according all right and again let me say welcome everybody to this knowledge expert event or doing NVP meet us and today we have Steven Bell and this is recorded and it will be available in the link that I provided in the chat so let's go Steven take away hello everybody on MVP meetup for floor designer versus workflows my name is Steve Bell and I am a senior architect at extension and this personnel practice my areas of expertise are having to do with CMDB scripting flow designer integration hub everything I Thomas basically and ITSM so I cover the complete gamut that I've been doing it for almost gosh almost ten years now so we will be covering these things which is what would parity be inside of workflows versus flow designer what are the pros and cons of both and then thoughts on migration from workflows to flow designer so this is me I am MVP five-year MVP I do a lot of contributions to ask the expert and I also do a significant number of articles I am a senior instructor for Accenture and I'm also a product developer so that's me alright so what about flow designer versus workflow so workflows we'll start with that there absolutely ubiquitous every there everywhere everyone works with workflows all the time Service Catalog until just with the Orlando release was actually an add-in in order to get flow designer capability with Orlando it's now installed out of the box but workflows have a gigantic inst relation base they're just amazingly large as far as installing and the investment many companies have put into them large number of experienced developers sitting out there there are quite a few examples sitting out on in the community and you know people have put together a lot of things in a lot of places you can find workflows just about anywhere they are long term they've been around since before 2012 so it's you know there's there's just no problem finding someone who can actually do workflows they're simple enough that you can pick it up pretty quick and you you have a couple extra things which are the bullets on the end which we'll get to here in a moment that they have over the top of flow designer right now downside not easily the test of all inside of the workflow creator and you have to set to the global table in order to even test them internally and it takes a little bit of training to really get a good feel for how all that works so okay there is an orchestration training class that gives you a very in-depth workflow and orchestration ability and this has been going on for a very long time I've taught it pretty much since it rolled out and there is a you know a nice in-depth on this that gives you a good feel for the four workflows more advanced capabilities what's really interesting is that they're still teaching this so workflows and orchestration are still taught and you can still take classes in it even with Orlando release downside things like orchestration are not available anymore as a separate sale they're incorporated in as part of the installation for integration hub so it isn't isn't segregated anymore they actually are selling them as a part of us so these last two like I said I'll get to here in a minute let's go to workflow I mean flow designers and so what is the difference here there is greater about that in a second there is such a huge workflow installation base that flow designer you know is one of those things if you want to move to you really have to start fresh and there really isn't anything there as far as migration path so you can't push a magic button and have your work flow turn itself into a flow designer flow there's not a lot of people trained in this stuff out there right now I've done a series of videos on them to help alleviate some of that pain but there's a lot of people who are still messing around with them trying to understand how it works and how it all fits together and how you use all of it there is some self-paced training out there for flow designer micro certification which is very useful and by the way I highly recommend it it's free so just go out to the now learning site there is no official class for it you have flow designer integration hub micro certs with self-paced training and that's it all of it so unlike with orchestration there is no integration hub with the most commonly used spokes type training available yet that may come we'll see I love the no code solution capability flow designer but again it's you know if you want to do anything complex you end up having to create your own custom actions and go from there so very small number of examples available right now on everything Docs does not cover a good number examples there are a couple things in the developer site and of course with the hands-on training you get a handful but there's nothing as far as anywhere close to the ten years where the work flows we've got so you know it's it's going to take some time to build that up but because of the small examples a lot of people are asking for help and it slows down the development time and the rollout obviously it's interesting that in the micro cert self-paced training the service now recommends that you can't do it in flow designer integration how do it and workflows and I'm sorry you can't do it in flow designer flows and integration hub then do it in workflows and orchestration and that's actually a slide in there in the deck I love the testing capabilities inside of flow designer but they're incomplete and what that means is that if you go do some of them options inside of the flow designer testing tool for results they're blank and it'd be nice if that stuff started working but there you know there are pieces that are just not complete yet inside a flow designer with Orlando they filled in a few more of the blanks but not all of them yet but it's good enough that I'm I feel like it's much more advanced in capabilities than workflows it just doesn't handle certain things that workflows does and we need that parity all right so what do we got all right I like the no code solutions in flow designer very nice I love the pills the downsides are they both require serious training to master so you really need to go through a tremendous amount of work even with all of the stuff that's available with flow designer integration hub right now to play around with