[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 take your company communication into the future with grouply before we get started i'd like to give you some background information on glidecast consulting glidefast 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 cset score of a 4.8 out of 5 and 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 end of today's session so be sure to stay on for the entire webinar i'm excited to hand things over to our presenters for today we have david arbour a senior architect josh brostoff a service delivery manager and smit patel a senior technical consultant all right well david josh and smith you guys can take it from here awesome thank you very much lauren i appreciate the intro and uh hi everyone my name is josh brossoff as lauren was saying i'm one of the service delivery managers here at glidefast and smith david and i are very excited to talk with you today about grouply it's a new application that we've built completely on the servicenow platform for group text messaging and collaboration so a little bit of an overview of today's agenda what we'll be talking about just kind of starting off with an overview you know what is grouply and and really then we'll transition into how it works and the different use cases that you can send text messages through our our group lee application and then what we'll do kind of after we give you that overview about how everything is is set up with group lead we're going to transition into a demo so i'll be handing it off to smit and david so you can really get a better idea about how the application works within servicenow and then at the end we'll open it up for q a so if you have any questions about how the application works overall um or you know how it might fit into your servicenow instance or different use cases that you have we'll we'll open it up at the end there for any questions so first and foremost what does group lee allow users to do so grouply allows uh you to send group based text messages based on any event in servicenow so what's really important about this is when you have you know whether it's a major incident or whether it's a server is gone down or whether you have an outage you can send group text messages and actually track those responses back in servicenow so for those of you who have ever been in a group text message thread with with your friends or family members grouply behaves the same way and it leverages something called the conversation api to enable that conversation to happen but something that's really nice about this is when you're tracking an event or you know all of everything that goes into resolving an event you want to also you know see the historical data associated with it and that's where we enable the responses that come back in a text message thread with group lead to actually flow back into the associated record in servicenow and that's really important for making sure that you never lose track of anything that's happened as part of that event you really want to make sure you can report on it if an executive wants to go back you can also see what has happened as part of that and how the issue got resolved so grouply is simple it's fast and it's all built on the servicenow platform which is really great um so you can install it directly into your service now instance you can leverage all of the existing data that you already have so all of the users on your user table all of the groups all of the data that you're already maybe pulling from active directory you can leverage because it's installed as an application completely on your servicenow platform and as part of that it's also a scoped application which means we're not going to impact the other work that's going on in your servicenow instance so you know what servicenow is really good at is sending email notifications right but something that we do see with a lot of customers is they start they get so many email notifications from servicenow they just set up a filter and their outlook and all those email notifications just flow into that and natively servicenow doesn't really offer any good you know one-on-one instant chat capability especially through text messages so really that's where we come in as a nice add-on to to enable the actual real-time text messaging with other group members and this is something that you really can't do natively out of the boxing service now so this really fits in nicely to be able to notify people within your organization in real time when things are happening so i just wanted to run through some of the additional features that are included within uh groupley so the first is the bi-directional group text message conversation so not only when you you know you're sending text messages outbound from your servicenow platform it's also coming back into servicenow as well when people respond so that's what we mean by bi-directional the text measures are going out and they're also coming back in as well and being recorded within the associated record you can view the text messages in a group conversation format on the forum view or on mobile as well so we have a really nice ui that david and smith are going to be showing you later that's really easy to set up you can control when conversations start and end so based on a certain event you can start that conversation and then you can also choose to manually end it or we can actually choose to end it at a particular time based on a timer it's one of the nicest pieces about this as well is the overall functionality in how we designed this application we built it in a way that we wanted it to be very no code low code and when i say that it means that your developers don't need to write any code to bring this application to life to send text messages it's all condition based which means based on a condition builder and service now we could say you know the priority is one you're able to send those text messages so we really build that design where you don't need to build to be a developer you can be an administrator or someone who really doesn't have a technical background to be able to send these text messages very easy you know to control security around who can do what and who can set up the configurations and also the ability to assign tasks through a text so this is a big one as well if you wanted if there's a p1 incident and you have people on call you could actually send out that text message and based on the response we can actually take database actions on the record so i could accept an incident being assigned to me i could promote it to a major incident and various different