hello everybody this is Ryan Hale with fruition partners with me I have Rob Allen he's going to be doing the presentation basically war god best practices in service catalog administration he is our service count catalog expert and what I'm here to do is introduce you guys all to Rob and then also give it a little bit of background as far as this room for partners we were founded basically in 2003 seven years ago we're primarily in the US but also have a few international clients ready networks for worship partners ITIL foundation certified version three you know our technical consultants are experts in their in their field so I like to think of ourselves basically as an IT SM one-stop shop we do education consulting and on the ServiceNow side we'll also do some virtual administration and that gets us into you complete IT service integration which builds on the three things that I just spoke spoke two wishes the education administration do not only with ServiceNow but also with with ITSM I'm on this note it's the the agenda for the slide deck so I'm gonna hand it over to rob and he will take you through water god best practices hi my name is Rob Allen and as Ryan said I am the service catalog expert at fruition partners today we're gonna be going over the order guide some best practices we'll start with an overview of what an order guide actually is we'll go into you know when you should use an order guide and what's the type of situations we'll also go into some typical uses there's some uses that we've seen or guides used in we also go into a net from an administrator perspective of how to maintain an order guide we would then go into a live example of an out-of-box order guide that's set up in everybody's instance the new hire we will go into a couple scripting examples some ones that we found have been very useful and then we'll have some best practice suggestions for it so we'll start with an overview of what an order guide actually it is essentially it's a mechanism to allow for one or many items to be ordered on a single request what makes it unique is the ability to have the end user either knowingly or unknowingly select which items are actually needed as part of the request you can have items to fault it in or you can have them up front in front of the user and allowing them to select each item in an order guide can have its own workflows workflows can also be shared across multiple items and basically you can ask questions that are relevant to each item in an order guide upfront so it allows for an easier user experience one submitting a request now we'll touch on when to use order guides we typically see these use in situations where many items can be ordered order guides are used to arrange you know commonly requested items or grouping and presents of them all to the user basically up front we also use these in situations where we want to enhance UI when there's many questions to be answered and that information that was has been gathered can be used across multiple items it's best to use an order guide that way you don't have to ask the user multiple times for basically the same information we've also used these when grouping is necessary it allows for grouping of similar items and and ends up being more of a categorization in the service catalog you'll see in a later example so we'll start with some typical uses for order guides and where or where we've seen order guides used effectively prime example is a new employee hire basically what an org idle order guide allows you to do is provide a standardization on the onboarding process you can ask all the questions up front of job description maybe their location Department all those type of questions can lead into what items are actually submitted with the order again you can have items to fault it in or you can ask upfront which type of items are needed and the basically allows for our customized request sometimes we see a hiring manager in charge of submitting the request so maybe they don't know all the items that the person might need so it kind of defaults in the items that are required for the new hire to actually do their job again allows for a bundling of these related items and as I mentioned these departments and/or locations can be the conditions that are used to determine which items are actually included as part of this request another use that we've seen a lot is the hardware request basically it provides a central point from where all hardware can be ordered from again you can ask questions that limit the number of options that are available to the end user so instead of having the user select all the pieces because typically what you do is when you ask the question of what do you need it typically turns out to I need it all so this way you can kind of limit it down to what do they actually need to do their job effectively and again it eliminates the need for creating a separate request for each piece of hardware another place where we commonly see order guides used for our 4x s and software requests as you see at the bottom here we have what is called the list collector variable basically it allows for the end users just like one or many pieces of software each software option in that list collector has an item behind it so depending on which items are actually selected brought from the left to the right those will be the items that are included with the order guide again each item has its as the ability to have its own workflow and we we typically use order guys for these type of requests because most pieces of software had the same or very similar questions and if you're ordering say five pieces of software and you're answering the same question multiple times doesn't really make much sense so putting all the similar questions up front again allows for an easier user experience so now we're gonna step into an administrator shoes for setting up and maintaining an order guide there are two things that are unique about the order guide form as you see below one of them being the 2-step checkout now the 2-step checkout if that is set to true the last step in the ordering process is skipped that last step is actually a view of the current shopping cart and it allows you basically to review what is in currently what is currently in your shopping cart before submitting the request the second thing that is unique about order guides is the idea of cascading variables the idea behind that is when you ask these questions up front it allows for the values that war that were filled in by the end user to be cascaded or transferred from that first page to the actual item level and then again allows for an expedited the middle process variables and order guides are very similar to how they are on items the same options are available one thing to keep in mind on an order guide is the idea of that cascading that I mentioned earlier how that works it actually looks at the variables