you [Music] I'm Matt Dumont today I'm going to be giving you a quick peek into the ServiceNow tool titled communities so I want to give you a brief bird's-eye view of the main functionality of the tool there's a lot of different features involved but I'd like to hopefully you can leave this session with a general feeling of confidence that you could talk to a customer about the tool and explain the ins and outs of it without without too much trouble I didn't like to go into social Q&A which is a feature of the service portal and just mention a few ways that you might be able to mitigate some confusion that I believe clients will have with the differences between social Q&A and communities due to some similar nomenclature and then I'm going to go into a brief demo session where I'll go through creating up a forum creating a forum with basic user access and then brief glance at the knowledge and case management tie a tie ends for communities and then we'll open it up for some questions I feel free to jump in if you have any questions specific to the slides and we'll try to fit those in before the end of the session so first I thought it would be best to just give a quick summary of how ServiceNow describes communities I'll be a little weird and just read it to you because it is pretty long it says what serves now communities application connect engage in collaborate with your employees customers partners and prospects your users get quick responses to their issues by posting questions reviewing blogs or videos and searching for previous discussions is an essential component of your self-service strategy along with knowledge-based and Service Catalog so what does that boil down to in terms of actual value add for a customer is it just another collaboration tool that's available in addition to the several other ones that ServiceNow has available and other modules so I kind of broke it down a different way based on the the intention I believe for how ServiceNow designed the tool and the plugins that are it is included along with such as GSM or HR service delivery which it should be noted are required for communities to to be installed on your system so you actually have to have some sort of Licensing for case management or it does mention in the documentation HR service delivery that I found little to no tie in directly to HR service delivery so my best guess would be that it would be kind of a supplemental feature where you could have forums for for employees to interact or for upcoming employees to interact but it doesn't have out-of-the-box tie-ins to HR case management that I could find so I summarized it as ServiceNow communities is designed to complement ServiceNow is already extensive suite of collaborative tools but the power of crowd-sourced incident and request deflection through customer service management which I'll demonstrate a little bit it does need to be noted as well that there is no out-of-the-box tie-in that that I could find anywhere in the documentation or in the actual design for anything ITSM related so while it does say you could use this tool for internal employees that might involve some customization or at the very least it would it would just be a collaborative tool more than a direct integration with those other tools so the best way to describe forums and topics in communities is like message boards you also are probably all familiar with the ServiceNow community which is built essentially on the exact same backbone as this tool so it's pretty much just a packaged up version of the ServiceNow community that can be customized for your intentions so the forums are just basically for organizing content allowing people to go and find information specific to their questions and the content that they're looking for and potentially because it is closely tied with customer service management you could have it be moderated by different different customer service management subgroups so you could break down the topics by specific features of a company that require support and those groups could moderate individual forums and answer questions review questions and then we'll see later that they can actually convert those questions into cases or if those questions get answered by themselves or another user and the answer is a thorough one or might need to be captured it can also be transferred into knowledge management forums as demonstrated here can actually be nested the two sub forums are listed above and then there's a parent forum to the best of my knowledge this nesting forums is more for content organization than anything you actually can inherit commissions down from a parent but it is not required so you could potentially have users that have access to the parent forum and not the sub forum or have access to the sub forum and not the parent forum and it's really flexible in that regard so you could build build out the structure any way that that your company is most comfortable as far as content types the only ones that are currently supported out-of-the-box when you create a forum our Q&A blog comment document event and video and these are all just content types so when you went into a forum as a user if you have write access for any of those content types you could create a blog post within zoo management forum and it would pop up and sort of that Activity Feed and would send out a notification install subscribers you could add questions and have them answered and as you'll see later in the demo portion you really have control over all of the content so you can say this forms only Q&A this forum is only for event posting this forum is only for videos it's really up to the administrator how they want to design the content layout as far as communication it actually borrows a lot from existing communication features in the communities menu you see options like global announcement which are actually just the same global announced global portal announcement feature that are used by all of the portals and you just you would create your announcement and select the community portal it also adds a new forum based announcement feature that's as well has tie-ins to other portals so if you created a forum based announcement you could say I only want it for May and forum C to receive this announcement the announcement would get posted to a an announcements widget on the side which all demonstrated in the demo portion and then you could