[Music] hi everyone welcome to Glide fast on air I'm Lauren Jankowski the marketing manager here at Glide pass and I'll be moderating today's webinar answering the age-old question flow designer or workflow editor I'm excited to introduce to you your presenters for today David Arbor a senior architect at Glide fast and Matt Du Monde an architect here at Glide fast before we get started I'd like to give you some background information on Glide fast 5s consulting is a consulting firm that is dedicated exclusively to service now as an elite service our partner our expert team of developers and architects have worked on both sides of the table on the customer side and the consulting side our company was founded by ServiceNow architects and we're proud to have a team of over a hundred experienced consultants an average CSAT score of nine point six and many more athletes as you can see here will 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 as another perk of attending today's webinar we'll be giving away a $50 Visa gift card we'll announce the winner of that at the end of today's session now I'd like to hand things over to Matt and David thanks Lauren all right so let me start out by outlining a few questions we'd like to help answer today what is flow designer you've probably heard a lot about it but may not be aware of what it was designed to accomplish a no code alternative to solve common service problems today we're gonna go over some of the benefits of flow designer and how it can solve that potentially solve that problem for your company what can I begin to transition to flow designer ServiceNow manages a lot of process flows in a lot of places what are some things that make sense to transition from those places and a flow designer and last when do I use workflow editor flow designer was not intended to replace workflow editor and there are a few types of flows that we think still make more sense and workflow editor will go ahead and provide those examples and some more detail later on so first let's go over some of the benefits of flow designer it's designed to consolidate multiple now platform automation capabilities as well as configuration and runtime information into a single end buyer with the addition of no code flow design and integration hub repeatable automations can be tracked and logged in one place I'm sure some of you have experienced the headache of code and log entry spread across the entire environment and many of us have probably at some point designed some form of custom application to work around this it also provides natural language descriptions of flow logic which goes back to that low code no code philosophy and enables subject matter experts to develop and share reusable actions this is a feature that I think most developers can get behind at least to some extent as it allows more granular delegation of development to the teams in charge of particular processes while maintaining a level of security and control over the codebase it also reduces upgrade costs with upgrade safe now platform logic replacing complex custom script while it can replace some script we will point out later in David's portion of the presentation that this may not always be the case for some more complex scripts and we may not recommend necessarily using it for a really complex code base as well it's also designed to reduce development costs by providing a library of reusable actions again this is true of the flow actions we will discuss later and be can be extremely helpful for companies that wish to take a more distributed development approach to their ServiceNow development it enables flow designer extension by way of integration or installing spokes we won't dig too much into this into integration hub as it's not part of the out-of-the-box platform it is an additional cost but I would recommend that you talk to your account manager about whether this library of external spokes is right for your company and last but certainly not least it is able to call workflow editor flows and this is a pretty key for the discussion that we're going to have because as we go into what makes sense the flow designer versus workflow editor you can always keep in the back of your mind that even if something seems to fit better and workflow editor you can still front-end workflow with the flow designer and trigger workflows anywhere in that process so just keep that in your pocket while we go through this now for those who aren't already familiar with flow designer I would like to briefly summarize the major components before we dig in to where it makes sense to use it the basic flow is pretty simple the flow is triggered and this can be by a variety of things including emails scheduled jobs record updates etc and those options are expanding as new releases come out a condition determines under what circumstances that trigger should generate a new flow event then the actions which are highly flexible and can be maintained by developers in a separate codebase get triggered throughout the process these make reusable these are reusable and available to the app honors while maintaining security so we'll dive into that a little bit later on but the reusability of the actions is a strong point of flow designer because you can design a set of work and create an action around it and then distribute it to various teams and have them use those within their flows executions allow you to monitor each flow and view its progress flow designer has a contained set of logs that make tracking down flow errors a lot easier and then lastly the data panel auto populates with all of the data that you pull into the flow plus extended Glide record information about those items a lot of what you would normally have to retrieve in a work flow via script about about records