[Music] good morning good afternoon good evening uh from around the world uh I want to thank you for taking some time to join us for the platform fundamentals academy uh part of the live on service now webinar series uh as we get started uh through this today uh we're going to be focusing in on what what upgrades are available or how we do our best upgrades in Washington and some of the tools we have available for us uh through this uh as we talk about we may talk about some forward-looking statements and what's coming in in uh xanadoo and Yokohama if those drop in we're going to be focusing on Washington but uh if I know goven and I know me we're going to say some stuff about what we're working on and some of the exciting stuff uh please note that don't make any D buying decisions based off of uh forward-looking statements um just focus in on what we have released today uh this is part of the live on service now uh series of webinars that come through uh lots of great information out there in the platform we have severals and towards the end we'll we'll throw those all up uh for you what's available um but if you take this QR code you can see everything that's that's out there you found this today you get those invites but again lots of great content for you live and then as well as on demand few housekeeping session uh items as we get started um one one please use the Q&A um if you want to chat and say that something is great or if your audio is not coming through clearly go ahead and use the chat for that but if you have a question please put it in the Q&A uh we take those off we'll answer those we'll try to get those posted in the community uh make sure it uh helps us ensure that we answer all of your questions so please use that Q&A button um we are recording this session uh to come through that's why you're on mute right now um uh as we get into the Q&A if we have a followup maybe we'll be able to unmute you but uh uh we are recording this if you would like to not uh come on come off of mute or you have any issues with being recorded you could go ahead and drop now um and then after this event we will have a short survey let us know how we're doing how we can make this more useful for you uh with that um I want to introduce our our featured speaker product manager on upgrades all exciting something we all have to do Goen minan me I'm still working on that goind you're the only goind I know um so I like to goind he focuses in on upgrades and we uh we invited him to give us uh to talk about what we can do in Washington to make our upgrades better and we're all here to answer questions for you um my name is Adam Stout I'm a product manager uh outbound product manager covering fundamentals uh we have a few other of our outbound product managers here to answer questions so please go ahead and throw those in in the Q&A if we uh if there's something relevant to what we're talking about right now I'm going to interrupt Goen I do that all the time um and I will continue to do that to answer those questions live if not when we wrap up we'll just try to answer everything we can uh at the end and then we'll post other answers in the community so please we want this to be as interactive as possible use those Q&A push us uh let's make sure that we get the most value for for you in this time um with that I want to turn it over to goind um and let him take it away sounds great thank you Adam give me one second to take over the screen sharing and I'll go full screen wonderful wonderful so I do want to First stress what what Adam was saying there at the beginning I want this to be as interactive as possible as many of you know upgrades is something we all must do but it's rarely something that people actively uh focus on more so than when they're actually going through the upgrade process so my takeaway from this session is this is my 247 job I really want you to be as invested in upgrades as I'm invested in upgrades because this is something that I strongly believe that if we make big investments from a service now standpoint in this area we can make lives across the board so much better for all of you and that's only made possible by me best understanding what are the pain points that each person here on this call and anybody who might watch this recording back later are most dealing with and then we can try to transition our strategy for zanadu Yokohama Zurich anything beyond that as well to best be fitting your needs such that upgrades are no longer something you're worrying about and planning for months and months about instead it's an easy click of a button and you don't even worry about it beyond that so in that vein I really want to stress beginning with this slide my email at the bottom here uh go. Menin servicenow.com I would love to speak with as many of you as possible to really understand your unique upgrade challenges I think that upgrades is something that is oftentimes talked about in kind of a blanket sense but we all know that we're all dealing with our own customizations and our own personal problems that are making upgrades as difficult as they are so please reach out and let me know when you are free because I'd love to speak with as many of you as possible individually for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour uh if you're willing to give me your time so thank you so much and with that want to go again into uh the Safe Harbor agreement a lot of what we're going to be discussing here is Washington related but I am also kneed deep in the xanadoo planning and the yokahama planning so I'm sure I'm going to slip up and give a little bit of that juicy goodness that's upcoming as well and I want you to hold me honest as well if that's all stuff that you're hearing about and you don't find all too interesting maybe we can reorient ourselves accordingly too and Adam I see you in the chat already emailing me thank you so much I I want as many emails as possible so with that I just want to start by talking through exactly what are the team objectives for my team here on upgrade so I lead a lot of the upgrade development processes and with me are a lot of amazing Engineers who really know their stuff and together we're Collective L trying to reduce the cost to upgrade now what does that actually mean to reduce the cost to upgrade here on the upgrades team we break it down into three further buckets the first is the actual time it takes to upgrade this is primarily speaking to the uh a lot of the planning and Analysis that's going into actually making sure that the upgrade goes on without a hitch secondarily we realize that there's High resource costs when it comes to time to upgrade as well may that be from a actual processing standpoint making sure that you have machines ready that can take on the upgrade but then thereafter also from a people standpoint we understand that upgrades sometimes go wrong and you need to have people there in order to make sure that your customizations aren't breaking and that things are able to proceed as as expected once you're on the new release finally we also understand that here at service now we pride ourselves on ideally having zero downtime but we know that for during time of upgrades certain jobs are indeed going to be paused we want to be making sure that that quote unquote downtime if you will is as miniz as possible so in that vein we break it down even further when we think of time to upgrade we want upgrades to be as fast as possible but we also want upgrades to be as early in the process of the upgrade life cycle as well why is that the case we want our best and brightest Innovation to be in the hands of you all the quicker and hopefully when you believe that an upgrade is as easy to do as we hope for them to be then you'll be able to get a lot of our newest Innovation even quicker in addition to that when you are pursuing an upgrade more frequently you're also going to result in the upgrade usually being faster too and you can think about that in in really simple terms right when I'm trying to take on more data as would be the case if I'm skipping two releases then the upgrades is going to take longer because I have more files that I'm downloading