[Music] hello hello and welcome to the workflow Academy in this comprehensive platform Academy video series we'll dive into the transformative world of work for automation empowering you to build Monitor and optimize efficient workflows with ease join us as we explore the core tools of service now's workflow automation Suite to build flows and subflows playbooks and decision tables on the now platform hi my name is Lisa horenstein and I work as an outbound product manager for the now platform my area of expertise is workflow Automation and I create enablement content videos articles and blogs on the now Community I have been with service now for over 5 years and I have been part of the service now ecosystem since 2016 before joining service now I was a platform owner admin and developer at a customer today I'm joined by Jason LEF who is a manager on the inbound product management team covering workflow automation Jason and I will walk you through some Advanced Playbook configuration options we'll look at the experience configuration and overrides layouts and controllers as well as the options for embedding playbooks in different interfaces for your users to interact with them following this overview session I will publish several shorter Academy videos with walkthroughs of each of these topics keep an eye on this Academy's Community article and the video description to find links to these demo videos quick reminder we might mention coming releases or product features that are still in development all timelines and features may be subject to change so don't please don't make any purchasing decisions based on anything we say today today we will cover some of the skills you need to set up a new playbook experience Define experience overrides specify a custom Playbook layout and embedding playbooks in different interfaces for your agents and end users to interact with the skills you acquire today are usually not used daily which is why is even more important to have a reference like this to come back to next time you need them first for everyone new to Playbooks and as a refresher for the rest of us let's look at what they are and how playbooks and Playbook experience go together our vision for building playbooks on the now platform is that we want to enable service now developers and business owners to build and manage endtoend workflows on the now platform you can imagine playbooks as an extension of flows as it adds a UI layer to your business logic allowing agents and request ERS to visualize and interact with a defined business process through a simple and task oriented view with the release of workflow Studio we're unifying the Builder experience for flows decision tables and playbooks so you find is no longer referring to building processes or process definitions and process automation designer or also short Pad but we're now building playbooks in workflow Studio instead when you build playbooks you can toggle back and forth freely between working in the cband style board view or the new more visual diagram view building playbooks and workflow Studios is just one side of the coin the other side is the Playbook experience agents process workers and and requesters can interact with each step through the customizable Playbook component you can Define the layout of the stage picker stage details and activity layout playbooks and Playbook experience as well as the experienced demo and additional content are being distributed through the service now store allowing us to ship updates and new features on a quarterly basis these apps are generally being updated with each family release however that is usually in the latest previous version and there will be a newer version available on the store we recommend checking the application manager regularly and updating the store apps to get access to the latest features and fixes as playbooks consist of multiple Parts different developers with different skill sets will perform these tasks in different builders first playbooks can be built by developers of various skill levels in workflow Studio process owners and business process users can map out their process life cycle with placeholders and play pre-made activities in sequential or parallel stages use now assist Playbook generation to accelerate the outline generation experience developers can build full playbooks and replace placeholders created by citizen developers or Playbook generation and they can review and validate The Playbook before publishing it when the Baseline activity is provided with playbooks do not sufficiently cover your use case you can reuse existing flows subflows or flow actions as automation only assets or use them as the automation plan for custom activities service now developers can build flows and activity definitions to extend the Playbook activity Library default activity layouts include record list knowledge and structure and more service now developers with UI Builder experience can duplicate an existing activity layout and edit it in UI Builder using any next experience component in our library switching to the Playbook experience side where can we work on playbooks and who do we need to add them to to these experiences from their Inception playbooks were available to be worked in work spaces and other next experience Pages the most common configuration is a dedicated play tab on a workspace record page workspace admins and service now developers can use UI Builder to add the Playbook components and configure the layout and controllers in the Vancouver release we added a mobile controller making them available in the service now mobile app the first product to adopt this feature was field service management work with your mobile app admins or developers to make the necessary configurations with the Washington release play books are now also available for service portals accessed with a dedicated Playbook content item this was first adopted by the customer service management product but it is available to all customers accessing playbooks in a service portal enables requesters and agents to engage in multi-turn processes creating the Playbook content item is seriously simple as you will see when you watch the demo this task can be done by any service catalog admin or service portal admin and developer ERS over the next couple of weeks I will publish a workflow Academy short video with a demo on how to configure each of these three options but in