that you're trying to update or to modify or just pulling in information through Glide record queries a lot of that's pre-populated as soon as you retrieve that record within the flow designer as you can see the basic composition of flow designer is a compact interface intended to be user-friendly and that's going to be a running theme with flow designer that it's it's a way to simplify a lot of the work that you would do with workflow editor for reusability purposes and for redistribution and packaging of code so this is the ServiceNow slide for training on the flow designer that talks about when tourist now believes you could use flow designer later on we'll be covering some of the cases where you might not want to use flow designer at least not in the current state it starts with are you running Kingston or Newark because flow designer and integration hub were introduced around this time you obviously can't use it if it doesn't exist yet so that's a pretty important question to ask before trying to use a flow instead of a workflow for versions beyond that look what these questions become relevant is your trigger a create read update delete table operation or schedule I would add the caveat that that's actually that base of triggers is being expanded with new releases so this question may expand depending on what version you're on and you might have other ways that you could trigger a flow so that question has to be re-evaluated the other question is are all the steps and actions that you need in the flow designer this one's a lot on what components you own as far as integration hub and flow designer but it's also another expanding base of actions because each version releases new opportunities and new actions and you can create your own custom ones as well so that's something that you are constantly evaluating in your environment excuse me and then lastly does your logic include if-then branching or a linear flow will Slater share some examples of wide that question is very important to ask yourself before implementing a designer flow and rather than address that here will actually show some examples of of different cases so this next slide is to address a question I actually asked myself when flow designer was first released floo designer just a fancy business role I contend that it it adds a few more features that are pretty handy so this just does a quick comparison between the two business rules our server-side script triggered by crud operations on a single table whereas designer flows can be triggered by as we talked about earlier multiple events and that number of events keeps expanding and they have different ways to be triggered business rules typically are going to run the same script every time their trigger you you build the business rule you write the scripts you give it a condition and when it reaches that condition it triggers that script and it's one script contained within the script field on a designer flow you have the ability to create a series of activities just like in workflow editor that are all triggered initially and then they're triggered sequentially by each other in a linear fashion so you can accomplish a lot more from a workflow or from a designer flow than you could from a business rule but it's it's got the flexibility of a business rule and that you can attach it to table crud operations and then the last two are reacting to form changes and not interacting directly with each other without some form of complex scripting and then requiring JavaScript coding for just about anything beyond a basic update to a record or field change where any designer flows you the intention is that you can do a lot of the same activities without meeting the complex coding the activities do that work for you so either they can be coded ahead of time by a group of developers and then admins or scoped app owners or things like that could use those flows or there's a lot of out-of-the-box functionality that does that work for you and then that goes back to the reusable actions that can be used in a pro code capacity but with the caveat that for any major scripting you wouldn't need integration hub but from the no code perspective flow designer has a lot of options there so if you've been in ServiceNow a while you've collected quite a base of scripts and workflows if you're like I was as a customer you're constantly being asked by the business to innovate and implement new features with little attention given to improving the old ones here are a few low overhead items that potentially could be a win a quick win for your organization if transitioned into flow designer so we'll start with simple workflows when I say simple workflow that goes back to that slide by ServiceNow that said do you have very simple linear flows that have if-then statements in them so anything that's just a approval or a few approvals followed by a task or several tasks that may be done in sequence that falls into me in the category of simple workflow and could be a good candidate an example here is when I just threw together that is a side by side of a flow designer version of a workflow that just has a manager approval and a task and then closes out you could recreate the same thing because it's very linear you're just doing if it's this state go here if it's not go here wait for certain states to apply on the task depending on the state's go one way or the other you'll notice here that this checks for three different states that's where it could get a little bit more complicated and flow designer because you see it's it it's basically is it this or is it this if you had four or five options you may not be able to easily branch that flow so these are these are obvious use cases where you could put them into flow designer so why would you put it into