There is so much Service Catalog goodness in the new Kingston release that I am unsure where to start. The whole Service Catalog experience on Service Portal is a game changer. The three-stage Order guide process, new out of the box widgets for service portal, features like "Show More" to enhance the mobile experience are just a few examples that show how this Kingston release is dedicated to the end user experience. You can read full release notes here. Let me begin with ...

1. Stunning new catalog experience on Service Portal
2. Order guides widget on Service Portal
3. Enhanced search experience
4. And Performance improvements

Let's dig deeper into each of these areas. For those who are not avid readers can also listen to this podcast on Sound Cloud, iTunes or ServiceNow Community.

1. Stunning new catalog experience on Service Portal

In the new release, service catalog experience on Portal has got a complete overhaul.

• Modern UI
• New Widgets
• "Show More" option

Service Catalog's modern UI in Kingston

One of the themes of this release was to modernize the user experience.

You will see a modern landing page focused on search-first experience. However, browsing by categories is still available. New category widget provides a more performant as well as modern experience that makes it intuitive for users to browse through the categories.

To support the search-first experience, there have been improvements to Search performance that I will talk about in a bit.

On the landing page, you will find many new widgets to surface status of requests submitted by the users, easy access to approvals assigned to the users and access to recent items specific to the user as well as most popular items across the organization. For example, My Requests, Saved Bundles, Popular Items or My Recent Items. All of these widgets are ready for mobile web which will give users a consistent and better-looking experience whether they are on desktop or mobile devices.

New widgets in Service Catalog on Kingston

Moving from landing page to the catalog items and record producers, they have got new widgets as well. Especially on catalog items, you will find a sticky ordering widget which allows the ordering options to be available all the time; even when you are scrolling through the lengthy item description and its variables

Every widget has got a number of instance options to tailor the widgets according to your needs.

The ability to "Show More"

You will also notice a "Show More" option on item widgets to enhance mobile browsing experience when descriptions get lengthy and occupy a lot of real estate on mobile devices.

2. Order Guides on Service Portal

Order guide's familiar 3-stage guided navigation feature will be introduced on Service Portal with Kingston release.

In the new order guide widget, you can remove the item or change variable values right on the choose options screen rather than going back to item page.

Clicking the options button will allow you to view and edit the variables values that were entered. Switching the toggle will either include or remove the item from the order. You can allow this toggle button to appear on specific order guides and hide from others. This is a setting when you are defining the order guide:

This widget will also support attachments, which has been a major ask from our users. You will be able to upload attachments to individual items in the order guide which is like icing on the cake or cherry in my bourbon.

Just before submitting the order guide, there is a Summary page which gives the requestor an overview of the entire order and the ability to review the items included before submitting the order or go back to edit options if needed. "Add to cart" is now available on Order guides as well.

Need not to mention, all these modern accordions and the intuitive user experience is stunningly beautiful.

3. Enhanced search experience

To elevate the search experience on portal, we made changes to the catalog search capability. The new enhanced search should present more relevant results and much quicker than ever before. Search will execute on very specific fields within the service catalog tables and each field is also weighted for its relevance.

Below are the fields in focus for search:

• Name of the catalog item
• Meta field, which holds the search tags
• Short description
• Description
• Category and catalog where the item resides.

And... we have lightened the cache which should produce results faster than before.

4. Performance improvements

There are significantly noticeable improvements in performance in Kingston. I will avoid going into technical depths; however, to give you an idea:

• Catalog cache memory utilization is reduced
• Client script execution has become faster
• And we have reduced Angular watchers to improve performance on Service Portal.

Other Cool enhancements

Here are 5 other enhancements that, though, may be small, definitely enhance the experience.

1. The wish list: Yes, you guessed it right. Wish list will be supported on Service Portal with the Kingston release. There will be an additional button on the items to "Add to Wish List" if it is enabled. Additionally, there is a header menu to access the wish list

2. "Scroll to Top" widget: lets you scroll to the top of the screen after you scroll down on mobile devices. Again, a user experience enhancement

3. The Catalog properties page: is now organized into logical groups which makes it easy to find relevant properties easily.

4. The Order status page: There will be a new order status page after you submit the order. With this we are trying to bring the order experience to a logical end unlike in the past where only a notification was displayed on top of the screen. The requestor will be presented with the details of the request and the items included with it in the order status page.

5. Hide on Service Portal: This checkbox will be available on catalog item form for administrators if they want the item to only show in platform and not on portal

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If you are a new customer or you have a zboot instance; all this will be active by default. If you are upgrading from a previous release to Kingston, then you must activate this plugin: Service Portal - Service Catalog v2 plugin (com.glideapp.servicecatalog.portal).

And read the product documentation release notes here: Service Catalog release notes

• Learn about Ahhhmazing enhancements to all ITSM products here
• And don't forget we focused on admin experience in our Jakarta release. We introduced new catalog Debugging tools, enhancement to variables and support for Automated Test Framework.

Let us know your thoughts about the new catalog features and enhancements.