[Music] hi everyone welcome to glidefast on air i'm lauren jankowski the marketing manager here at glidefast and i'll be moderating today's webinar the power of content delivery in service portal before we get started i'd like to give you some background information on glidefast glidefast consulting is a consulting firm that is dedicated exclusively to servicenow as an elite servicenow partner our expert team of developers and architects have worked on both sides of the table the customer side and the consulting side our company was founded by servicenow architects and we're proud to have a team of over 100 experienced consultants an average csat score of a 4.8 out of five and many more accolades as you can see here as a perk of attending today's webinar we'll be giving away a 50 visa gift card we'll announce the winner at the very end of today's session so be sure to stay on for the entire webinar i'm excited to introduce our two presenters for today todd brady a servicenow architect here at glidefast and lauren toomey a service portal developer here at glidefast i'll be monitoring the q a throughout today's session so please send in any questions as they arise and we'll do our best to answer them now i'd like to hand things over to lauren to dive into the presentation okay so for those of you unfamiliar with it what is content delivery particularly as it relates to the service portal one of the most important things you can do for your employees is to keep them informed however there are several areas in which employees need to be informed there may be different times of year when information needs to be shared say around holidays or open enrollment and on top of that different information needs to go to different groups how do you manage all of these variables well content delivery is a way to inform groups of certain actions they need to take perhaps signing the waiver and then leading them to that action you can share information that repeats at certain intervals like a reminder around the time of year for urban enrollment you can also direct specified users to specific content like a video or a link to training that they need to complete whether it's a one-time thing or it repeats you can also manage email campaigns to go beyond the portal and sharing information with your chosen audiences so who does it benefit which of your employees does it benefit and how the most obvious groups benefit from content delivery will be your employees that are in charge of distributing information whether it's a single person or a department it will streamline and simplify your processes to deliver important info in a timely manner these employees can create and schedule their content from one place in just a few steps and have it shown to users in multiple mediums all in one go they can use hr criteria to schedule content or create custom audiences that are important to your organization they'll also be able to reduce their reliance on emails and tools like finicky mail merges and perhaps most importantly by sharing information in an easy to access and timely manner cases can be deflected and employees on the receiving end of information can be less stressed so let's take this analogy for a minute content delivery is an art but not in the way that you have to be born good at it when you create content you want to share you are creating a beautiful piece of art perfectly unique to you and your organization like most artists you probably want to share your art with the world so you need to schedule a showing of your art or content and when you're finding that time to do a showing whether it's one day only or a week-long event you need to decide which gallery to share your art with or which group of users is the right fit for seeing this new art taking that analogy from our last slide you probably have an idea of the three steps to success in content delivery first you have to create your content there are several types of content you can create and todd will be doing that for you shortly you could write an email create a flashy announcement share a link or send relevant tasks to your employees after you've decided on the type of content that will be the best method for your information and then created the content you'll get the option to schedule it you'll have to decide when is the best time for users to see this information should it be a reminder that's always on the portal like say an important link that you always want available to your employees do you want to share holiday reminders a week before the holiday a month before the holiday these are the types of things to consider when scheduling content in addition to your employees and what their needs are finally you've created the content you've decided when to schedule it now you can share it but who do you share it with well you can choose to share it with everyone fairly easily but the real power is in uni is in using audiences and criteria to share content if you have international employees you might have international holidays so you share different holidays with different users based on their location or perhaps you need to share certain documents only with new hires the possibilities of sharing are truly endless but now to give you a real taste of content delivery todd will be demoing these three steps to success all right thank you lauren so we're just gonna get into this what i have um up on my screen now hopefully you can all see it is my personal developer developer instance and i've got a couple things already bookmarked here in the instance so that we can that i'll go through and show you so one of the things i wanted to start with was the actual plugins for content delivery so um within the instance if you go to your plugin list and uh you'll see that there's uh you know a handful of content or plugins that start with the word content con the core of it is the content delivery plugin and i just want you to take note that um employee centers employee service center is uh another plug-in that i'm gonna kind of touch on briefly here because it has a little bit of a tie into content delivery so really to active