flow designer that's really up to your company's needs but I would make the case for considering what we talked about earlier which is the logging and maintaining all of your codebase in one central hub I'm sure a lot of you have tried to troubleshoot workflows in the past especially in production where you're going to the script logs or it might be the error might have showed up on the work flow or you might have just an activity State on the work flow and you have to decide from that did it trigger properly there's three or four different ways that we know a lot of experience to go troubleshoot a work flow with a flow designer you would be able to go into the executions list that was on the previous slide pull that up show the previous executions of the flow and then find each step and where where the variables were set and what errors occurred and that kind of thing so it does help a lot with troubleshooting code base and just having all in one place next on the list is a synchronous business rules well I don't think I could say with all honesty that a flow designers right to replace every kind of business rule I do think a sinkers business rules are a very good candidate for this flow designer has some struggle with the idea of a condition that triggers and the flow triggers and let's say you have a task that has to be completed within that flow before the next activity triggers if you have a task needs to be completed and didn't get completed but let's say the flow triggers on an update of incident and that incident gets updated again then the next flow triggers you may not know right where in the process that flow that previous flow is and even if you could just cancel that flow it might stop in the middle of a task that's being generated or something like that and then the next flow would trigger and you'd have two flows on top of each other possibly one that's cancelled or you have them running simultaneously if you get messy quickly if you're not careful with your triggers and how you're designing the flows and what you're designing into the flows asynchronous business rules are a quick win because that's how they're designed to work anyway they're just there to be triggered run and then complete in the background and flow designer is perfect for that because that's I mean that's where it shines is you trigger it you set up all of your meter activities and a line they all trigger in a row they trigger without any monitoring or anybody needing to watch them and then when they're done there's that they're done and you have your list of executions to look back and see what happened so one good example of this is just a very simple a very simple asynchronous business rule that goes from the incident whenever an incident is created and writes a comment to the related CI you can see here it's just a quick script that I threw together in the asynchronous business rule when it runs it's I could put a log statement in here to log it to the script log alternatively I could just put this in here where I have an out-of-the-box action that already exists for adding a comment and I'm able to retrieve the incident from this previous step and just write to the comments on that incident no code involved it's going to write to the executions table and show me what happened in the background it's just gonna run on its own and it's very quick to do so this might be a good case for consolidating at least your asynchronous activities into flow designer and and then keeping some of your other things in business rules we've also got a simple catalog item workflows that the main difference here as you probably aware is that catalog items function a little bit differently because when you submit a catalog item there's a lot of stuff that has to happen in the background to generate the request item the request and the task it doesn't just it's not a one-to-one so with some recent updates to flow designer it is now possible to take a catalog item instead of specifying a workflow you can select a flow to run off of it instead and that to be the primary triggered flow and then on the the rhythm that's generated there use is usually a show workflow button or link then that link now goes out to flow designer if you've assigned a flow to it with that functionality you could do similar to what we talked about with simple workflows you could do very simple steps are very common types of catalog items using flow designer and keep all of those in the same place and then I always go back to what I think is the main benefit of flow designer over other features which is the ability to maintain your code in one place the ability to distribute that code to people who aren't necessarily developers or who may be part of the business if they have a scoped application or something where they need to run a workflow you can hand that packaged code off and they would be able to to use that to build their own catalog items so this is just a simple example from the out-of-the-box ServiceNow instance of a catalog item it's actually a record producer and you see here that it's pointing to the outage table and has a note the let's create a new incident is a different item so in cases like this where you might normally just want to a quick record producer to throw something out there but it points to one table you could very easily just say alright well this is a simple flow I'm gonna ask a few questions up at the front end to decide for the user is this actually an incident or is it actually an outage and then have the workflow branch a little bit and decide all right we're gonna create this type of record versus this type of record or we're going to change the results a little bit the tasks that are generated some of that you can do with workflow editor and often this would be