because more things have been changed between those releases so if you're upgrading more frequently you're also more likely to have less uh slow upgrades and upgrades that are less likely to break as well because the change between releases are going to be a lot less than the changes between two releases or three releases at a time in the vein of resource cost we understand that resource cost takes the form of many different things it's a cost that comes with planning when you're actually reading through all the release notes and you're trying to determine whether or not the upgrad is worth pursuing it's a time that the devs on your team are spending fixing skipped records and issues with the customizations it's the time that your QA teams are going through and making sure that things aren't broken and finally it's the time that you're using your update sets or your upgrade plans or what other migration tooling you might have in place to make sure that you can Port things over from release to release so lot of different things to be worried about from the resource cost standpoint and we also want to make sure that we're not only worrying about the wall clock time instead we're also trying to make it as smooth and easy as possible to pursue an upgrade such that you're not having to employ a team of 10 to 20 people to do an upgrade instead this is something you can do on your own then finally the idea of downtime let like we said before there is a little bit of time during the upgrade where certain jobs are paused and we know that that's going to have Downstream effects for all of your own end users ideally we want to be making sure that that time is as little as possible so that you can get all the best and brightest parts of the service now experience at all times so that's how we think through upgrades at least on my team and we're trying to try uh to decrease the the load associated with each of those different uh buckets that we just walked through there but then when you think about upgrades from a service now and customer standpoint this is how we think about them from a service now standpoint it makes a lot of sense for us to try and get you to upgrade as quickly as possible it's easier for us to support few your releases so we want everybody on the newest release we also think that uh everybody should be hopefully trying to use the best stuff that we're putting out there and ideally by upgrading you're accessing that so we want to make upgrades as smooth as possible and we have a vested interest in that because we want you having all the cool stuff that every other team here at service now is trying to trying to create from a customer benefit standpoint uh I think we talked through this a little bit on the last slide but we really want you to be able to take advantage of our uh best and brightest May those be the our modern future sets in the Washington release or anything prior as well we also realize that we are best at supporting our newest releases too so we want you to have access to service now support but I think the most interesting part of this is that the latest security patches are something that a lot of our customers want and those are always going to be accessible when you upgrade so hopefully if you want the best security experience you also want to be upgrading as often as possible so this is the first part where I want this to be as interactive as possible because when I think through the upgrade Journey this is what I think through you start with the learning phase where you're trying to figure out everything that's new in the upcoming release then you go into the analysis phase to figure out hey is everything that's new worth my time right we ideally hope that it always is but we know that there's a huge time sync associated with upgrades and we want to make sure that you understand it's worth upgrading but sometimes people in the analysis phase realize hey maybe we'll skip a release because everything that's coming in this release isn't worth the hassle associated with upgrading we then hopefully people will decide yeah no I'd rather pursue the upgrade nonetheless and you go into the planning phase to figure out what when should all of our teams pause their development work and we're ready to pursue the upgrade after that we then go into the different subpro phases so you're going to be cloning prod to your subr you're going to be performing smoke testing you're going to be validating your customizations to making sure that they're not going to be broken and then finally once we go into more of the testing phases we're doing the same testing on prod too we want to be making sure that nothing's breaking once we Port everything over to prod finally is the uh all the stuff that happens at the end of of the production upgrade you're going to be emailing your users about changes you're going to be performing end user testing as well we ideally want to make sure that everything that you're uptaking in the Wasing release is going to be as easy and intuitive to use as possible too so this is where I want everybody to ideally provide their input in the chat or raise your hand these are the markers I have around how long these areas are traditionally taking our customers most of the time is spent on that 61 day process that is uh learning analysis and planning then there's 42 days or so along the lines of the subpods and the testing and then finally you're looking at about 3.5 hours or so for the actual upgrade itself now of course these are averages they're by no means going to be the case for every customer we have some customers where this might be double the time we have some customers where it likely is a fourth of the time but I want everyone here on this call to hold me honest if these are in line with what you expect or at least the ratios are in line with what you expect that' be a huge help to me to best understand exactly what are the areas we should be caring about most and even if it is say for example only 3.5 hours for the production upgrade itself but that's the point in time that is the most important to you you don't care as much about the three-month process at the beginning let me know about that because then we can make sure that the Investments we're making in xandu and Yokohama are in line with what your needs are so I'm just going to take a moment to read through the chat here and talk aloud as I do so so we're seeing six weeks um six to seven weeks um I'm assuming that everyone here is saying that this is the time it takes from beginning to end of the upgrade or when we're talking about six weeks are we are we saying that this is just the learning analysis and planning phase okay whole in 10 thank you Wayne oh one week upgrade from Mark that's that's wonderful okay we're looking at eight weeks from Jackie 61 days looks to be about right for Eric so yeah we're we're seeing that it's a little bit different depending on the size of the company but at the very least it seems like these ratios are more in line with what most people in the chat seem to expect which is good from our end so then I'll I'll I'll take a step back and if there was one area of this upgrade Journey that you think is most important to be trying to bring down in terms of time which area is it is it just the time that's being taken so long for the learning analysis and planning or is it something towards the end of that life cycle which is even more important because it's impacting your end users more okay testing in all caps we've learning from Jenny testing learning learning lot of learning okay testing and regression QA testing okay so it seems like the two buckets um right here is like learning in analysis is a lot of people are calling out and then testing so that's amazing to hear because at least in my mind that's very much in line with what I've heard previously as well I think that a lot of the tooling we're going to have especially in X is going to be very associated with the uh one of a lot of the issues that people are having in the vein of testing the learning analysis phase is a lot more interesting for us to tackle because the issue there is uh we have customized release notes we hope that