it still takes some time to understand it and get your get your feet on the ground with it workflows have a scratchpad variable now with the advent of orlando we've got dynamic outputs capability but that's with integration enterprise integration hub and doesn't really come out of the box with flow designer so having this dynamic object capability inside floo designer is a must and they when they released what they did for integration of this round it looks really great it looks exactly like what we want but it's only available if you buy the most expensive piece of integration I'm so workflow loop backs not available at all inside of flow designer so this is a big deal right here by loop back so I'm talking about let me demo real quick is you have something like this where you have the capability of doing a test running the script a script or another activity or whatever and then looping back to do a check again and I write stuff that on the next time around so it's possible to do this looping it's possible to loop back to previous steps and be able to do it by simply you know creating a connection to that particular step so boom I'm done I can begin testing a whack hang on a button which would be a bad idea cuz I initializing is going to cause this loop if I do that and then in testing in here is kind of so-so I mean I've got to set up on the global table I'm not logged in I figures no I just lost my nice little alright so enough that nonsense but you get the idea being able to go back to a previous step is a huge deal and you can't do that inside flow designer alright finally is the you know with the data pills you don't have a JSON or non glide record object capability except for through that dynamic object and again that's only available for in some cases inside of the enterprise version of integration hub deployment is the same for both so I in update sets or scoped applications deployment works just great so it you know there's no real difference here alright so you know here's here's some thoughts on this I I would like to open this up for some discussion and essentially you know what do we get here we want to be able to move from work flow to flow desire right and we want to be able to ultimately it'd be nice to have some sort of migration path tool that would get us from point A to point B but since we don't have parity and there's enough difference between the tools this is not really possible I don't think I have analyzed it trying to decide whether or not I could build myself a tool it would not be easy to do and be like writing a language parser almost because it's significantly different in some areas and I would have to actually analyze that stuff and be able to iteratively go across the design of the workflow and then be able to say okay this is one of these and be able to do things like the loopback somehow loop backs can be done in a four loop type structure but it takes thought you know thoughtful planning to really get that nailed down and for loops require a fixed value so I can't do like workflow scratchpad for loops you can you can actually make those dynamic it could probably get away with something like that to degree but it would require some serious work and you really need the dynamic objects for it and then you know smaller workflows may be movable as far as translating them into flow designer even know code and I've done some of this but the large ones it's it's just nasty so it's it's almost better to start over you know if you've got to really move something from one to the other and there's no real good reason to if it's working fine an orchestration or our flow workflows there's no real reason to rebuild it in flow designer new look at doing the flow designer unless something rears its ugly head can't do inside flow designer in which cases just fall back to work flows and that's about it so let's open up for discussion here anyone have any questions they'd like to ask me or anything they'd like to throw out there onto the floor yeah make sure you open your chat there because one question that was from the community will workflow be taken away and upcoming updates no yeah they take first off there's literally millions and millions of dollars installed on you know have been spent on workflows by companies all over the world and I would hazard a guess as you know it's hundreds of millions and bucks have been poured into it with people's time and effort and even additional licensing with orchestration so the service now can't touch that not for a long long time it has one they have to have the compatibility with each release and they can't shave that compatibility out without major screening from big partners so big partners big customers everything else workflows and orchestration are here to stay for a while until you can push a magic button and have it transliterate one into the other if it could do that I think workflow and orchestrations days would be seriously numbered now on the other side ServiceNow is not supporting new materials into those tools so orchestration and workflows aren't having money sunk into them to give them new capability if you want that new capability to go to the new tool suite which is no flow designer in integration hub are there known gotchas indoor limitations of flow designer and scoped applications none that I've run into Nia I have done some deployment work with them they look pretty good I really haven't seen anything leap out and bite me and I do quite a bit of work with this I just built the tool for own internal use and it's a pretty good sized tool works a lot with a lot of different components both with integration hub components and with flow designer components I built a lot of my own stuff too as far as new activities and it all deploys beautifully inside scoped applications Lynne I have multiple catalog items that use the same workflow does that concept exist with flow designer yes it with prior to Orlando and you have to install the plugin for flow designer support and service catalog with Orlando it's out of the box and it's it's available on the Service Catalog item screen you know on the form with New York it's not they're out of the box after installation you'll see it and it works exactly the same as it does for workflows it will not let you pick both