resolved with either an order guide or multiple record producers but it isn't a simple type of task that could be done using flow designer and in lieu of workflow editor if you're looking for things that you could easily transition without too much overhead and then lastly we have reusable actions every company has its list of activities that are performed across the business over and over and over for usable actions offer a way to codify that work into a library that can be distributed depending on the structure of your servers now environment to either to your administrators your app owners or even to power users in some cases this allows you to manage a single codebase with security while providing flexibility on top of that ServiceNow actually offers an ever-expanding base of out-of-the-box action spanning across the majority of the various product Suites so in this case I just have one example of the ITSM suite where you can see a lot of these activities were already predefined but beyond that you have the ability to create new ones where you could generate your own custom activities to do whatever's relevant to your company that maybe you want to put together an action for a serie a set of actions for the company and then have those be available to be used in any of the flows where on the company including by teams that aren't necessarily yours and you can still handle that codebase taking advantage of these transition opportunities there's four that we mentioned is a great way to start dating your codebase with those use cases in mind I'm gonna hand it over to David who's gonna go over some types of activities that probably make more sense to leave and workflow editor thank you Matt appreciate that all that was excellent information so yeah I'm gonna talk to you about those right we have four examples but the things that we think would be a little bit more difficult to put into slow descent or not impossible and we'll talk about that a little bit but a little bit more difficult to put in the flow to designer and may still fit better in the workflow editor so yeah so I'll go through these so each one of these is gonna have its own slide where I have an example that I built as well so we'll start with multi pack and multi path were basically talking about workflows they could follow one of many paths right so typically this would be like a switch activity where you have a variable that has or a field that has a ton of values to choose from where you know you can technically do that in Imbler designer but you're talking about it's possibly extremely nesting if-then statements or really large if-then statements that really make the the the flow designer it sort of takes away the whole purpose of blow designer being simple and easy to read and easy to use so I have a very simple example here that I've created it only has two options for the switch statement but as you can see if we had a variable that had like 30 options I could very easily just slide that that that switch activity into this flow and it's automatically gonna build all of those different pathways for me and I just have to connect them so something that we think is a bit easier to do still in the in the workflow editor but not impossible to do in in flow designer is this switch statement again very very simple example the next one we'll look at is nonlinear or closed right so these are workloads that typically would involve some sort of rollback so some decision is made during the workflow and for whatever reason we have to go back to some tasks or some some code prior to right and so in this little example that I've created we have a task that has two pathways it could either be complete closed complete or closed incomplete so if for whatever reason the FULFILLER sets this task to incomplete we can then move it on to create a it doesn't say it that's actually an incident that's being created so it creates a task that you know tells the team that there's an issue with why this task couldn't be fulfilled and then you have to then it rolls back up to that that task after that incident is is sorted out after everything is resolved and so there's no real good way to do this in in flow designer to do the rollback because flow designer is you know it's designed really in a linear way not you know it doesn't branch off a whole lot it's it's you go up and down throughout the the flow designer so this might be one of those ones that you would keep in flow again the all of these that I'm gonna go over here that I'm going over here it can be packaged as sub flows that you call within the flow designer so all of these can still be part of the bigger picture okay so the next one we'll talk about is recursion or recursive workflows so I've actually used this quite a bit these are tasks that are I'm sorry it's a flow that may iterate over some item or some array of items however that gets passed into the into the flow I use this pretty often to cut down on yes sprawl that you would get in the workflow editor now we want to talk about that for a second as the loop there is a looping construct within the flow designer but you know caveat here with with code so the flow designer was built and and with in mind that was going to be a no code solution right so you can use code in flow designer but it's not it's not flow designers the integration so you have to have the integration hub to actually run build a custom script and run a custom script within flow designer so if you don't have that or if that's not in the books for you or you know in the future for you then if you have to run a script of any sort you're gonna run that here in in float I mean in the workflow editor so in this example I'm passing in a list of variants a variable list of items so it may be a list collector it may