everybody here is is making use of them but trying to fure figure out a way in which we can have it be as smooth of a process and as customized of a process as well about learning about the new features has been a challenge that we've always ran into because what's interesting in one family release for One customer might be extremely different for another customer and having you pour through the entirety of the release notes every time isn't all the most like helpful for everyone because there's a lot of stuff there that might not be really really targeted towards your own use cases which we'd still love for you to know um but want to make it as impactful and bespoke as possible as well okay I love everything on the chat here we'll save the chat as well and I'll go through it afterwards I once again implore everybody on the call to ideally send me an email uh and I'd love to work through each of the the times that each of these areas are taking for your own use case as well Okay cool so from that this is another area where I'd love a little bit of audience feedback from my prior conversations these are are the three things that it seems that customers are wanting the most customers want speed so actually quick upgrades second control over what parts of the upgrade you're taking up then finally guidance how do I even pursue the upgrade and what are the steps I need to be taking to actually pursue a successful upgrade without breaking my own customizations so when we break that down even further from a speed standpoint we're talking about the planning that we just talked about in the last slide we're talking about the testing that we also just talked about in the last slide then finally this seems to be the case most so for our largest customers less so for our mid to smaller customers as well but that engine time of that 3.5 hours that downtime can really affect the end user so we ideally want that engine time to be as short as possible as well so that we have ideally no time where jobs are paused from a control standpoint what soft software is upgraded um which is much of the reason why many of our customers seem to be skipping some releases they don't find inherent value in each part of the release and they understand that testing every part of the family release is going to be a little bit of a hassle so let's push it down the line and ideally find a family release which is really impactful for us we would love for everybody to take up every family release so we want to make sure that each part of the family releas is as powerful and as impactful as possible and we're also right now exploring ideas to see if we can break up the family release to be in a way that you can pick and choose which parts of the family release you'd like to take up control over when the software is upgraded as we saw in the chat previously there's a lot of people who have very stringent planning Cycles so you want to make sure that you're not disrupting any of your development work at the same time too and then finally how app upgrades are completed so I've heard this less so on this call right now from the chat but in previous conversations too that it's a little bit finicky trying to work through trups and trying to figure out that when you're doing app upgrades on the store as well having to do those manually isn't always the best so if there's a way to bulk upgrade or something along those lines is something we can explore as well finally in the vein of uh customer guidance too we want to make sure that the new products have very clear uh guidance processes as to how to use them I don't know how many people here on this call have made use of our upgrade plans I think they're an amazing deployment tool but many people need to be on the app repo model to be able to leverage upgrade plans now the issue there is we don't know if we were as clear as possible in our messaging around that as such uh We've had some issues with upgrade plans previously we understand that and we're iterating upon that and we hope that we can pursue even better stuff in the upgrade plans domain in the future but right now are are we're transitioning towards trying to tackle those needs in the testing and learning phases instead as far as customization management is concerned we know that customizations often break a time of upgrade we want to make sure that those breaks are as limited as possible and looking forward towards the Washington release we actually think that we're going to be doing a very good step in that direction then finally the the delegation piece one thing I've been told by many customers is that it's very complex to do an upgrade and trying to put that in the hands of a new admin is a little bit fearsome because if something breaks down the line and that new admin doesn't know what they are doing then your entire upgrade goes kaput and that's a lot of lost Revenue uh for your own company so ideally we want to be making a way that we can onboard admins easier towards the upgrades journey and in addition to that delegate processes as well so I'm going to take a moment to read through the chat see if that's in line with what everybody here today thinks uh and then after that we can try to dive a little bit more deeply into what to expect in Washington so app upgrades are a new challenge looking for a new strategy for quarterly release of store apps as we brand them as Express upgrades interesting uh I think I'll follow up with you there blae and and we can talk a little bit more about that um I like that Express upgrades that's a great way of looking at it totally typically try to get information from a YouTube video to get a good impression of the contents are release Herbert is that a YouTube video that service now is uh presenting or is that something that external customer is doing and you're just trying to learn a little bit more about what worked for them okay also in the middle of an upgrade we don't have time for the learning curve waiting oh thank you Ian I appreciate the the compliments about the presentation um Marywood when in the middle of an upgrade we don't have time for the learning curve waiting on service Now to respond for cases for help with the tool yeah that makes sense which Mary that's ideally why we're trying to hope that everything we ship in the future is going to be as clean from a code quality perspective as possible um and we're making strides towards that in a was in our Washington release so we'll we'll share a little bit more about that in the future but I fully understand when you're at time of upgrade the last thing you want to be doing is on service now support uh instead you just want to get through the upgrade and move on with your day and yeah uh blae I also see you having a comment about upgrade plans happy to talk to you about that one-on-one as well I think our our release with upgrade plans there's a lot of promise there as far as a deployment Tool uh we've had some customers really really loving them but then some other customers where I don't think it was extremely clear for everyone exactly how they would work um so as a result of that we want to make that a little bit more clear in the future too okay cool seems like a lot of the questions have been answered so let's dive a little bit more into what to expect so this is a little bit of a forward-looking timeline once again Safe Harbor so please don't make any purchasing decisions based off this but we try to break down everything towards what are we doing in the pre-upgrade journey during upgrade post-upgrade and then things that might hit on multiple parts of the upgrade Journey as well so in Vancouver we released the skip record rules engine I I hope everyone here is at least making use of that in some capacity but generally speaking I'll give a quick overview of what that is the skip record rules engine allows you to create bulk rules similar to maybe let's take outlook for example or Gmail when you have you can create rules in your email and then uh you can apply those rules into any incoming email that you have right so maybe you can sort certain things to spam if it has a certain type of messaging in the contents of the email itself or