activate content delivery it's core functionality you only need uh the the content delivery plug-in and i'll briefly touch a little bit on content automation as well as content analytics but once you've installed the content delivery plugin you'll notice that you'll then have the ability to a new application with various modules for content delivery so before i go into into uh you know describing what what each of these items are and um you know creating a content what i'm going to do is show you the portal that is provided once you activate the content delivery plugin so when you activate the content delivery plugin it it provides you with a handful of functionality in addition to widgets but it also comes with like kind of a a demo portal i would say so under the content delivery application there is a module here that's just a link to the actual portal and you can see that you know it's not really meant to be a usable out of the box but it does absolutely showcase the capability of content delivery so what we have here is a portal um and if if any of you have experience or at least seen one of servicenow's portals you'll recognize kind of some of the layout bootstrap layout etc but each one of these widgets on this particular landing plate page is a content delivery widget so um they they have a number of examples on this because there are different types of content in content delivery that you can deliver to your end users so we've got some of the i'll show you in the back in here shortly but the header the banner on the top and these two items right here are announcements or banner banner type content we've got a video widget that displays any type of video content that you may provide quick quick link same thing with quick links it's kind of the same as the important links except you you have the ability to provide an image um for the for the link and then at the bottom here we've got a calendar which is really cool uh the the out of the box example always is the holiday calendar but you can ultimately display uh any calendar uh and that has a schedule in in your in the environment in the system and have that display so calendar or perhaps um you know i don't know what some other examples i i think i think you can provide different calendars as well so like uh um uh latin america holidays or maybe your european holidays uh the possibilities are endless there and then there's an upcoming events widget which you can see has some a little bit of html but allows you the user to see information about a particular event and uh gives them the capability to add that to their calendar as an ical file um so that's pretty cool uh but this is ultimately the the front end this is your the result of content delivery is is this kind of um widget so what i'm also going to do now is i'm going to slip swap over i mentioned that the employee service center has a little bit of ties into content delivery and that is because and i'll show you this if you go into the employee service center and look at what required what needs to be installed when you install employee service center you'll see that content automation and content delivery is a requirement so a little bit of background and employee service center i think it was back in the jakarta release employee service center was actually the hr portal um and back then it was it was absolutely called the hr portal and you know i can only speak from a developer's standpoint but back in jakarta um the hr portal had a variety of features that were not available in the out of the box you know standard itsm portal and one of the things that they were continuing to add there was this ability to show targeted content on the hr portal so once they realize that that capability is way beyond the scope of just hr it's it applies to virtually anything um they started decoupling that capability from the hr portal and turned it into its own plug-in which is con now called content delivery so uh the future state of of the hr portal is now actually called the employee service center because for a variety of reasons it it it encompasses more than hr so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to show you the landing page of the employee service center and and you'll notice that there are some familiar objects on the employee service center landing page so once again you've got a banner here with large image i'm sure many of you familiar with the with the lady in her cell phone and some other widgets uh further down the page that i have announcements there's our video videos widget the upcom upcoming events so you can see that content delivery is leveraged on the employee service center portal out of box um that does that doesn't mean that you need to have employee service center it's just showing you that uh you know with content delivery all you get out of the box is a demo portal um and then you kind of have to design your own pages or drive or put it put the widgets as you see fit during your design phase so what i'm going to go into now is uh we're going to dive into portal content because there you as you can see there's a number of items under the content delivery application but one of the things that i particularly wanted to focus on for this demo was a portal content and and that is because that's virtually every everything that you see on the portal there are other types of content that isn't you know directly related to a portal and so i wanted to focus primarily on the portal so as you can see there's a lot of demo demo content in here but one of the key things is that well from here on out we're going to just use the content delivery demo page as a reference point but uh there's a lot of content in here and uh the first thing i wanted to point out it on this list here is the content type so if i just order by this you can see that there are a number of content that i've already been created from the demo data of type banner and somewhere on this landing page those records are being rendered on the landing page so i say somewhere because we're going to get into a little bit of the nitty gritty when you create a content a piece of