today's video we will focus on the experience side of playbooks and the highest level entity we can configure is the Playbook experience itself the global Playbook experience provides a starting point and default values for configurations activities action mapping and Status mapping this experience is readon but Playbook experiences are built to be extensible when you create a custom experience in this table you can also Define overrides and extensions for that specific experience any values that you do not Define here will be inherited from the global Playbook experience when you create custom activities and activity uis these will have a reference to an experience record to Define when these will be applied these override settings will then also show in the Playbook experience related lists you can learn more about about creating custom activities and custom activity uis in my Academy that I published earlier this year similarly this works for Action assignments actions can be available for activities stages or a whole Playbook stage and Playbook actions are defined per Playbook experience activity actions are tied to a specific activity definition and Playbook experience when you create a custom activity that should be interactive you will add activity actions like for example Mark complete skip or update these declarative actions can be implemented as client actions server script or mapped from UI Builder events through UXF client actions when you build activities for specific tables and use cases their statement values may be named differently from the default experience status values use status mapping to ensure that the right State info shows up when displaying an activity in the Playbook when adding The Playbook components to a next experience page we're no longer limited to the original bof component but we can now freely place all parts on a next experience page the new playbook components can be arranged and configured in multiple ways you can decide to include or exclude any of these and choose between horizontal or vertical stage Pickers as well as showing or hiding as much activity detail as required additionally with recent recent improvements in UI Builder you can now connect these components to the relevant data much more easily and quickly than before data presets and controllers will wire up all the necessary inputs for each of these components without requiring any specialized knowledge before we head over to the Hands-On demo we'll go through some general guidance around creating any of these custom configurations as a general rule you want to create your own experience if any of the settings do not serve your business for experience settings this means things like overriding the default layout showing or hiding the stage or activity picker or specifying the visibility of activities and stages state mappings are useful to tie task status fields to activity State values creating new playbook activities is a task done more frequently than a than a new experience or Playbook layout whenever you run into limitations of what you can achieve with the activity definitions we ship with our product you're free to create your own if an existing activity layout is not enough to satisfy your use case you can duplicate one that's closest to your needs and extend it with any next experience components overwriting or adding actions will be necessary to provide your agents or fulfillers means to interact with an activity stage or Playbook you can learn more about custom activities in my other Academy I won't talk through every detail on this slide but I'm including it so you can come back to it for reference this slide deck will be available as a PDF in the academy Community post linked here on the left you see the general architecture of a Playbook with stages and activities and with activities consisting of an automation plan a UI layout and generally activity actions on the right you can see different parts that can be configured to determine how the Playbook is presented to the user that is working it there are a few more detailed and moving parts to Playbooks that cannot reasonably be displayed on one slide but this will give you an idea of how the parts play together after all this abstract Theory let's look at these settings in action Jason take it away let's talk about Playbook experience configuration one of the pieces required to set up Playbook experience is to configure your playbook experience configuration record by default the platform ships the global Playbook experience configuration record and this is going to control certain default behaviors in your playbook in the experience that presents to your user in runtime this can be things like how many fields are allowed to display on a form at one time you can control the or limit the number of fields that are displayed on a on a Playbook activity you can also configure stage visibility so if there's a scenario where a user has no activities that they can complete within a given stage by default we hide that stage but it's possible to show that stage even as an empty stage should you want to present that type of experience to your uh runtime user so let's take a walk through of where to locate these Playbook experience records and then we can talk a little bit more about uh the the considerations when either using the global Playbook experience record using one of the out of thebox business unit uh application experiences or building your own custom experience so from the all menu we're going to navigate to Playbook experience and you can see here we've got a Playbook experience as options we'll click that and in this instance I've got a number of out of the boox application experience records you can see here that uh we have some customer service examples and typically what will happen when an application team ships their own Playbook experience they will extend the global Playbook experience rather than build one from scratch what this does is it allows you to Mo pick and choose the default configuration settings that you want to customize for your own experience so let's open up the global and take a look around so you can see here we have a an an active configuration record we're going to open this up so that we can see what options are available um so you can see here that in this default configuration we have an activity State option so we're showing the activity States uh we have the ability to