there's certain things you want to be putting into your prior inbox based off the way that the email is sent May if it's from a certain type of email address or something along those lines we have a similar sort of logic here for the skip record rules engine basically you can create record rules which will then allow you to autoresolve certain rules uh which I think or certain records rather which I think is really really important because many of our customers try to go through resolving all their skipped records right but there are many skip records that might not be Mission critical to be dealing with so instead you can employ the rules engine and actually create rules to try and make that process a little bit easier so we really hope that you take the time to explore the rules engine if you haven't already because it's been a big win for their customers that have already started using it in addition to that as far as Washington is concerned I'm really really proud of the work that our team did most of the Washington release was in two buckets the first is engine improvements we wanted to make sure that the process of the upgrade itself once you click begin upgrade is as smooth as possible and that comes down to decreasing file load time so we'll talk a little bit more about what that means but a lot of backend improvements went into the wash in release and then in xandu we want to build upon that to try and do even more in the vein of database improvements and we hope that you'll actually see a lot of benefit in terms of the time that that quote unquote downtime where the scheduled jobs are paused um we want that to be as minimized as possible especially for our largest customers then finally impact tracker uh one of the biggest things that many of our customers oftentimes talk about is hey I I wait a few releases before or wait a few patches before I take up an upgrade because patch one might not be the safest Goen and I fully hear you I would feel much the same I'm never the person that is the first to upgrade my OS on my iPhone we want to be in a world where you are safe and trust us enough that you're willing to do so and impact tracker is going to be the first step in getting towards that future and we can explain a little bit more about that in the next few slides as well thank you Jonah uh seeing the the comment about the rules engine ideally uh everybody else feels the same way I think it's an amazing feature too so let's talk a little bit more about those Innovative Investments specifically in the backend space so we're seeing a over 10% increase in file Low Time Performance uh as a result of the improvements we made to the engine uh as a result of the uh Washington work so there's a few different things we're doing underneath the hood there I won't get into the super technical details but we're doing a lot of file loading optimization but also a lot of memory optimization as well so hopefully that will result in many of our largest customers seeing a large large increase in the time saved as a result of the uh the work we've done in Washington in addition to that we also understand that table Alters are a really really big deal for many of our customers and that sometimes it can take up to 60% of the upgrade time depending on how you are as a customer so we are working very very hard in sand do to build off that work that we did in Washington to try and make the backend work as easy and smooth as possible for our customers we understand that many of our smaller and mediumsized customers might not see this as as big of an issue which is why we're working on other things in parallel as well the Hope here is that any of the quote-unquote downtime that you're experiencing is going to be as minimized as possible in Washington and Beyond any questions about any of this before I keep keep hopping forward U Goin we did have a couple of questions sure yeah come through if you uh if you want to pop in to the the Q&A you'll see the same thing sure some of these will take at the end uh to come through uh but just to clarify just that's in here I know you talked about a little bit about what comes through but uh when do you recommend starting to upgrade to a new release the the honest answer is as soon as possible um that that is as what what we' love I think right now many of our customers are looking at patch four or so of when they they feel most ready to be upgrading but a lot of the work our team is doing right now is to try and make sure that code quality is as high as possible so that people can feel safe upgrading even at patch two or patch three and I would say I actually want to start at EA I I'd want to go grab um the PDI as soon as possible I know we saw learning coming up a lot in the chat and I think it's the sooner you start your upgrade the sooner the sooner it's going to be and the sooner you your things are going to be fixed uh if there if there are issues um or enhancements that come through so EA is there for a reason I'm not going to go I'm not GNA go to production on my EA instance but I'm gonna go get my PDI kick the tires um and and really soon as GA I want to get that my subr and run through my automated testing and I think part of it has to do with your um your organization on what you're going to do and there's a question about ATF and we'll um I'm going to plug that at the end uh so I won't I won't your time in here with with the automated testing but if I get it on EA I get it on GA and I'm starting and I'm looking at it I can run my tests and have a good idea of not only what is everything work or not but there's different right we make it better all the time and there's differences and you need to figure that out when you're looking at uh what's available and what you want to have and if there's any ocm you need to do and get people trained make sure it works you're going to get a you're going to be able to upgrade up sooner if you wait until the end um maybe it doesn't work for you right it's your customization that has an issue uh with it that there's something that you have and then you're just gonna have to wait for that to be fixed with the case so again I wouldn't necessarily go I'm gonna go to prod uh the day after GA but I want to have that plan and the sooner you start the the better off it's going to be the soon you're get all those great features yeah no Adam I think I I 100% agree with you I think you want to be as quickly as possible play around in sandboxes get your PDI working I think you want to be testing our stuff and make sure it works for you and the sooner you do that the better and uh also related to question for the duration um yeah we talked about time uh how long it takes to upgrade do you have any references for how many FTE are assigned to it or working on the on the upgrade yeah uh very much differs from company to company so the numbers that I presented are averages from our own uh data that we've taken in I don't have that same averages around uh how many FTE because that's not something a customer has to report when they when they're pursuing an upgrade in the same way that we have that data around the time that is taking at each stage of the upgrade um from my own conversations it seems like teams are ranging from anywhere from three people to 50 people so I think there's a huge range depending on how large the company is it is and I find it interesting I think it scales pretty well because we hit that time period pretty consistently and and for what it's worth the customers seem to put the resources in to get into that time frame um and it has to do much more with how many how much you've customized how much definitely how much you've customized how many different product lines you have if all you have is itsm fine but if you have itm and CSM and HR and app engine You're Building all this stuff you have more resources that are in there so uh there's not a perfect number there's not a yeah I don't think there is a perfect number I go you definitely need to have this um all right and oops uh with hot fixes do you have any as we're going through testing do you have any recommendation about taking hot fixes so I I I'm testing patch three um we're going