actually also select other portals besides the community and that announcement would appear in the announcements widget on the home page for say service portal it would lose all of its form context and it would just be on the portal homepage but it would actually allow you to do some cross portal announcements that way subscriptions here I need to to point out subscriptions do not utilize the out-of-the-box subscription model at all there's no relation between notified the notification subscriptions feature and this feature in fact when you create your when you create your community you have to specify an administrative email address for that community and that email address receives all notifications that go out from that community so you would end up with and your email logs you would see a list of emails for all different activities they all have a single email address and the to field and then if you add the BCC column you'll see all the subscribers get inserted via script to that email notification I point this out because that was something that took quite a while to dig through and figure out and it can be a little bit confusing I think the the logic makes sense to have administrators you know being aware or a group of administrators being aware of the communications going on in the forum but just something to keep in mind when implement and most of us are familiar with ServiceNow community and their point system or as they call it gamification so you can customize a lot of this there's a whole list of out-of-the-box triggers for different kinds of achieve and triggers for four points this is just a summary of some of the major ones the points are set up so that if you let's say you post a question and someone answers that question and you mark it as helpful or market as answered then that amount of points would be added to that users account and then if that answer was later unchecked as as correct then those points would be subtracted and it keeps a log of the points that that user has received you can also build custom put images into build custom badging systems so that you can kind of encourage people to interact making it into sort of a game to try to answer the most questions I think we've all seen how that plays out in the community where there's top contributors and there's different ways of tracking who's the most interactive in a forum and those people might be able to be flagged as power users or support users within a company so the two key I call them integrations they're really internal connections to other modules the two key features that support incident and request deflection more than more than anything would be knowledge harvesting and case generation while you can kind of see the idea that forums would would help to manage some of the questions that are really simple answers you could have other users responding or power users responding to questions that wouldn't necessarily need to generate a customer service case or eventually an incident or a problem there are going to be cases where either someone answer the question really effectively and you you say I want to extract that as a knowledge article or maybe the question has a much more complex answer or needs some actual interaction from support where it may may be something actually is broken or or some something about that person's account needs attention so with knowledge harvesting you have the ability to take a completed or successfully answered question and extract it from from the forum and push it into a draft article and I'll demonstrate a little how that works when you create a forum you can actually designate it as knowledge harvestable and give it a default knowledge base as you can see here as long as you have access to edit the article afterwards you would be able to modify which knowledge base it goes to and change the category and whatnot this is just a quick way to generate those articles without too much effort and it also does link back to that forum topic so once that knowledge article is published any user who views that topic can actually click into the knowledgebase directly from there and then with case generation any user that has a case management role has the ability to go and to take questions that have been posted and convert them to a case and CSM the caveat to that is that you do have to make sure that that question is posted by someone who is a designated contact in case management and for those of you who aren't familiar with case management you have to designate contacts that are basically on the same table as users but they are considered CSM contacts and that I'm guessing that probably has a lot to do with with license management and things of that nature so if one of those users posts to the forums then those questions have the ability to be generated as cases a standard user would not be able to when that flag would not appear on their topic or on their question and I'll also show a little bit of that in the demo as well so social Q&A is a feature of the service portal and as soon as we go through this slide I'm gonna pull up the service portal and show you exactly what I mean but there's a big widget that shows up out of the box on the front page of so service portal that says community and that widget has absolutely nothing to do with ServiceNow communities it may have been a precursor to the concept of communities but it does not in any way link out to communities so to try to simplify that a little bit and and address questions that may come up from your customers I dug into it a little bit and found a couple ways that you might be able to do remove confusion as it were so when you create when when social Q&A is first created in service portal it's a feature where users can go and view questions that have been asked within the knowledge management side of the of the system and that by default generates a social Q&A knowledge base where all of those questions and answers are stored and it's just a simple question answer layout and the portal that you can just review and see this was a question asked and something this has this many answers and then you can dig into it and you can review all those as well and the knowledgebase communities has a similar structure and that it requires a default knowledge base out of the box when you first create it it is in the backend a knowledge base called sm community is created that is inactive