to the developer site you look for ccw 1001 in fact i just googled it and it came up it's like there's only one instance of ccw 1001 on the internet apparently so it'll get you to the developer portal and you can launch that lisa has done a wonderful job building out this hands-on workshop follow along and then i invite you to attend creatorcon next week just go to our main site under events you'll see creatorcon you can register totally free half day event with keynotes and a look into the future you get some uh sneak peeks at what's coming in quebec you'll get uh some it it's wonderful but we're keeping it short we learned a lot from doing knowledge back in maine we're taking that forward so mark your calendars 9 a.m to 1 p.m pacific time i don't know what that is in your time zone but apologize if it's ungodly hours or whatever deity you pray to we're going to make sure that it is available on demand afterwards in case you can't make it so let's uh also remind you that there are a whole bunch of resources available the doc site developer portal the community we've been doing this for a long time we can now change this to over 80 topics and want to get through that because we do have a number of questions and i'm really curious to know what yarn has to say to the live q a that's come in i've saved up a couple of good ones for you here so let me hold that up i'm going to take these in the order they came in just to be fair uh are the activities in process automation in any way related to the service catalog slash ritms how does someone initiate one of these flow they are not directly related to anything within service catalog but they can be uh they they use any table that you want to can power any of these um activities you can have any associated record you can provide forms on any of those records as well so you can have any conditions waiting on something to be done whether it's a service catalog or whether it's anything else but they're there's off the top of my head i can't think of any specific flow that would be incompatible with this okay uh let's see i think you talked about this and towards the end when you talked about licensing does the bpa features demo fall under itsm pro with the paris upgrade or are there additional subscription fees i think the answer was it comes with the platform it's like the workflow engine however if you want to do the custom tables and custom applications you're going to need the aes plug-in which does have a cost associated with it so always talk to your account team if you've got licensing questions and you want to understand that further there were a few people in there there was also a number of questions about uh exposing playbook to service portal any thoughts if that's on the roadmap at somewhere because there were more than a few requests about uh using it outside of workspace i know we'll see sure so we have this new now ux framework that's powering workspace and is also powering the new ui builder drag and drop builder in quebec we are actually launching a version of workspace for csm that was entirely rebuilt using ui builder it's drag and drop builder experience and portal is replacing service portal as well uh well not replacing but being in addition to uh the new modern version of that so any any place any application that supports um these new now ui uh ux components can support a playbook in the future so in paris the only place that this can actually work in paris is within workspace in quebec and beyond any custom page built with ui builder including the new portal will use it it will not be compatible with service portal service portal at this point is uh you know running on legacy technology using um angular so it's not compatible now someone um it would be conceivable to create a a wrapper that displays playbook within service portal if there's enough demand but that would be more a question for a product team to decide based off of a customer input or something yeah exactly so short answer is no it does not work in service portal today uh it will work in the new modern portal that is going through replacing it tomorrow ah okay good idea good idea let's see uh is there conditionals you mentioned the branching and the forking the possibility of you know running one of these four activities is there conditional starting of lanes uh not in paris so a lane will only start after previous immediately or with previous in future releases though it is on the roadmap that features on its way and that's kind of a follow-on to this next question what if i would create a process automation on an incident but the agent opts to resolve the incident outside the prescribed process will the playbook close the moment the incident has been completed or resolved does it catch up or is it oh yeah a resounding yes that is something that we we definitely we want to keep everything decoupled no one is required to use playbook to do the work you can update the incident and mobile in the legacy ui and workspace portal whatever the moment that that record is marked complete whatever is waiting on it to complete will finish for that you get one of these there you go all right a gold coin could you provide an example of what business use case this process automation designer would be used for when would we use this process automation designer versus flow designer versus workflow editor oh good question because they hit the whole family sure so uh workflows is at this point is considered legacy it's always going to be supported but we're not recommending anyone continue to build new workflows and workflow flow designer is the replacement for that flow designer however is does take some developer skill to really understand it is low code but it's not no code and it can do really anything and everything process automation designer is an abstraction it sits on top of flow designer the the distinction between when you use one versus the other it really comes down to who the role is who the persona is if you are a process owner or you are working with a process owner who is either intimidated by flow designer or just not super comfortable with that environment and thinks more in terms of lanes process automation designer is a much better fit you can as a developer you can pre-build these reusable activity definitions for that process owner to use and to wire these up without having really any understanding what's going on beneath the surface the other advantage to using process automation designer even if you are a developer is that ui that playbook experience ui the ability to pull out data from that process as it is running in real time and represent that user uh the information to a user in a unified interface without them having to dig around through forms and lists is a huge power of cross automation designer and and you don't have that functionality within flow designer flow design is really meant for more of these automated processes so in terms of the business use case it really comes down to anytime you have these cross enterprise processes these complicated processes involving a lot of different players that you want the process owner to be able to manage and run themselves without having to bring in a developer are there any out-of-box reports or dashboards to help track the activities or particularly how much time is spent in each one so we can see where the bottlenecks are sure no great question um these all these executions are running in those tables i showed them a little bit if you go under process automation and then process administration you can see uh the records that are representing all the different activities and all the different lanes and all the different processes um when they were created and they'll have the whole history in there so you can either navigate that through forms and lists or you can create a custom report that's on top of that we've already had some customers who've been using this already create some meaningful reports on top of that data so it's it's definitely possible in the future we do plan on adding something more of an interface on top of that to make that easier to see yourself maybe something akin to what you see in flow executions all right one more i think we've got time for one more question this one's a little long in the reading hopefully it's a quick answer in the in the back end uh what is the engine behind the scenes that pad uses and process to process and determine when to run its flows is it entirely built up a flow or does it use its own engine and tables behind the scenes and then simply calls flows when conditions are met that is a great question um i'm not a hundred percent certain but i'm not say 90 certain it is its own engine um it does kick off those actual flows so the the engine itself i'm fairly certain is not it's not like some parent flow that's orchestrating everything it's more of a an engine itself and that engine will go and navigate through these tables uh these um process definition tables create the process definition context fire off the activity context and fire off flow designer to do the actual work but again only 90 sure of that okay well i'll take 90 of your answer versus 100 of mine yeah i do you know i i i manage the playbook team so i know every little detail about playbook but in terms of the engineering implementations of padlessa all right good segue because i want everybody to mark their calendars for november 17th same time it's a tuesday 8 a.m pacific for the playbook follow-up to this webinar and with that huge thanks to craig stepp for behind the scenes answering questions keeping things running keeping me honest thank you yarn for all of your picmatter expertise and the demos that you were able to show here and thank you everybody for watching this to answer the common question yes it will be made available on demand watch for that information shortly it's also if you go over to bitly servicenow dash tech now you'll find the community article with all of the techno episodes and uh this one will be number 80. you can watch it i'll have it post production and all the answers and questions and everything in a couple of days so give us a little bit of time to wrap that up and we will see you about back here real soon thank you everyone for joining [Music] bye you