through we have uat we're we're four weeks in we had and there's a hot fix that available should I take that hot fix actually default to you there I I think you might have better insight there I I would say my my my response would be do you need it we list everything that's in that chain in those hot fixes um our policy at service now is generally we don't want to we don't want to add new features and new functionality into Patches at all it's about fixing and securing hot fixes it's even more even more that hot fix fixes one specific thing if you don't need it I probably wouldn't do it um security I'm I'm probably always going to take but if it's fixing um that that H fix might be fixing something in an app you don't have so don't worry about it right so make sure you're really really um critical thoughtful about hot fixes for the minor for a minor release that comes through a quarterly or patch that comes through um you know I want to take my quarterly patches it's got lots of good stuff it's my vitamins um it's good for everybody you definitely want to stay in your quarterly Pat matching um but the hot fixes that come through if it's late in the cycle really take a look at do you need it or not um it's probably not going to hurt anything if it if you don't need it because it's a similar area and if you do go ahead and take it um but we're we're not throwing in major functionality to H fix right it's it's very very targeted when we have that all right all right I'll hand it back over to you and I'll continue to monitor the the the Q&A and and then interrupt no no worries and I think we'll dive into a lot of these Q&A questions at the end as well so from there I want to talk a little bit about um the impact tracker initiative as well and I apologize if any of these slides seem a little bit too text Heavy they're from a completely separate deck that I entirely stole them from for this uh conversation so I'll talk through them I'll give you the highlights no need to read word for word exactly what's here uh but the takeaway is we are fully acknowledging of the fact that many of our customers have extremely customized instances and we love that um but it results in a lot of issues at time of upgrade especially so when we look at service now service now is also trying to push a lot of new stuff which oftentimes might conflict with your customizations so we want to try and make sure that us as a company are still prioritizing our customers and making sure that they can customize as much as they want but making sure that we're breaking less stuff when we allow them to do so so we'll dive a little bit more into what exactly that means so service now are often times creating merge conflicts with you the customer because we're altering files that customers have already customized but it goes both ways as well customers are oftentimes customizing files the service now is prone to change too so we want to ideally make sure that that sort of uh like tug a war of sorts is as minimized as possible and there are two ways we can do that right we can either alert service now to say hey maybe let's not touch this thing because customers have built a ton of customizations at top it and if you really do need a build a top this thing maybe we create a new file instead and then from a customer point of view we alert all of you to let you know that hey this is something that we've change in every one of our past releases and odds are we've got warning that we're probably going to change this again in zanadu or again in Yokohama so maybe you don't want to be building a customization here because it's just going to cause a skipped record for you in the future as well so what we're doing is we're trying to bring down that skipped record count we're trying to make sure that you're running into fewer issues at time of upgrade and that merge conflict uh that person you might have on your team whose entire job is just to deal with merge conflicts their life's becoming easier too so what we're doing is internally we're creating an upgrade friction dashboard we're calling that as a project initiative the impact tracker and what impact tracker is trying to do is we're trying to look at every place where we're causing skip records for our customers track the total count of skip records but then also track which teams are creating the most skip records so that we can see that okay this scrum team is responsible for every single customer across the farm getting a skipped record let's figure out exactly why that is is it breaking customizations let's talk a little bit more with that team and then if they realize it's something that is still Mission critical and everybody needs to be making sure that they don't have customizations on top that stuff we'll then convey that to you Downstream as a customer but ideally we want to be having those conversations earlier with our own engineers and letting them know hey we no longer want this to be a headache for our customers let's try to make the upgrade process as frictionless as possible so this is what our dashboard is internally we have a lot of different ways that we can break down this data too and we now have an entire team as well whose job is going to be monitoring this dashboard and making sure that we're breaking as few things as possible too now how does that manifest from an actual customer and developer point of view too for our customers uh or rather for our developers on this slide we're going to be surfacing how many uh how like high friction or low friction a file might be on the actual file that they're working on so this is one view you see in uh in build tools which is what our internal system is called but then you're also going to see this if you're actually building on like an IDE or some sort of like code development software we're also going to be alerting you to that as well and what we're going to be saying is like hey this is customized by oh so many instances maybe you don't want to be making this change if they still go about making that change they'll then alert things to my team and we'll then go talk with them and figure out a little bit more why they're editing high-risk files and our goal here is that only the most important of files are touched moving forward and that anything else that you have built a customization on uh we're ideally trying to make sure that there's breaking as few things as possible Adam I see you hopping off mute I GNA chime in because I was had a conversation with this with one of my team this morning um and to be clear too one of the ways one of the reasons that this works um and and is important uh has to do with how you upgrade um and how you build how you customize and configure um and this has changed over time one of the things we used to say was make a copy we haven't said that for a while now and we actually want to not make copies of things that we're configuring because we this doesn't work if you make a copy and you activate right or come through and there is uh there's certainly some art to it about if I'm enhancing and I'm adding stuff yeah go ahead and add a new you know I don't need to go modify a script include if I'm just adding some new functions right I don't want to go modify an out of the box flow um just to that I'm not going to call anyway if I'm adding an action I'm adding a flow action I'm just going to add an action I don't need to use the out of the box one um I don't want to reuse it script include if I'm adding a method I'm probably not going to add a method to an out of- the boox script include I'll add a new script include and and call that but again you don't want to copy you want to modify we actually want to be really head-on to go I am configuring this I'm customizing this I'm changing this business rule I'm changing this ACL if you just add new ACLS we can't see that and again if I'm adding a new role and I'm expanding what it can do new is fine new is good for new but if you're changing don't make it look new modify it right and so that way we're all really clear on the skips that I think one of the things that worries me the most is that I've added new functionality maybe I inactivated it so it doesn't show