The Helsinki release is a big upgrade to the ServiceNow developer experience. The overall Helsinki themes are i) Consumerizing the Service Experience and ii) Accelerate Time-to-Value. New developer and development features in the platform directly support both.

Service Portal Designer is the canvas for delightful employee experiences. Visually compelling with predefined widgets and templates, Service Portal enables developers to build visually stunning employee portals using out of the box widgets and templates as well as creating their own widgets and styles with standard web tools such as Bootstrap, AngularJS, HTML, and CSS.

Delegated Development is one of the most requested features from our customers. They told us that they want to reduce the # of admins on their production instances. At the same time, IT is getting requests from other departments and business units to build their own apps on the ServiceNow Platform. IT could only support this by creating more admins, which leads to concerns about platform performance, individual app performance, and potential security issues. This led to shadow IT with departments and business units sourcing their own development platforms and resulted in increasing application backlogs for IT.

Delegated Development solves this headache by enabling IT to create a scoped app based on department/BU requirements, assign non-admin users and teams granular developer permissions against that app, define app cross-scope permissions that dictate resources and data accessible outside of the app scope, control publishing to production, and track and enforce app resource usage. Individuals or groups of developers can be assigned their own logical sandboxes with very granular definitions of what they are allowed to see and do. Now you can be sure that your app development team in one department is safely quarantined from touching, for example, your change management application.

This enables IT to become the at-scale PaaS provider to the enterprise and retain governance and control over the platform, while at the same time scaling out the # of developers across the enterprise. This leads to accelerated time-to-value and increased business agility for departments and BUs outside of IT. Now they can quickly build the apps on the ServiceNow Platform that meet their specific business needs without having to rely on IT all of the time.

Delegated Development: Enabling non-admin developers to leverage the ServiceNow Platform

Scoped Administration - allows organizations to protect sensitive application data by restricting how users acquire application-specific roles.

ECMAScript 5 - a modern JavaScript experience that developers expect, including the ability to leverage external 3rd party libraries such as Lodash. This increases developer productivity and accelerates time to value for new applications.

Studio - Git Source Control Integration - streamlines the agile development process by supporting any Git-compatible distributed source control solution such as GitHub or Bitbucket.

API Usage Analytics — identifies who is using a Web Service API, and what versions are being used, providing more visibility into active integrations and assisting with application rationalization.

Excel XLSX support: - enables import and export of records in XLSX format. XLSX Processing is significantly better in memory management

Client App Enablement: Example REST Client applications have been created and their source made available on GitHub to illustrate how customers can connect applications to ServiceNow using our REST APIs. The app enablement applications include NodeJS and iOS example application as well as a Scripted REST API. Each repo includes documentation that walks developers through cloning the repo from GitHub to configuring and running the application. These example client applications can be accessed from with ServiceNow by navigating to REST -> Example Client Apps

Web Service Import Sets - enhanced asynchronous behavior.

Reporting - Map reports, Single Score auto—refresh, and more efficient calendar rendering to improve the reporting experience.

Developers can get hands-on with Helsinki at ServiceNow Developers and at the CreatorCon Hackathon and all CreatorCon workshops at Knowledge16.

We can't wait to see what you build on H!