that are in the total request and if the names match up then that information or that value that was filled in by the end user gets transferred across all variables with the same name a tip here would be to use variable sets that basically allows for you to utilize a set of variables across multiple items now if you assign that variable set to an order guide since the names are all the same the information comes across from the order guide to all the associated items they can ordered the part that makes order guides unique when compared to items is the idea of rule bases now rule bases are what define what can be ordered from an order guide the items can have as we mentioned earlier be defaulted in or they can be conditionally set look into what a typical rule base is made out of again they can be conditional in this example if the end user selects one of these titles CEO CFO CTO or director and as a department of IT then include the executive desktop as an example of an item that has default in it or you can put the questions up front and have those items be selected by the end user directly we are now going to step through the out of box order guide for new employee hire as you see here on the first panel it appears to be very similar to an item but there are multiple items in the background that are associated with this order guy so we'll go through and create John Smith's new employee hire request let's say he is going to be our new CEO and he's going to be part of our IT department if you as you might remember and the earlier example of rural basis we have some items that are going to be defaulted in here based on his title and his department that executive desktop will be on will be a part of this order you'll see that on the next screen we also ask some questions right up front here's for additional services and what this is referring to are additional items that are going to be a part of this order let's say John Smith needs I phone 3G and some business cards the next step of the order guide is to choose the options now this page as you see has the actual items listed on the top and separate tabs each item has the ability to have their own set of questions they can share similar data as far as who their request is for or what location these items are going to go to so I can customize my executive desktop all right the next tab refers to the iPhone 3G this is a an option that I've selected on that first page I needed an iPhone 3G executive desktop as you might remember is a piece or an item that has been - faulted in based on our selections the next piece here and you see this little star here that denotes that there is a mandatory field that needs to be filled out in order to submit this request and job title CEO also street address so now the last step of the order guide is to checkout again this is the third step of the order guide it allows you to see which items are a part of your shopping cart at the current time you can also have prices associated with each item and it can gives you a grand total of how much your complete request costs you can submit any special requirements or instructions and also this would be the point where you can actually add an attachment to your order so go ahead and submit the order they'll bring me to my last screen which is basically a summary of the request as a whole as you see I ordered a business card an executive desktop and an iPhone 3G lays out some stages for each item and again once these get completed based on the workflow they will be checked off in green after it gets approved as well so we're now going to go through some of the commonly used client scripting with order guides as you see here a common request is allowing the variable set to be transferred across many items it might become a little overwhelming when you have the same questions visible even though they're answered but having them visible on the item might become a little overbearing for the end-user so this simple onload client script extra removes the variable set that you name based on where it's at along the process and basically what it does it looks for the described needs on the banner which is that second step another common request when working with order guides is the ability to allow for some categorization at the request level the idea behind that is if you're looking at a list of requests that are open without actually digging into the open request you wouldn't really know where the order or the request actually came from this piece of script here is a way to actually push the name of the order guide through the scripting clue that actually is part of the shopping cart this is an out-of-box script include that when a request is submitted you add a couple lines of code and you can grab the actual guide or the order guide name and paste it to a newly created field we now have some best practice suggestions when dealing with order guides the first one is the idea of create order guys out of items that it can also be ordered individually now the reasoning behind that is to allow for more flexibility in your service catalog without repeating the same type of work a good example of what we mean by standalone items is say a laptop now when you create a laptop item you're probably thinking well I want it in the new user order guide but I also want it in the Hardware order guide so you'll ask questions that are relevant to just the laptop on that item even though you're gonna be using it in to you new user and you're gonna be using in the hardware make sure you ask all the questions related to the new user on the first page of the order guide and leave the item level for more specific variables for that item another suggestion is create order guides that are visually similar so basically you want to have some type of uniformity in your Service Catalog so if you're gonna ask a series of questions related to the actual requester that is going to be filling out the form you want to ask all those questions up front and if you're gonna be using a different order guide make sure that those always stay at the top of the order guide so there's some uniformity across the board for your service catalog another suggestion would be to always name your variables again this allows for scripting of the variables and it also allows for the workflow to be dependent on what has been selected so you could actually script the workflow to be dependent on what has been selected up front and the only way to allow that is to name your variables another suggestion is use the request for widget the request for widget allows for the end user to select on a per item basis or per order guide basis who the request is actually for it allows for some security and who can actually submit on behalf of someone else and that type of configuration is set up in the properties for the Service Catalog thank you very much for joining in today and take care