use cases that your organization might have so how does the group leave product work and again this is it's a very easy setup that we have to be able to send out these group text messages so the first is going through and actually identifying your event that you want to send that text message right so we could say there's a p1 incident on this particular server there is a priority one there's a major incident there's a case for one of our biggest customers that needs to be escalated to a manager there is a security incident for you know a particular configuration item really any event that you could think of or any use case that you have that's where grouply is able to come in and really assist you with sending out those text messages so the first one is really identifying your use case the second is creating what we call a configuration record so this is where you're actually building the individual conditions that are going to send out your group text messages and david and smith are going to be showing you how you can build one of these coming up in the demo in a few minutes here so like you can see in the screenshot we have the priority one is critical and the caller is smith patel or the caller is josh brostoff right so you can really start to identify those individual conditions that are going to be sending out those text messages and again this is where it really you know plays nicely with not needing to be a developer you know you can really have no technical background to be able to create these configuration records to send out the text messages and the third is just sending it so once the text messages get sent out we can actually track all of the live conversations within grouply and we can also see all of the responses who are the participants of that conversation are and as people send back text messages you can see those come into the portal in real time so the records in servicenow are actually updating you don't need to refresh your page you can actually see the new text messages popping up as people start to respond so what's great about this as well is your organization may have various different applications that you use within servicenow whether it's hr security incident service catalog to cmdb the way that we've set this up strategically is to make it usable for all these different applications so you don't need to actually build out new configurations to be able to use it for these different tables you actually get these out of the box so anything that is really extending task or if you also have additional use cases for other things as well you can use group leaf for those so one of the really nice pieces about this you know you're not just getting this for incident management in itsm strictly you're really getting it for the broader platform so really as you continue to expand your you know your footprint of servicenow within your organization you can really offer this this application to other groups as well so what i'm going to do now is go ahead and hand it off to smith patel and he's going to walk you through some of the demo features of groupley awesome thank you josh all right so i'm a senior technical consultant with glide fast i've been on the working with the servicenow platform for about six plus years i'm really looking forward to showing this app to you guys and just going to the nitty-gritty of it so as josh mentioned we have something called configuration records so what those are is basically a record where you can specify exactly what type of alert that you want to go out who do you want to go uh send that to for example in this case is to the dev members group and what fields do you want from the actual record so for example on the record if you have a contact or a customer that you can specify and dot walk those uh personas to send the notifications so it's not restrictive based on just groups you could dialogue to any field that you have access to depending on the table that you are the second thing we have is the condition builder we wanted to be located no code where all you have to do is just put in what condition do you want this event to trigger so in this case it's priority is critical short description is either this or that and you have something called a start message and end message what that is is what will be the initial message so in here as you see we have something called this is a p1 alert and then we have uh these type of variable fields so what that does is you could actually get the uh dynamically fields from the actual record so in this case it would be the table name and the number will be pretty popular so you don't have to have hard-coded messages you know they could be dynamic to the flow of what you uh what record that it triggers off also you can mention bridges so in this case uh we've mentioned a bridge where once this alert fires uh it'll be part of the initial text message and at that point whoever is supposed to be joining those in this example the group lead them members will be able to join a couple uh things that we have in here are the different uh alert types so to speak or event types one of them is a lit where it simply just sends out the message um and records the message back into the platform we have something called assignment so assignment was what josh was mentioning where you could directly have some response come in that says yes i'll take this incident or yes to a specific keyword or keywords and we'll assign that particular record to that individual who responded so it's easily accessible from different means we also have something called escalation so for example let's say this p1 was created but nobody was assigned to it you could theoretically have a escalation event trigger after four minutes let's say you want to send out another text message to a different group saying hey you know why is this not still why is this still not a sign and so forth so we have developed this in a way where you could dynamically choose a bunch of different factors and conditions to start these events and easily send out the message so for this demo purposes we're going to go with this p1 incident where it has to meet these categories and depending on that we'll go and send that message so we'll go ahead and create a new instrument so in this incident i'll choose myself josh or david as a caller and then we'll say we have software issue can system and then we have group of service and then you can select anything so for example you know you can sell the particular ci that this issue is occurring on and then you can go and say grouply and the party has to be one and save so