so it would not show up to users and the knowledge side of things however you can designate other knowledge bases to store the questions and answers posted in communities and this is only for question the question and answer side of things so there's really a couple different ways that you could address the kind of distinct nature's of those tools either you could designate social Q&A or some shared knowledge base for both questions and then both sides both portals will pull those questions out and display them differently or you can just change the community widget to point to communities and say this is where you should post all of your questions and answers I actually want to pull up now the demo instance to show what that looks like because it can be a little bit confusing so on the service portal side you can see we've got a couple of widgets that pull from this social Q&A feature we've got the community widget and as I mentioned if you click on it it just takes you here to this list of questions and I actually for the sake of this demo pointed community to the social Q&A knowledgebase as well so you can see that all the questions that were listed in community are posted here as well but they've lost all of their context as far as what forum what topic any of that information it's not relevant to the service portal side so you get it you do get a single repository for that information but it may depending on the circumstances it may be confusing who asked the question and why if the forum itself has added context to the question then it may not be immediately clear why the question was asked you also get my subscribed questions which is this user was subscribed because he posted this question and that's really the function of QA and service portal is just to give people a quick quick access to some possible deflection type situations where you might might find a question that you had yourself and you're able to find the answer there that all of that functionality exists in the community side and if you do intend to implement community you may want to discuss with the customer whether that social Q&A is something that they want to hold on to or if they would rather just push all of that functionality over here and retain the extended functionality of the community and I may have been a little bit confusing it was a bit of a a roadblock for investigating community at first because that the terminology is just it's it throws the customers off a little bit and you hear you might hear someone refer to community and they're actually just talking about social Q&A which I believe is included out of the box with service portal whereas this is an entirely new module and portal before I go into the demo any questions on the social Q&A feature out a question more of a comment so when I recently the this is what the customer you help me with the wall back but when we recently implemented this I came to find out I didn't realize this initially but all of the different widgets provided by community or can be called like knowledge widgets so you can call them within the framework of a different portal rather than using the actual community portal and it is a Brandan's that way we were able to serve community pages or widgets on on within the CSM portal versus the service portal and have it branded properly and all that so I just wanted to put that out there for an FYI right yeah that's so that's a perfect way to to redirect the user without without having to make too many customizations or anything like that right thank you yeah I actually was gonna mention if he wanted to jump in with anything because David actually did it have to end up implementing what we did the research on for the for communities feel free to jump in alright so that said let me just do a quick demonstration of creating a new forum so I have a bookmark but if you wanted to get to the menu you just type in community and all of the menu items are under that header and then I can come over here to forums and you'll see that all my forums are listed here and I can create a brand new forum so we'll just call it test forum open up with some creative names long demo so with a forum you have the ability to require a approval workflow for membership if you check this box it creates a a set of permissions for that forum that is specific to only that forum and then you can go on and edit that set of permissions to say what a user with that access can do within the forum as far as editing content reading content etc if you don't I found through testing if you don't specify an approval workflow the user would click request access to the forum and then just get access so in order to actually make this have meaning you would want to specify a workflow and there is a default workflow here for requesting access or you can create your own one out of the box what that does is it allows you allow you to to triage who's trying to get into the forum and then you can tell you can say if you wanted to say that that's a full access role than people who have Wester that can have full access where as what we'll get into in a minute is there's a default setting for registered and public users that those people get a base level of access no matter what two forms unless you remove that access let me just give a default here and then I mentioned knowledge base harvesting I can specify a particular knowledge base as the one that all draft articles are sent to for that form so now I have a test form that you'll see is because I missed this admin over here it's going to show up immediately as another option for a form to select if I come back over here I can do some more configuration to that forum this debug form permissions I'm not going to get into that a whole lot but it's pretty handy it tells you exactly what users can do you give it a role or a person and it will decide what that user is able to do within a particular forum and then you can also send out an invite so since I request membership approval I can send it out and those people can say that yes I do want access to the forum and then we can go through the approval process because I designated the enable membership checkbox it generated this members of test forum with a default permission set which I believe in this case is full access you can actually go modify that there's access types down here you can change the defaults for all of these groups as well