content so what i'm going to do right now is i'm going to just open up this one the portal content the banner content here just to show you what the form looks like for this particular piece of content so um this is a the the content type is a ban banner and you have when you choose banner you have an option some uh dynamic options here to use custom html or you can you know just use some out-of-the-box elements as well but by default it was it was set to custom html html and what you can see down here is literally an a rich text editor tool that allows you to put virtually any html in there uh so much so for for you web developers out there you'll you'll recognize this but you can go into the source code and literally paste in your html code right here rather than using the the editor but what that's what this gives you is you're creating a piece of content that actually has html designed how you would like it to look and now you know without actually editing any widgets on the portal or customizing anything on the portal specifically you've just created a piece of content that uh the system will then be able to place on your portal dynamically and when i say dynamically i'm that's the next piece that we're going into so though so lauren had kind of alluded to uh on one of the previous slides that once you create a piece of content there it's not going to show up anywhere on any page on any portal until you actually schedule it so creating the piece of content here is like you know your work of art now you've got a schedule it so shows so it shows up somewhere so you'll notice then down below here let's go to um another piece i think this one is a uh i think that our company is part of a campaign i'll get into a little bit of the campaign content as well but um so this is a the content that we've seen both on the employee service center i'm not going to be showing the employee service center anymore but say uh so this is the one that i wanted to show so this is what we see at the top header and you'll notice that this is actually not using the custom html option you'll notice that you know if you check the use custom html then i can do whatever i want in here otherwise you have some default options like button text and button link and uh image etc and that all gets rendered like this so you can have an a button and you know have it linked somewhere and we'll talk about how the how you construct a button link but the alternative is to create just html but more importantly is this piece of content has a schedule on it already it's a related record and i'm just going to open up the form here for the uh scheduled content and you'll see that there's some other information here that you have to populate for the schedule and we're going to go kind of into some of this lightly uh you'll notice that this this allows you to choose kind of what what uh location the content is and you can also specify a page and we'll go a little bit into widget instances here but you have to choose which in widget instance you want it to show up in i can show you demonstrate why it's asking you that because well i guess this isn't the only one here but this is a banner piece of content but you can in this in the demo landing page there are three places where you can place a piece of banner content or a piece of banner information um actually i think this one is a banner and this is these two are announcements so yep shaylee when you're scheduling your content you have to choose where you want it to show up under which widget you want it to show up so just i'm going to reload the form because i just blew that record away so you'll notice that there's a widget instance called welcome banner top and without going into the nitty-gritty there i didn't um close the portal there that's the that's the the item at the top there but this widget instance happens to be named welcome banner top and that's why you can see it on on the landing page that's where it's been pointed at and that's the only place where it's going to show up is only on this page only in this widget and here's where i feel is the exciting part of content delivery and you also specify an audience so this is where content delivery can get really powerful because i created a piece of content that i want to show on the portal but not only do i have that capability of where what portal to show it want i want it to show up and on what page but i can specify which users i want uh to see it so i'm going to show you a couple examples here where we're going to go kind of just step aside here and show you what an audience is so what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on the manage audiences module and we'll see what an audience actually is so in the previous record the schedule content there is a audience called active users and we're going to go in and see what this active users is so you'll notice it's just named active user so i can i can call it whatever i want but what what i'm specifying here is it's a set of users that i can apply a filter of since since the audience type is users it's building a condition builder for you based off of the user table so i can come in here and select users and say in this case you know it's all users that have an active flag of true but you can see how powerful this can get because i can build other um and there are also already demo ones created here but i can build all sorts of different types of audiences like irish this one is actually pointing to what's called an hr criteria if any of you ever heard of user criteria hr criteria is just kind of an extension of that of user criteria in a way but user criteria is another sort of entity in service now where you can create a a specific type of i want to say it's audience but audiences audience is kind of like the the wrapper around user criteria because you you can choose other ways of identifying identifying people other than user criteria but as you can see i can come in here and create a user criteria and i can choose what type of users i can specify individual users for this user criteria or i can uh choose specific companies locations