all this will do is go ahead and fire off that initial notification that it takes maybe 10 seconds to go out and it'll give you an exact highlight view of okay you know what is going on who all is invited to the actual conversation and so forth so we also have a couple of other things as you see up here we have a sentex ui action and the end text conversation so end text will potentially go ahead and end the conversation if let's say you were done with this instrument we also have the send text where let's say you're not part of the actual conversation uh and i want to ask for an update so let's say if i'm a director or something i was not part of the conversation and like this incident pops up on my dashboard so then i could just simply ask where's the status of this incident and then i could say it's that so as you see the text message was sent and if you refresh and scroll down you can see uh we have a relative list for text messages so in here you know it'll say where exactly this text message was fired from the in this case it was sent from servicenow form and it'll say who the person was or who was the person who took action on that actual message we also captured the initial messages that get sent out so later in the demo we'll show the actual portal ui and it's a better way of showing all this data so it's going to be a one-stop shop that we have compiled all the data in and you could send text messages and so forth but that's all you can do on the back end that's all it takes you just trigger an incident and the app takes care of the rest of it so if let's say david or josh or myself were responding you could theoretically um they would appear down there so as you just saw josh hey i'm you're joining now josh responded awesome so uh again it's easily trackable and you know we have different records in place to make sure that the data is handled correctly um so that's all i have on the back inside we also have the portal view that david has developed so i'll go ahead and let him take it from there sure yeah so we have a portal here for uh grouply that's what's showing right now um and so the idea here was we wanted to build something that was sort of a one-stop shop for everyone to go to i'm sorry for users to go to so that they didn't have to navigate through the platform ui so we provided this portal it's one stop shop everything is here you can see all live so we're in here is an admin right now as an admin you can see all live conversations you can see past conversations um that have taken place that are no longer active you can search on those by any number of factors that's configurable but you can search by participants you can search by um incident number or task number whatever it is that that you're looking for um those probably all have josh in them submit that's not limiting them down there you go so it does the type of head search type thing where it shows uh you know what what those results are in lifetime um and then in the live conversations if we go to live conversations right quick um we can see that we actually have the incident that smith just created and it is right in front of us here so you can view participants uh the phone numbers that are associated with each participant um and you can view the messages you can see that these are the messages that have come through today if this is a message i'm sorry this is a conversation that spans more than one day uh then you're gonna see more than one day here and you can view it by day um i'm going to respond real quick uh just so you can see live time how it updates i'm gonna say i'm here as well how can i help so let's see and we'll show you how you can do it in the portal as well had these in the portal okay so i've just just texted back that i'm saying that i have joined this conversation and there i am i'm here as well how can i help um so that came through my text i can see all of the conversation all of the text messages within this one in my you know normal text messaging app in in uh i have an ios and one's an iphone um but you then you can also see it here and live updates um do you want to go ahead and add one maybe smith so if you were an admin or a user in here viewing this conversation that you so as an admin you're going to see all conversations as a user you're going to see the conversations that you're part of um so right now we're in as an admin and so we can send it directly from the portal as well and then that comes to all of our phones as well as a new text message that's that's part of that conversation uh so like i said one-stop shop you know single pane of glass type thing here you can view configuration records from in here you can create configuration records in here um you can see the in your in-use phone numbers so uh the way this works is that you're um you're allocated a certain number of phone numbers that don't change um that uh you know we we administer for you um and so you're gonna see a list of your phone numbers that are in use so we have four conversations going on right now with different uh incidents as you can see and we also have the available numbers and i don't know if we have any available right now but go ahead and click it yeah see none available so all four of ours are used right now um some larger companies are going to have you know many many numbers some smaller companies are probably only going to have a few so basically you can't have a phone number uh if you run out of phone numbers you can't have another conversation started so you want to have enough phone numbers there allocated for yourself uh that you're not gonna run out of those phone numbers okay but as soon as a conversation ends that phone number becomes available again um so i wanted to just show real quick on live conversations schmidt if you would um on our incident that we're looking at here there's also a few uh things that you can do directly from here for managing the conversation so you can open the conversation in the platform right there and so that's going to open a new tab that takes you to the conversation record this one's only available for admins so users won't see that and the you can actually go to the task record that it's related to as well the record and that is available to non-admins as well so they can go to the record and see what's going on with it if they need to um and you also have the little power button there which allows us to end the conversation and they'll end the conversation in servicenow as well as uh on the other on on the api side that's driving um uh all of these notifications um and it frees up the number for you so um