up as a skip but it works differently and it causes me a problem right is that does that make sense that's it's important as you build every day every deployment you make every update set you deploy every app repo you come through you're making your upgrade harder or easier right or keeping it the same but you definitely have a chance to make it harder and if we hide everything we insulate everything that's that's where we cause all the friction and upgrades or we cause a lot of the friction and upgrades because the skips didn't show up we don't know you're customizing it but it breaks what you have but if you configure and you if you change what's out of the box we can see it we can handle it we can talk about it we G have these great conversations so just again as you're thinking about it as you're building we don't want to just copy and ignore because that's what bites Us in the past right that's setting up those issues we want to be very upfront about it I'm changing out of the box behavior and we see this okay sorry that's an amazing call out Adam and something that I think everybody would benefit from knowing especially now that we've changed the way we're we're tracking it on our side so from there from a customer point of view this is what you're going to see now uh as far as this is a higher priority file type we're going to recommend that you uh don't pursue changing this if if possible but if it's Mission critical for your business use case feel free to continue doing so just expect a ski record at time of upgrade now to peel back the curtain a little bit and how we're building upon this in uh in xandu what we're thinking about doing and what we've rather begun work in in the vein of is pairing up with the automated test framework team where our goal is that for any issues that that might arise you're catching them early enough in subr instead of catching them in prod so what we're going to try and get everybody to do is that if you still pursue customizing high-risk areas areas that service now is prone to change in the future you try to either manually test it or use our ATF framework as well to make sure that you have tests around that and the ideal case there is that the test will run at time of the sub production upgrade and what you'll realize is that you're catching those issues in subr instead of finding a defect in prod and what we're going to be further building upon that in either xandu or Yokohama I need to double check with my engineering team to see where we're at is uh a upgrade risk score which is going to take as an input all of this data from the impact tracker but then also all the data that's coming through you're testing and and trying to figure out exactly how risky is your upgrade to pursue right now and whether or not we'd recommend that you either deprecate certain at or you try to build tests around uh certain customizations that are currently untested so a lot of work right there as far as customer validation still needed but wanted to peel back that curtain for all the lucky people here on the call to make sure that you understand that we're trying to do our best to to try and help from a testing point of view too uh and I think that's really really important as we move forward finally uh this is the last slide I have here uh I want to give a little bit of a plug uh for the wor that our team's doing just because I know that many of my Engineers will listen to this too uh Conrad very nice customer who talks to me hopefully I think all of you can can be similar people as well who are who are in my ear if you email me at the email previously but he told me that his upgrade was the most successful one to date when he was moving up to Vancouver uh yet to talk to him about Washington but hoping that'll be much the same there too and hopefully that means that all of you can take take interest in trying to pursue those upgrades as well and I hope they go off without hitch and if they don't you have my email and I'm happy to hear everything about everything we can do better in the future too so with that Adam I'm happy to pass it back to you and we can talk about any questions that people may have great okay so let's get to some of the questions there lots of good stuff in here um yes okay uh this is one I'm gonna take it to come through this more area but we but it's a great question uh can service now documentation be more explicit about letting us know what's um out of the box or what comes with a potential fee because it's not clear um yes we definitely can do that um I will say there's a little bit of nuance in there because there's variance in contracts and some contracts uh some skes will include some featur and some don't um we were trying to be much more thoughtful about that and basically if it says it's in the platform it's included if if it's not it's not also way more transparent in uh application manager um I'll put the plugin too one of my favorite enhancements in uh in Washington is that the admin Center I can just go straight to to the application manager and I don't have to go system applications all application manager um we're putting a lot of effort um into explaining and being clearer about entitlements so that when I go to the application manager it'll say I have a license or I don't um that's something we we should be able to answer for you and communicate out if you don't have a license that's a lot less clear and that's where you need to talk to your account rep about how you can get it um in a way that makes sense for you uh there's some different restrictions between uh different regions in the world and different governments on what on how we have to sell it so there's not like you have to buy this um but uh definitely in the documentation we want to be clear that you need some type of license or not we can do that and the real answer will be in the application manager about am I licensed or not um and we we're balancing not showing you stuff you don't have but also telling you about stuff that would make your life a lot easier uh in that but if if in doubt today just uh talk to your account team they'll get be able to get the answer for you uh but we're going to be pushing really hard to make sure that that is uh in the instance for you to see um I I my understanding from what everybody I've talked to is the people who read the contract and the people who do the who activate the applications and the plugins are not the same people I know that sometimes they are um but just we want to make sure that as somebody who's doing the upgrade who's being asked to activate something that you have that at tip of your fingerprints T your fingers to be able to do that um okay um there were a couple questions in here about rollbacks and and I think that has to do with roll back I'm going to take that as uninstalling some of the plugin stuff um for plugins and for apps do you have any insight into our thoughts on that and how we're positioning uninstalling something that that is something I I'd say talk a little bit more with your account team about that uh I don't have a ton of thought around the the uninstalling idea I know we're trying to minimize rollbacks I've been looking at a lot of roll back data there but as far as bre practices are concerned I think that would go under some of the other teams uh and I'll put it in terms of uninstalls are we should be pretty clear about this we're trying to move as much as we can to the store most Store app not all but most store apps are uninstallable um much more than plugins right plugins are not un activatable once you once you've turned it on you've turned it on um but and and there's the reason for that when we're modifying a bunch of global stuff you can't really undo it in a way that makes sense without causing lots of other issues so generally with plugins we fix forward uh but with store apps uh it will warn you if you can't uninstall it some of the store apps arein I'm going to say un uninstallable that doesn't sound really great are not uninstallable but are a lot of what we are doing is put it into the store design it in a way that it is uninstallable so that if there is an issue or there's a new version or