actually be a string or array of strings that I'm passing in and we run a little script to see if there's an item or if there's an X item in this array right Laura I'm sorry the first one says it does the array actually contain items because if it doesn't contain and so we're just gonna push it on down and end it if it does contain items we're gonna go to the first one order to the next one we're gonna process that item in this case we are doing a catalog task but this may be a processing of a script it doesn't have to be a catalog task and then after that we're going to remove that item from the array and then see if it has more items and if it does we go all the way back through again so this is the recursion that we were talking about right so no no outside of the loop piece that there's in flow design or there's no real good way to do do recursion and in this case we're actually using a script to you know where the catalog task is where it's processing the item but you know let's assume there's a script in there that's dynamically moving onto the next step right so it's it's something that we're calculating as we go through this this recursion so if it has more items it goes back up it recursive through goes to the next item in the in the array and goes through all that again if it does not have more items in and again there's a good good candidate for a sub flow to be called within flow designer okay that's recursion and then lastly we have one called multi task and so multi task flows these are official names multi task flows are those that that branch off and join back together um so yeah here's the example um with this one you know we have a branch we branch off into multiple tasks and then you know if it didn't matter whether those tasks were completed before we moved on then it could be no big deal we could do that in in floaters honor but because we need to wait for both of these to complete before joining back and then moving on there's no real good way to do that within flow designer and so the branch /join construct that we have here in the in the workflow editor is is a good candidate to keep in the workflow editor so yep I think that covers it we can move on and I think that's it for the four examples that I had I think we're now at the Q&A section awesome yeah I definitely have seen some questions rolling in so we'll get to those okay first question does flow designer work with scoped apps and delegated development so the answer to that is yes and actually you can see that in play and the event management module where the VAM management now handles a lot of their assignment rules using are there alert rules using flow designer and the flow designer flows are within the event management scope so you can actually delegate out access to event management and your event team can manage the flows within flow designer they can edit they can create new ones in some cases depending on how you set the permissions and they could do that all within that scope great and then it looks like there is another question can you code in the flow designer yes you want to yeah I touched up on that very briefly in my portion of the presentation but yeah you can code so there's two constructs for coding right so the you can create functions within the data pills for for field so let's say we want to transform a field value from from something to assist ID or something like that so we can build small scripts within those functions and that's part of the flow designer that comes with flow designer but if you want to run a script independent of that data and just as a script activity and create a reusable script activity and that's part of integration of and not part of the base workflow I'm sorry flow designer tool awesome there's another one um can you check out and modify flows designer flows in prod I know this is an issue with workflow that's always that's always a tricky thing to answer anyway because it's not terribly good idea to tech check out that kind of thing in production in general just because you want to you know make sure that it works correctly and so I would probably never recommend that in the first place but I I'm not a hundred percent sure if I'm pretty sure I wouldn't necessarily have an issue you could check it out and then publish it but that goes back to the you know code management do you want to potentially break something in production that you haven't been able to test in sub production alright the question then I think is added on about whether it should be done in broader the update said and I would say updates that is the way to go yes yes I would I would add to that as well that if you've ever done flow and an update set there are a lot of moving parts to it it's not like workflow editor where you check it out you publish it and it's one line in your update said there's a whole piece of all the components get added in in separate lines so trying to do that without an update set could get really messy really fast great here's another one um could a flow be used to say add a reschedule action and seep RIA prove all of a change requests I think if that could be used as a as a sub flow that gets generated based on specific conditions of that change then I think that's definitely possible but if it's if it's one flow that we're talking about that's attached the entire change then that would be going back to the whole the the part that I talked about before where if we go back we do a rollback then it's really better suited outside of flow designer hopefully I'd answers your question yeah I think the rollback would be the tricky part of that right wait yes and there was another question when testing a flow do we have a rollback feature like we do with ATF's oh so that's talking about the actual execution and testing not