departments whatever and i can even get even crazier and script my logic into determining what users fit this user criteria but once this user criteria is created you can then leverage it as an audience in content delivery so i'll show you that back to that irish employees example this content is of type hr criteria and i'm just choosing the irish employees hr criteria that is already predefined and there's an option here where you can see okay exactly who would end up seeing this if you chose this criteria which is kind of cool so that we've got three individuals here that are irish employees so um i'm gonna go ahead and try just show you what the form looks like for a new criteria and we can come up with something funky um just as something new so i don't know we'll say um and we'll say let's try users and we'll say yeah we want them to be active and we want um let's see we want them to be anybody who's in the city of let's say uh denver or city of minneapolis where i hail from or let's say city of new york so any active employees that are uh at any three of these cities that i don't know let's throw in something crazy like um maybe photo is anything so they have a photo i don't know whatever so we've only got two users that that that uh this criteria applies to so we've just created this demo audience and and now what i can do is now that i have this demo audience whenever i go to create any portal any content i can choose when i'm building my schedule i can choose who gets to see that so i can say for this person no i don't want active users audience i want only those that crazy filtered uh demo audience so now on the portal when i save this the only people the only t uh i haven't filled this out here but the only people that will be able to see this piece of content that i have scheduled will be those two people that happen to be from colorado or denver minneapolis or or new york and happen to have a photo attached to their user record um and then let me just go slightly deeper into uh different types of audiences that you can create you can also upload a file so you can just upload a file of just uh some you know static set of users that you want to show content to uh which is which is really cool and then you've got of course um you can select hr profiles that i'm not going to really get deep into that because we're assuming at least i'm assuming for this demo purposes that we're speaking specifically to content delivery not how it's represented in in hr but you can define an audience based off of an hr profile or hr criteria or user criteria so having said that um you know i wanted to show you a little bit of what we can actually do uh you know there's there's different content type and i'll show you the different types of content here uh and these are the you know the predefined content types and you as you can see we've seen the type of banner um there's also let's say styled contact content uh i think there's like a is there a rich text there should be rich text here yeah rich text which is the announcements widget so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go in here and i'm going to just create a piece of content as an announcement so we'll say rich text and we'll say okay check this out check and we'll go in here and let's say um so just slapping something really quick together here uh so i've created a piece of content here and i know it's boring and just uh having one sentence here but i'm going to submit it and remember going back to what i had said earlier let me bring an update date here that i've created the record but i haven't scheduled it so it's still not going to show up anywhere so let's create the schedule for it all right so we've chosen this the service portal it wants to sh we want it to show up on the service portal we want it to show up on which page and this can in this case with the content delivery landing pages content delivery demo um and then now we have to choose the instance so you notice how there's two instances this is this this uh choice list here is filtered by the type of content the widget is offering so on the landing page we've got two widgets that are showing rich text type content so since there's two of them on this landing page you can see that though for this page there are you have two options so we'll just we're just going to go ahead and put it into the major announcements and now audience go ahead and choose that demo audience we created and we'll save that so just going to go back here and review our crazy requirements for that audience so i am in here as admin um and i am active am i in one of these cities i don't know let's just uh yeah actually i do have a photo so let's just see if i load this page am i gonna see that piece of content under major announcements why is that let's go check it out and i think i think i might be squashing it here because um i'm an admin and i believe admin can see virtually everything so let's go view default let's see i think it's um oh i think i built the criteria different here so let me just go back to this audience here i'm going to clear it up i think i got a little too crazy with the requirements for that audience so i'm going to say that i have to be in one of these cities and i have to i have to be active right so now when i go here and i shouldn't see this content here right you see that this is the only piece of content that's visible to me that was the default piece and another thing that's kind of cool about the rich text widgets on this landing page is that they're just flat uh banner content until more than one is added then they're automatically automatically turned into carousels so i can't see this piece of unique um piece of content that we created why not well that's because i'm not in one of these these cities so let's go change that go to my profile view uh i think i have to add it to the form here so bear with me all right switch back to content delivery so city where'd my city go city is blank right so can't see it because i don't i don't fit one of those profiles so i'm going to say i'm from minneapolis i'm living in minneapolis nice save