whatever wants to come in that you have that that power um it's not always possible but that's certainly something that we we take a look at um go you have any insight about um two major releases a year uh yeah so why do we do it I I think the first answer is that it's been the way that we've done it from a legacy standpoint so it's it's hard to really break tradition there but I know that's a lot of thinking that my team's going around right now to see is that the right way to go about it because I think Anonymous attendee uh you highlight a very very good point there that for a lot of our smaller customers it's a lot to take on a lot to test and by the time you finish that process there already a next release ready for you so we're right now exploring the idea of trying to shift more so towards the store have a lot of that functionality that's would traditionally be in a family release available in the store and you can pick and choose which parts of the family release you'd like to have similar to like an Apple App Store model if you will now we're very very far away from actually implementing anything of that sort that's something we're still validating and if you have any thoughts on that I'd recommend reaching out to me via email and we're we're happy to talk a little bit more about that one-onone and that relates back to to the next question uh about app upgrades uh spefic specifically and that they're uh possibly released monthly I mean to clarify so we do two family releases a year and then we do um quarterly store releases of new functionality the quarterly for new functionality but we do patch releases every month in the store uh to come through partner apps that are not from service now I believe actually released weekly we don't we don't really control when they release it but for service now apps which has going said we're pushing much more into the store to give you more choice and more flexibility um those are patched monthly released quarterly and I'll say originally we did store releases monthly and it was too much so there's a there's a double-edged sword here and I think our philosophy goes to we want to give you the choice we want to give you the choice to do it on how you want to have I like to again we earlier we had about the uh Express upgrades I think uh what it came through with the store as an important reminder or note to come through you might hear us say to there and I think we need to document this a little bit more about trups which is we take almost everything that's in the store from service now and we put it into the family release so as you're upgrading the family twice a year you're getting the store releases that were ready to go when we made the family so when you're upgrading to Washington in uh if I'm upgrading to Washington right now I'm getting most of the store apps that were available when we Rel uh when we built Washington which would have been in November not what came out in February so we our store releases are February May August November for our major releases it's getting the stuff it doesn't get the latest one because we're actually at EA we do EA and store release at the same time it's the stuff before that so you're gonna get all that functionality twice a year and as we make it faster and simpler um we'll be able to deploy faster but we can't deploy faster until we make it faster and simpler right govin's got to succeed before we can really go hey we're going to give you you know six releases a year you know it's too when I when I talk to customers it's it's too much right I can't I can't give you something where you literally never stop upgrading um and that's that's well until we get to a point where we can never stop upgrading and it's easy right and it's just flowing but I can't I can't ask you to have dedicated resources that just do service now upgrades all the time nothing about that I don't feel comfortable asking you to do that so this the store releasee does give you the options to to patch that stuff and get new functionality sooner but it's a lot it's a lot and if you have a one app maybe you can do it but I for some of our customers that have everything we sell it's so much to manage that we need to give you some checkpoints where things come in and we need more flexibility we need more transparency we need to be easier but we also don't want to just dump everything on you and tell you good luck right um we want to make sure that you have all the tooling and support to be very successful totally and Adam in that vein I just want to speak to Mark's question in the chat saying that customers already don't stay current with the store apps are we not just shifting the problem and I want everybody here on this call to keep me honest and again message me at the uh at my email with your thoughts here but what I've heard from some customers is that family release is a little bit too overwhelming so because of all the time that it takes to go through every part of the release notes do testing around every part of your customizations and even sometimes testing the new stuff that service now is pushing as well people skip family releases because it's a little bit too much to handle so our whole thinking about exploring this other idea is that why don't we try to make family releases as lightweight as possible instead people can pick and choose what they would like to test in the store and if that ends up not being something that the people here on this call find valuable then we can move in a different direction just want to be operating and be candid around why we're thinking through that right now sorry reading all these great questions that come through through and that we only have a few more minutes to uh um I I I I will go as as hopefully we'll get some answers in in the chat to that um as we go through I think that that uh I think one of the things we'll come through is there's not one size fits-all and so it's really important to uh email Goen he wants to read all of your emails and we'll follow up and have some more conversations about what makes sense for you um and and I think we want to become more prescriptive I know we want to become more prescriptive on how you can on different plans that you can choose and what makes sense for your organization some organizations can only upgrade once a year it has nothing to do with service now it is that's their ocm and I think one of the things that I want to make sure that we don't forget um is that upgrading is more than the technical upgrade right so there's testing so I might want just this new app I might want this fixed for this app great we want to have we want to have that flexibility but there's other organizations where we have to do a lot of uh there's a lot of regulatory issues that we have to handle and that way outside of what we're able to do right now right we want to know about it if you have regulatory issues uh you have things you have to file like we want to understand all of that Goen had the slide at the beginning about this is the upgrade process which my hands don't fit on the screen we want to make sure we know that and understand it and and help address that as much as we can um but it's because of the ocm and the changes that come that come with that and how I enable my organization we want to give you the control to say I want to do my CSM team now then I'm do my HR team next and then I'm going do that like you want to rotate others just need to do a big bang because I have this window that I can do an upgr for all of my systems um there is not a a one siiz fits-all a best for everybody but as we talk to you and what your needs are you know help maybe we can help craft a best for you um and and reuse some of the some of the models that we have um I am gonna steal the screen um hopefully and okay um so need some help with some resources I do have a few more things that I wanted I wanted to end with this uh on um so one how do I know what's in Washington reallying the release notes the release notes are great if you have a real question if you have not used the upgrade kit it is awesome these go back at least to San Diego I think before that I put up the I put up some links for