actually in a flow I don't believe roll back I mean the testing is very simple though you can retest very easily by throwing a new context into the into the flow designer hopefully that makes sense as well is it we have lots of questions coming in um is it possible to kill a flow that is either hunger stuck in a loop actually yes I was I was playing around with this a little bit and was interested to find out that you can pretty much just outright cancel a flow which is good in one sense but then can also be a little tricky because if you're if it's attached to something like a catalogue item and your rhythm is dependent on the next task or whatever and you kill it it will kill the flow so it's not coming back it doesn't matter what triggers but it does seem like it's much more flexible in that area where you could just click a button and say stop this flow from running anymore and it'll just stop so and there's also a caveat to that too so there is a I know whenever I was dealing with a flow designer flow previous or prior to New York I had the need to cancel a flow based on a condition and I couldn't because there was no out-of-the-box code for that yet that came out with New York there's now a flow API and a cancel function that's part of that API that you can call in code as well if you have to awesome and those um for those of you asking this webinar will be recorded and it will be put up onto YouTube and the glide fast web site for future reference as well it'll be up there in a couple of days after it is edited but I see a bunch of you asking not a couple more questions here's here's a good one is it safe to say workflow is best for change overflow designer that comes down to it yeah an opinion I mean based on what we've shown that's kind of up to your organization to decide I don't think I want to put myself on the chopping block there but I would say that change has if your changes depending on things like rollback you're probably going to lean towards workflow editor we found is out-of-the-box I believe it has a rollback in it right yeah but then again we've also shown that you can actually attach those workflows to a flow designer floo so it's really just how you decide to implement great um here's another one regarding transitioning are you aware of any cost or benefits benefit examples of transitioning is there any automated means to do so I'm not aware of any automated means that's probably a better question best asked your account rep but as far as I'm aware you're pretty much just I mean they're not planning on phasing out workflow editor anytime soon if they did I'm pretty sure there would be an automated means because that wouldn't go well for a lot of companies but for the time being it's that's kind of why we went over the suggested types to transition is it gives you an easy way to start that process if you're interested without needing to spend you know dedicate a project to that process yeah and I think the part of the question about cost benefit is you know what we were trying to convey at the beginning of this session was that if you have a lot if you have time that you're devoting and and putting into building those actions at the beginning of your transition and those actions are you know well defined and things that you can pass on to folks that aren't necessarily developers but are people that are going to do no code development of flows then I think you do end up gaining you know cost benefits in the long run because you've built those and now you can have multiple people that aren't developers that that may be business owners they can actually go in and create these flows for themselves because there's actions you've put the time and to create those actions on the floor on the front um let's do two more questions um can you use flow with integrations without the purchase of integration hub like custom-built rest integrations I don't basically yeah I don't I don't think that's possible no because you have a rest in that you have a rest an actual rest activity type that comes with integration hub it does not come out of the box with flow designer so hope that answers it awesome yep and let's do one more question is there a migration path from workflow to flow design hmm one that we can decide for you probably not not without knowing your organization but I think I think that's really why we brought these for transition types to the forefront because I think you could start there that's really all we could tell you from this presentation is here's a good place to start and then as we you know as you're looking at what you have in your environment what you're trying to do with your current flows with your business rules you can establish what things would make sense to move and then start building your transition path but I do I think pretty confident that the what we've shown you is a good place to start all right well for anyone that has more questions feel free to definitely reach out to Matt or David their emails are their first dot last name at Glide fast comm or you can reach out at info at Glide fast comm and we'd be more than willing to answer any of these questions that you guys have and it will be recorded and shared on YouTube and our website but now I would like to announce the winner of our $50 Visa gift card giveaway and it looks like the winner is Harry Tillman congratulations Harry your email will be your prize will be emailed to you directly to the email that you sign up for this webinar with all right everyone thank you to everyone for attending today's webinar we hope you enjoyed it and learn some useful information if you still have any more questions feel free to reach out to the glide fast team and sign up for more webinars at glide fest comm forward slash glide fast on air thank you you you