that come back here boom look at that now i can see this piece of content so pretty um pretty limited example but the important thing to to pull away from that is that you can see how you can see how you can completely change what shows up on this entire page based on who your end user is um i you know i've got you know i had a previous uh uh project client project where the company had a service portal and they had they were all over the world they were global they had all over they were all over the world they had subsidiaries and those subsidiaries were in some of the countries or one country or all of the countries and they wanted content to be shown and in different languages uh differently to those you know if you were if the end user was in particular subsidiary and was in this country versus the other country or was not in a subsidiary it was i mean it was pretty crazy but you could see how like you know the content for that portal changes dynam drastically for or can change drastically for the end user so pretty amazing stuff i think i think really with the content delivery yeah it's cool you can throw some content up there but what's really powerful is that you can specify who gets to see it you can really uh deliver some unique portals that way and i think that's about all i really wanted to demo i we can you know obviously i can sit here and talk about it forever but i think you should probably cut myself off thanks todd that was great all right so now we're gonna move on to some questions and answers and some are coming in so here's the first question i noticed there were other categories of content how are those used ah that's a good question that's uh yeah as you can see the content delivery is um there's a lot more to that plug-in that application than what we were looking at you know i showed you portal content but you also have notification content you have to do content and they all they function a little bit different to do content does have a real estate on portal as well but that's a way where you can construct content that the end user actually has to do like for example uh watch a video and so you know and you would create it to do content that attached a video and it requires them to finish that and that actually creates a task in the background notification content is um not portal uh doesn't exist on the portal but that's for email notifications but same thing you can you can imagine i can send out a blast out an email to a certain set of people based off of audiences that i've created it's a it's pretty powerful so yeah there are different types out there and i encourage you to explore it because um we just kind of brushed the tip of the iceberg there awesome yeah good answer um here's another one can you create your own content types yes um you can create your own content types uh there are is kind of a out of the box categories as i showed you like for example there's a banner content type there is a rich text they were just linked content types in a previous project i created a what was what i called a contact us content type which is just a different kind of content type where i just wanted like a html field but i wanted to present it differently and i wanted different colors so i enable different fields if you go to the portal content form you'll notice if you go check out business rules on that table on that forum you'll notice that there are tons of business rules showing and hiding various fields based off of what content type you choose so when you create a new content you can there's a place that right in there's it's table based so you can create a new record for a new content type and uh you'll just have to play around with the business rules on the on the portal content table so you can have the right one show up i think what i did was like you know if you choose the call us content type just show all fields i'll deal with it later you can do that but you but you absolutely can so in my example i created a content type called contact us and and allowed people to put in different contact numbers that showed up for different people so he had a contact number for latin america or he had a contact number for north america or canada and yeah so definitely can have different type types of content awesome and looks like we have one more question is portal content designed specifically for landing pages no that's a that's a great actually a great question and it comes to play into play a lot more with the employee service center because employee service center is sometimes promoted as a enterprise level portal and what that means is it's the it can be designed to be the one stop shop portal for all of the companies business needs for example for hr and for it and for finance or facilities and but the problem is is that once you bring on in all of those departments into a single portal well each one of those departments will want their own content you know you have got one only one landing page so a lot of times um with the employee service centers that we'll create separate pages for each department and those separate pages can have their own content completely different content so you could have like a an hr uh landing page as well so on you know on your on your main landing page you have a link to hr when they click on that it takes them to a page that is like the hr specific page and there's content there that only shows up you know you can create announcements for hr that only show up on that page not on the landing page or maybe both um yeah so it's not just for landing pages it can uh you can really put it to use um for you know enterprise level portals as well on different pages too awesome thanks todd sure all right well that looks like all the questions so i'd like to move on and announce the winner of our 50 visa gift card and it looks like the winner is tyler pickard congratulations um thank you to everyone for attending today's webinar we hope you enjoyed it and if you have any more questions feel free to reach out to info clientcast.com and we can have todd or lauren answer any questions thanks and enjoy the rest of your day