i think that's it for the portal um we are adding enhancements constantly as well so just want to say that that um there's a lot on here that's configurable and there's a lot on here that we can we can add for you exactly awesome and now i'll just quickly show how all this conversation looks on a cell phone so so as you can see in my cell phone i get all the text messages back and forth where it will tell me exactly what platform is coming from so if it's a regular text message it'll just say who the user is in this case josh said hey i'm here join now and then he was saying hey i'm working and then as you see we have different tags or name tags associated with the text message that's come through because for some reason you know you may not have somebody's number so you want to know who's responding to the actual conversation so we have that built in and we also have different um if you're responding from a group with portal or the backend form we have differentiators in place so that way you know exactly where the message is coming from are going and they come in instantaneously so just and the flow between the text messages and service now is maybe a second if that so it's fast it's quick it's easy to manage and that's what we wanted to aim when we wanted to develop this app yeah and the driving force here is to get people available when something is is down you know incident is is a prime example of that something's down something that's high priority is down so rather than opening a bridge and trying to collect everyone we know everyone has cell phones let's send a message out to everyone that's involved and and get everyone on it asap because that's the point right is to resolve an incident as quickly as you possibly can exactly and the use cases are you know depends on what your company or your use cases are for example it could go from csm with customers it could go to psychops incident management and so forth so the number of use cases we have are based on whatever you are already consuming or will want to consume in the future so there's no limitations as to how much or how little you can use this app in your platform now i see some um questions so i'm going to read these to you guys and submit david josh feel free to answer them so first question i see you're logged into the app as an admin during this demo do all users of the app see that same view in the portal or is this view for non-admins different i'll take that one uh yeah so uh well as we sort of mentioned uh throughout the demo there are certain things that are going to be missing for non-admins like uh you know ending a conversation you want those to happen naturally um if it's not being done by an admin you don't want users to go in and in your conversation without you know for no reason um so there are certain things that don't show but there's the the layout of the application is the same so you know there's gonna be quite or there's gonna be functionality you don't get but the layout is the same awesome here's another one how can i find out more about pricing for this application yeah i'll take that one so in terms of pricing it's really based on the size of your organization and how many people are going to be participating in these text message conversations but if you have specific questions around the pricing for organization you can reach out to us at info gladfast.com and i'll actually roll into the you know the next one here as well in regards to pricing is there an independent app or do i have to purchase something else with it so this is completely independent here so really the way this works is it's a scoped application and we are really um you don't have to purchase a specific application from servicenow um it is considered a standalone application that essentially integrates with other pieces of your servicenow platform awesome thanks josh um got a bunch of questions here um how quickly would we be able to deploy this application after buying it awesome uh i could take that one yeah so we've made it where all you have to do is plug and play right you get yourself x amount of numbers so we could give you depending on your organization needs if you say you need 50 numbers we would deploy that for you with the application so all you have to do is simply just install the application in your whether it's dev broad test and that's all it you don't have to really configure anything else just numbers and authentication and then you're good to go so maybe an hour at max and set up your configuration records but that's going to be they're specific to customers so exactly those are very simple to set up yep great um two more questions here can the users opt in and out of these texts via notification preferences in their profile yes uh i could take that one too um yeah so we have a option in the notification so each uh user profile has an option whether or not they want to receive grouping messages so it's simple true or false or checkbox you just check it if you want it uh you know check it off if you don't want it so as simple as that um depending on what your organization needs are you could have that default to true for everybody so everybody will have to opt out or you know everybody would have to opt in depending on what the use cases are but it's totally it's flexible in that way great and looks like we have one more question how many tables will this application take up um so we've tried to kept uh keep this application as low as possible so there's only four tables that come through with the application so it helps with the licensing and the cost that the customers have so we don't create a big splash in the customer's environment so that was also a goal or aim of us to make sure that you know we don't have had to make customers buy more tables or so forth so it's only four tables and they're pretty simple to configure as well awesome well that looks like all the questions um that just came in and if anyone else does have any more questions that arise definitely reach out to us at info glidefast.com but now i'd like to move on and announce the winner of our 50 visa gift card and it looks like the winner is lou honabek congratulations lou we're going to be sending you your visa gift card through the email that you signed up for this webinar on thank you to everyone for attending today's webinar we hope you enjoyed it and learned a lot if you have any more questions feel free to reach out to us on our social media channels or at info glidefast.com to see more on-air sessions just visit our website thanks everyone and enjoy the rest of your day [Music] [Applause] you