filter on assigned to we uh can filter on the Playbook card status uh we have a Mac form Max form field limit set to 15 and uh let's show here that we are showing pending stages and activities and we're hiding stages with no activities so this is the some of the default behavior for your running Playbook if I wanted to override that default Behavior I can just create a clone of This Global Experience configuration record and then let's say I update uh my stage visibility to show all stages so this would mean that even if I as the Playbook user have no activities within a particular stage the stage is still visible it will still show in the stage picker component for example even though I have no work I can complete so uh when when to consider uh building your own Playbook experience configuration record or uh extending an existing one is when you want to uh modify the default Behavior Uh or your own custom use case let's go back to the configuration record and look at activity overrides so activity overrides are a way to override the default behavior of a particular activity so an example could be if I've got a Playbook that uh a user in a portal initiates so if I'm a an employee and I want to initiate some kind of request there there may be certain steps within that Playbook that I as the end user or employee type of persona can complete there may be other activities that only the agent or fulfiller can complete and so you can use activity overrides to look for a specific role so an employee may have a different role than a fulfiller you can set an activity override for a specific activity that if the role is employee the Fields the the form that's presented to the user in the Playbook are editable but perhaps that same activity for the fulfiller user if the fulfiller is viewing that activity it would be a read only because they're they don't have the same role as the employee Persona so that's a way to activity overrides are a way to customize the default behavior of an activity for a specific use case and you can look for specific roles you can display certain components differently than the default Behavior there's a lot of flexibility for how you can do this uh the other thing we want to show is activity uis so these are essentially the presentational components that um show up as an activity card in your running Playbook by default we ship uh seven out of thee box activity uis so it's possible to extend these and and customize your own activity uis if there are custom use cases if you want to go beyond what we offer out of the box um keep in mind that there is a workflow automation Academy that Lisa hollenstein produced that uh goes into more detail on custom activity UI configuration so definitely check that out and take a look at how you can unlock the power of UI Builder and customizing your experiences uh it's also possible to map uh actions to your playbooks so for example uh we ship some out of thebox stage and Playbook actions these are for our restart so you can see we've got our restart activity we also have a restart stage we have a restart um Playbook itself and so you can map some of these activities to your playbook experience record and so by default these actions will be available to your activities your stages your playbooks that are within uh that are using this experience record to determine the the runtime experience that's available and finally we'll talk about status mapping so it is possible to map statuses for other types of Records to Playbook statuses so it for example a task has different statuses or states that that uh it will have as as a person goes through the life cycle of resolving a task completing a task you may want to map the state of a task to the state of an activity and so perhaps um you might have an in progress state for um your task and you would want to map it to the equivalent in progress state for an activity so as your task progresses could be progressing outside of the Playbook we can update the state of an activity to uh reflect the state of the task at the same time so if something's pending if something's completed um and and any of the states that are in between it's possible to map the the states of another record to the state of your in progress Playbook your in progress activity uh one additional thing to note is that each of the things I mentioned the activity overrides um the actions see here we've got an actions list here and we break them out by activity stage and Playbook actions these are all available as their own lists within the platform navigation so Under The Playbook experience module um definitely encourage you to check this out on your own and we will be uh like I mentioned before with the activity UI workflow Academy we will be diving deeper into some of these aspects as we uh complete our minseries on workflow automation so we we'll be showing other videos that go deeper into some of these topics but this was just a general overview to get you a a basic understanding of Playbook experience configuration records thank you Jason for this awesome demo for everybody who's watched so far please subscribe to this sessions Community post to be notified when I publish the detailed demos for embedding playbooks in a next experience pages in Mobile and in service portals if you like this session please upload this video and whether you liked it or not this survey is your chance to provide feedback or comments about this Academy I am looking forward to reading your comments you can find the link in the video description or use the QR code shown on the screen if you're interested in other topics Beyond workflows let me recommend my colleagues Academy series each of them covers a different part of the now platform we have content about conversational interfaces including virtual Agent mobile apps analytics next experience workflow core platform and of course artificial intelligence while on the topic of more content if you prefer to read up on topics at your own pace check out the workflow automation Center of Excellence on the community I've collected resources and links and I'm regularly publishing new articles with best practices FAQ and guidance around flows playbooks and decision tables thank you for choosing to spend some time today to learn about workflow automation on the na platform thank you for providing your feedback and questions to help us make these sessions better for you until next time bye