the default for registered is the ability to see the forum name and the description only so this could be modified if you want to say any registered user can view anything within that topic it's not a secret as long as that user is logged in then you can modify this for that particular forum and elevate access that way you can also give public access to a forum and I'm I want to actually show the difference between public and registered in a moment but if I give full public access then a user who has not logged in to ServiceNow would actually be able to view this forum the caveat to that is there's a property that's that you can check on and off that says public users can actually edit content within forums or they can't and by default obviously it's on read-only that's highly it would be recommended against to allow the public users to edit according to ServiceNow documentation if you have public users adding content that content is added as a guest and ServiceNow does not have a way to distinguish between guest users so you would end up with a lot of overlapping content and it's all looking like they're from the same user it would probably not be a fun thing to try to maintain so the best practice would be public users can maintain read access and if you give full access to a forum it's still read-only unless that property is switch so they could view everything but will not be able to interact unless that user logs in so to demonstrate that I want to go in to the terms and conditions here right now there's an out-of-the-box Terms & Conditions document if you choose to create one which I would imagine you will want to for a particular company something that matches their own you know goes through their own legal department etc then you would want to create a new document in here and make that the active document if you do not designate an active terms and conditions then users are left as public users unless you actually as an administrator go over and add the community user role to that to that user that role is is essentially considered registered user if you do have an active terms and conditions then if I go as a user who has never entered the forums before even though I'm logged in I should get a page like this that's gonna let me set up a display name where all of my posts will show with that name instead of my current name and this can be modified later in my profile and then I'm asked to agree to the terms and conditions which I can be here once I hit submit it will automatically assign to that user the community user role and from that point forward I would have access to the forum as a registered user so everywhere that registered is considered a level of access to the forum that access would automatically apply to me and now let me go in as a I'm gonna go in as my community admin Abraham Lincoln is moderating my community today so as a community administrator that the community admin role gives me the ability to do all of the knowledge harvesting case management etc this is also tied to several different roles that you can give to a particular user including some very specific ones that are just knowledge harvester and then I forget what the case one is called but it's just basically case generator and that's it or you can let admins do it within community or there are some roles within CSM that would let you generate cases from the forums and knowledge roles that would let you harvest knowledge as well so you can kind of mix and match how you want to allow users to do that and with the knowledge side of things you do have to have contribute access to the knowledge base that you're trying to draft an article for or it will just throw back an error so I have this this test question posted by a registered CSM con tact and if I come in here as Abraham Lincoln I have the ability to harvest it for knowledge because it has already been answered and I received this error because I'm not a contributor to the IT knowledge base but you can also see that this has already been used to generate a case because I'm not in case Abraham Lincoln is not a case manager he doesn't have the ability to go over directly to the case but he but you would see this link and know that it it has a related case here if I go in here a case has not been generated yet for this particular piece of content so I could say create case and it's going to give me a quick template to generate a new case and then I'm going to get a tie back to that case from here so the value in this is is that you could have moderation where people are perusing the questions going through and finding things that need to generate a case and quickly push them over to case management you could have case managers doing that you could have the moderators doing it within the forum's however you want to structure it for you for your company that's always an option you do also have a quick summary here because everything is now converted to a case that can be there's nothing on this list but you could quickly find a list of things that could be converted to a case the last thing I wanted to show directly was the announcements feature that I discussed earlier so right here I have my global announcement this is just a global portal announcement I can customize it to allow the user to remove it or I can say I want this to stay until a certain date or give no expert and just have it show up for as long as I need it to and this can also be done across portals and this is a feature that's that's utilized in the service portal often as well the other the other functionality I mentioned with forum based announcements if I go into this forum I designated an announcement specific to this forum and to the African safari forum so it shows up here I've posted a link and then I can go back to African safari I'm gonna see that same announcement here but it's not going to be available in the aquarium forum however I did also designate it as being available in the service portal as well so I can see it in my announcements widget here and this is how I described the the short description so it has that context but other than that you would have no clue that it's specific to forums on the other side this just posts directly to that with you all right well I appreciate your time hopefully that was informative if you have any questions offline feel free to contact me and I hope that this was helpful have a great day [Music]