I was recently at the Knowledge 15 conference and have a lot of new ideas to bring back home. It was great to see old friends, make new ones, and just be part of the ServiceNow Know15 experience. Here are my favorite moments of K15.
Fred Luddy
I think Fred Luddy really gets us developers and creators. He makes the entire conference worth attending if just to see the his keynote address.
UI Improvement
New User Interface
New Geneva User Interface (From Twitter)
ServiceNow continues to evolve in terms of the user interface. The Geneva interface is the most impressive UI for ITSM software that I have seen. That alone will make a big difference in gaining user adoption of ServiceNow.
New Mobile App
For ServiceNow Geneva, they put the time and resources towards a great mobile app, and it looks like that over achieved in terms of that. So awesome.
The new mobile app appears more user-friendly and powerful compared to the old mobile app. I know we will get many more users using the new mobile app than we had before.
New Mobile App (From Twitter)
For more information on the details of the mobile app, see Fred Luddy - Keynote Day 2
New Service Portal
Service Portal (From Twitter)
The release of the Service Portal. good and bad for me.
- Good: ServiceNow is going to release a great Service Portal in Geneva. It is better than what we currently use. We did switch to the new Service Catalog instead of Pages for each item which will make the transition easier.
- Bad: the CMS sites we currently use will need to be scrapped to use the new Service Portal. However the new Service Portal is so much better than our portal that it isn't that much of a loss.
I think the good outweighs the bad in this case.
Low Code/No Code Developers
At my company, we have had more employees want to develop their own catalog items and forms. Although I am not quite ready to turn ServiceNow over to "low-code/no code" developers in Fuji, I think in Geneva they are making greater strides to allow this.
The Service Creator and Item Designer are being refined and improved, we will definately look into using them in Geneva.
Limits and Tenancy
They discussed an important topic in multi-tenant vs multi-instance architecture in Dan McGee - Keynote Day 3
If you have programmed in a multi-tenant architecture versus the multi-instance architecture that ServiceNow offers, you will quickly find the difference between the two. A multi-tenant architecture is restricted with code limits and obstacles so that you don't affect other customers.
Maybe multi-tenant is the future in terms of cost savings. However with multi-instance you can more quickly provide a company an effective solution. From a developers perspective, the ServiceNow multi-instance architecture is just so much easier and quicker.
Developer Instance
We have always had a Demo Sandbox to try ServiceNow. When I changed from being a HP developer to ServiceNow developer in 2011, I used the Demo Sandbox. However this Sandbox was used by a lot of different people at once and was recycled frequently. It was fun to see what crazy things people were trying in the Sandbox at times, but other times it was frustrating to use.
ServiceNow released shortly before the conference, the ServiceNow Developer program. You can get your own instance and follow the ServiceNow developer curriculum.
Store
ServiceNow introduced a Store where people and purchase apps from developers.
Between upgrades, ServiceNow Share, the ServiceNow community, and now the store, it is difficult to keep up with all the innovation and available features. Oh what a problem to have!
Labs
I have a considerable amount of changes to make to my ServiceNow instance after going to all the labs. So many new ideas!
Mike