so you can't have a workflow and a flow designer flow you have to pick one or the other but you can have multiple service catalog items pointing at the same flow designer flow lands it is it best practice to use rest messages messages within an action or connection and credential aliases all right let me list a couple things here one with the old workflows you could do rest calls from things like script includes since ServiceNow redid the paradigm and consolidated the licensing for both flow design and workflows you can't get away with that anymore it doesn't let you do that so in that regard that's now forbidden and you'll act if you try it I actually see a message in the logs now where am I going with this okay so I worked with rest messages which our integration hub and you have to have integration hub to make them work and you can put them inside of scripted actions or you can put them down into script includes in the work great but you have to have integration hub installed you know in order to have that functionality connection and credential aliases yeah yeah with with flows its life is different things have changed the licensing is a little more complex because it's transactional licensing and highly recommend going and doing the platform micro cert to learn some things about that better yet go do the hands-on training to get the micro certs for flow designer integration hub and it will really fill in a lot of blanks for you Karen I am a process owner hoping to leverage flow designer to some simple stuff can you dot walk in the data pills absolutely alright so there's two types of flows and if you go watch my videos I I did I get into that kind of nauseating detail after a while but anyway I am I show that you can walk into glide records and you can also walk into complex objects the side where you get into trouble and you can't dot walk into them is any sort of JSON objects so this is part of that dynamic object stuff that I've been wanting for a while if you have a JSON object that you create specially in it and you feed it back out of your script activity scripted active action then it will be available to you but you have to use another scripted action to tear it apart and get into that so dot walking objects that have been created is not available to us right yet here let me show you something because I was playing around with this and you know a of this hold on man I'm gonna refresh walk back into my instance and show you an example I am so it's a good question and it has a very interesting side effect on it alright so what I did is I was playing around with trying to get dynamic objects to work without having to work with rest connectivity which appears to be its limitation in the outputs on this stuff this is a JSON object but notice I can't there's no expandability to it and this is a fallback or a problem a failure inside of integration area I'm sorry inside workflows right now flow designer this works fine inside workflows so I can you know actually dot walk into the object to some degree if I have it available to me over on the workflow side but I can't touch it here if I would like this to be something I can expand out and drop down let's see if I got a good one here I can show you I think this is one so no that's still a that's a sub flow in a flow designer flow check in with you we've got quite a number of questions as well so yeah I know it's this is a hot topic that's fine yeah all right here's a dot walk here's an array dot object here's another one incident record and you can see I can I can dot walk into it it's just basically walking into the tree of data pills and this capability is therefore by records it's there for certain types of objects like array objects I can go in and play around with things that I've created this has to be done you know carefully obviously but it's got some capabilities to it that I I'm happier with in Orlando but you get the idea you can do some pretty cool stuff alright sure let's see here will we be will be getting reference a flow designer on tables directly rather than checking designer I'm not sure I think you still have to go in through designer if I understand your question right and I don't know I don't think we're getting the capability outside to view in it's not contextual in the same way that workflows are Wesley we are looking to start using the flow designer as opposed to workflows future Service Catalog items do you think we'll run into limitations in switching overflow designer only the ones that bump into so far that I showed you the rest of it is a training issue usually on having to think differently on how flow designer works compared to workflows so if you end up doing complex work with scripts you're going to have to you know kind of understand how it all fits together how things flow through your scripted action and being able to utilize that when it's back out on the flow also how to trigger flows and the best ways of doing that they call they have a mechanism call a sub flow it is not it is a forwarding for the name there's flows which work with record sets so glide records and then their sub flows which allow you to pass in what you want so you can actually throw a piece of JSON at a sub flow as an input to the rather than having it forced you to glide records like enough alone so there are some things you'll have to take into account that are similar but not the same as workflows so it's a retraining thing for most of it let's see Lisa I'm Shekar why cannot flow designer in integration of be a single tool well it's the same paradigm that workflows and orchestration are orchestration workflows are part of the entire out-of-the-box instance when you first purchase the the product the license for your platform with orchestration what you're getting is a tool suite that goes on top of workflows and it has a bunch of new tools that go with it and it is considered a separate product that has workflows as its engine so think of it as a set of serious enhancements or specific enhancements that have special support behind them it's a service now actually has 14 that supports orchestration maintenance and also you know just helpdesk type stuff all right same kind of thing goes through integration of only multiply times 100 integration hub has tremendous