Vancouver and for and for Washington the Washington's out these generally come out on the day of ga uh to come through so there'll be a zad do one in September um so it's not ready for EA but for GA it's there Washington is there this is um I was going to bring it up but I think it's a 200 Point PowerPoint deck um and the link actually didn't work in in Washington but I'll follow up on that for you to get this deck it is a great overview pictures uh description of the value of all of the new enhancements that came out in Washington and again we have that for Vancouver and the previous releases as well depending on where you're at Great content for you to see if you're here you definitely need to look at this um but take the Powerpoints deck and use it internally you know change the the the uh the slide master and make it look like yours that's what it's for but it helps you communicate out to your internal teams what the value of Washington is and Vancouver and before awesome awesome resource make sure you are using this again those links down at the bottom will get you there you can find it on servicenow.com as well uh through a couple clicks but if you want to get there it'll take you there it's a PDF and it has that link on here to get to get the PowerPoint and I'll I'll follow up about why the PowerPoint is not working for Washington uh next impact customers you have if you're here and you're getting started with upgrades impact has an offering for you about jump starting your your upgrade great resources to come in um you're you're here you're you're watching this and participating at getting to ask questions live but we can't talk about your specific instance if you're watching this on YouTube uh we can't answer your questions live but for uh our impact customers great great offering to help you through it I I highly recommend doing this particularly if you're early in in your journey and service now you haven't done a lot of these yet uh to come through you'll spend a couple hours with an expert uh looking through your instance talking about upgrade strategies that fit for you um I keep saying it's not a one-size fits-all this is a great opportunity uh to get some some knowledgeable experts to help you find what works for your organization so that's available with impact related to that as well is jump start your automated testing if you are not using ATF uh we did a session on that a month ago yinka who who is on I don't know if he's been answering some questions as well um was talking about ATF and the automated testing and how that helps your upgrades as well we didn't talk a lot about that today but you you really want to make sure you understand ATF if you have not been using ATF uh go check out this this accelerator with impact the webinar it's posted in YouTube uh we'll put a link to it at the bottom of this one we post this as well um yinka was talking about all the great stuff that was in that's available with ATF whether it is the test generator uh cloudrunner to help you run your test all the time in Washington we have a new performance uh performance testing tool great stuff with ATF this ATF will help you reduce your time we we see it in our stats we talk to customers when you're using ATF you will reduce the amount of time it takes to to have an upgrade and you'll have better quality smoother easier upgrades um so if you're just getting started check out impact uh and then we're back on the Q&A um and let's see if there's anything else in here uh when is the impact tracker going to be available Goin impact tracker should be live for our Wasing customers and the updated impact tracker should be live in xandu so all the stuff I was sharing about the ATF related work um later and is that the impact tracker will it help me in my Washington upgrade or uh will it need to be really my my it'll really be your Washington Z do upgrade I think okay and and patches should help too right and patches yes patches right so today it's there like I hope you get excited go take a look at it and particularly as you're we're going to go through a couple patches in Washington start there and then when you get to zanado do you'll be an expert uh okay uh a question about Health Scan to help you out I definitely love Health Scan um there's this is saying about it not going away I don't expect Health Scan to go away although it might be might be replaced with impact uh with um instant scan platform but the concept of what Health Scan does I I have no I have not heard about it going away at all um it's really essential um I am a big advocate of we need more of it and I want it an instance I want it to be easier all that stuff um but we'll uh I again I haven't heard of it being pulled um and then ATF uh speed of ATF is definitely being worked on um check out the session from last month if you if you haven't done that um but we are uh doing a lot in ATF to make it better easier all of that great stuff um just just as goind is focusing on the upgrades we have a team focusing on ATF uh and that whole experience for us um for pa uh I'll get back to the PA content pack stuff with that um okay uh let me get the last slide so we can wrap up for this um we'll try and get to to the other questions but we are over time I think already uh if you have other questions we have lots ofies that are going on so this is our platform academy uh platform fundamentals Academy we have a an academy focused exclusively on workflow automation with workflow Studio flow designer process uh playbooks um uh action designer decisions great stuff in workflows um analytics everything there is a lot happening in analytics with platform analytics um so check out those series uh specifically with a migration it's very related to upgrades if we had more time i' talk about how uh upgrades are going to impact your anal itics but make sure you go check out those sessions they're all recorded on YouTube mobile next experience AI I don't know people like to talk about AI nowadays amazing amazing content out there and what we can do with now assist and then conversational ACA interface Academy so if I want to know about virtual agent lots of great content out there you're certainly invited to come join us live and ask your questions and if not it's uh all available on YouTube shortly after the session and with that I wanted to thank you for joining us here's goin's email not mine I changed that uh so you have that so uh Goen wants to hear from you we all want to hear from you um but let us know about your upgrade experience and we'd love to set up some time to talk to you um and find out what will make upgrades easier and smoother for you um and you know the better the more you get to talk to us the more it's going to impact and be better for you uh with that anything you want to add Goen otherwise I think we're gonna have to wrap up for today been wonderful spending time with all of you hopefully looking forward to many emails great uh and this will be recorded posted into YouTube uh probably early next week um so you can forward it to your family friends get it to go uh Memorial days coming up you can do that um and I will be uh remiss to tell you too knowledge knowledge is coming up uh in just a few weeks super early uh to come through for all of us here um Goen are you gonna be at knowledge I will be at knowledge and he will be at the upgrades Booth so if you're gonna be at knowledge come talk to goven live uh you can send him an email but I would just surprise him just show up and start talking I'm much shorter in person so that might be a little bit surprising I know I seem large on on camera but uh expect aate man at best yes many people servers now are super tall when you see them you find that a knowledge not go than me we are on the shorter side uh but come see us we'll be at the platform Booth um we have some sessions going on uh we're we're doing some round tables uh talking about upgrades uh the two of us will be there a couple other experts to come as well so um if you're here you know there's some great resources for you at knowledge so we hope to see you there um and with that we'll wrap it up and we'll see you again in a month have a great day