number of spokes both supplied by ServiceNow l and also by third-party teams some of those spokes even cost money to cover creation cost and maintenance and support and Plus you know profit but it costs a lot of money to build a spoke and it costs a lot of money to just have integration hub present with its out-of-the-box components so integration hub is very similar and licensing wise to orchestration and it's the reason why you pay for Shane just looking for your opinion do you want ServiceNow to and prove workflow or focus on floaters there I want them to focus on flow designer I want to get these little things out of the way so I can get off of workflows flow designers more advanced in its testing capability it's more advanced and its overall capabilities the actions are more flexible in my book I love the pills so the pill paradigm beats the socks off of the old work flow data bus paradigm and it's simpler to use it's simpler to visualize in many ways I would like more flexibility with the tool right now it's very rigid in the way it's setup because of things like the loopback problem so I want to see more on the flow designer side and I would like to see ultimately I'd like to be able to push a button and have it changed for my workflow into an integration hub a one-way getting me off workflows altogether would be great our flow designer Chad hello if you use to do the following in parallel with check with if check is it possible to go back and process portion after parallel action has run and workflows yes in the flow designer it's possible but it is and you can sub flow out and have parallel operation on some flows very similar to what you can do inside of a workflows it you cannot loop back when you get out of those if you've got a check there you can't go back to where you were you have to set up kind of a there's a do loop that you can set up and ask me thought out carefully but it doesn't work the same way as workflows so I'm not super happy with my condition capability inside of flow designer yet doesn't give me the same flexibility and I I really like that I'm Shekar what is thought process behind moving toward flow design regression again it's much more advanced integration hub significantly more advanced the development teams both inside ServiceNow and outside sir now the stuff you can get from the store allow for integration of significantly more products out there and it's much much nicer to get at it let's see this got to be the last question we're at the bottom of the hour I don't know how much time I've got Lisa well we did schedule only for 30 minutes I do but maybe our guests do not but again being reported so okay I'll I'll hit this last question then we are looking to start using the flow designer as opposed to workflows for future Service Catalog items I think we'll run into the limitations and switching over yeah basically as I was saying to someone a similar question further up the yeah there can be some problems there especially if you're trying to use a dynamic object there isn't anything like that over in the flow designer integration hub world I have built things that are pretty close it is possible to get very close to an actual dynamic object it's just that it's not shown properly in the tool when the pills are displayed for the the flow itself so when you're working with the scripted actions you can get pretty pretty good with them but then feeding those two and out-of-the-box action is they as a it's a real paint you have to set up individual variables for what you want to do and then you can drag those variables over and drop them into the out-of-the-box I may do a demo of this in a later ask the expert session but that's a major drawback to me with the flow designer or slash integration of world so yeah there are some things that you can run into that could be showstoppers Jenny still had a question and just as a quick reminder maybe some people do not know what they ask the expert events those are the events that if experts like Stephen Bell put on with me on the community and so if you do need to find them they they're under community events but I think there was still a question from Jenny all I asked Jenny about your question is I'm a huge fan of the studio and deployment from the studio I honestly my preference is to build it as a scoped application and deploy it through the studio but it depends on what you're doing so if I'm releasing in global and I'm only doing global it doesn't make a lot of sense to put it into studio and be better just to get updates and deploy it you have to it works just like orchestration in that regard or you know workflows you have to publish your flow in order to get it to show up in your update set and be able to deploy it but beyond that you know it's the my preference is to use the the new deployment paradigm that's available in studio I prefer it the recommended practice reviewing the customer updates for flows and we're just developing that believe it or not ourselves I've got some best practices developed for our North American servers now practice that I'm going to be implementing here real soon essentially it is review scripts that are part of our code review process the things I look at are the scripted actions and how you know how it holds to our actual paradigm for code reviews because we have a standard that we utilize and then also the any code that ties into it will fall into the normal code review process as far as building out the flow designer flow not really you know very many practices but everything that's out of the box it's you know pretty straightforward so it really falls into any customizations you do rather than just having any best practices from flow designer itself it's not a flexible tool in the way that orchestration and workflows are it just is not okay so major takeaways there are some still some serious parity issues we have to be careful and taking a work flow over to flow designer and it requires serious thought to do so and it may not be possible it's also a best practice probably in my book anyway to start brand new clean when you're going to the next next level things I've got a couple of links that will be posting with this deck and a these yourself they're pretty good and that's all I had thank you everyone for your time