ServiceNow has just launched it’s latest version of the product called San Diego. I bet you are wondering what’s in it for me and since you must be a busy executive type let us take a rapid look at what’s available.

So here goes! First, ServiceNow does an excellent job of telling you what is in every release. Being an elite ServiceNow partner we know where to look is key to make it all work for you!

Prior to San Diego being released, anyone could sign up for the beta versions of the upcoming system and get to play with features that ServiceNow is planning on releasing to market. Sometimes not all planned features are ready for release so, they either tweak them for a future release or simply omit them depending on user feedback.

While we here at ADVANCE have been using and interacting with these new features for the past several months. Our overall impression is that this release seems to be well thought out and is ready for the general market. As with any new software upgrade you need to do your own self-assessment to determine when upgrading makes the most sense for you and your organization. We can assist with this if you get a queasy feeling in your stomach when even thinking about this. Reach out to us for a free assessment!
As promised, depending on your license entitlements you will see these changes to the ITSM aspect of the system.

IT Service Management

Digital Portfolio Management: Holistically manage services and applications through their full lifecycle in one unified workspace.
Process Optimization enhancements: Leverage automation to drive greater process efficiencies. Optimize processes more quickly by using AI-powered root cause analysis to uncover undesired process behavior.
Virtual Agent enhancements: Give customers conversational AI capabilities. Provide an intuitive interface to easily manage configuration via the admin console.
Walk-Up Experience enhancements: Improved user experience for the hybrid workforce. Book and manage all walk-up appointments via the self-service portal.
DevOps Change Velocity

System health dashboard: Use the dashboard to share connectivity health and trends for DevOps integrations, easily maintaining DevOps connectivity to ServiceNow.
Historical pipeline data importing: Improve value stream management by importing historical data for immediate insights. Import elements like Work Items, Commits, Test summaries and Packages from existing teams.
Manual change traceability: Improve value stream management by connecting existing DevOps data without altering current change processes. Associate artifact and release versions, build numbers, and other information to change records during manual creation.

From Source

There you have it! A few features are now available to you to begin the upgrade journey and prepare your organization for the next level. We suppose by now you are thinking of connecting with your System Administrator or ServiceNow Customer Rep wanting to know which licensing pathway you are presently on so you can determine which features you want to show to your boss.

Now let’s say that you are presently on the Standard licensing model. That is OK, as ServiceNow has lots of updated and added items in this base release. Above we have highlighted the general areas in the platform that exist for the San Diego release.

Here is more of a summary by module:

Incident Management	Take advantage of the responsive dashboard version of the Incident overview homepage. Experience the new Next Experience visual design-compliant Incident overview and Incident premium dashboards. Experience the new Next Experience visual design-compliant major incident workbench. View the Interaction related list in default view on the incident form when one or more interaction records are associated with the incident record. Modernize your Incident Management with several enhancements made to the Incident form, UI actions, email communications, and the integration between problem and incident flows. From Source
Change Management	Take advantage of the responsive dashboard version of the Change Management overview page to streamline your experience. Add comments to a change record with the updated ACLs. See Change Management for more information. From Source
Problem Management	Populate the Source Task field with the problem record on the Know Error article form when you save the problem record. Use the benefit from enhancements made to the problem life cycle. From Source
Service Catalog	Add conditions to service fulfillment steps in Catalog Builder. Define the sequence of fulfillment of catalog items in an order guide. Configure the ability for requesters to modify the quantity of an individual catalog item in an order guide From Source
Knowledge Management	Enable knowledge authors to create articles in a localized language as per the geographic region. Improve feedback management in the article view page by enabling task generation only when feedback details are provided for negative feedback. Enable guest users to access knowledge articles using the Now Mobile app. From Source

Like we mentioned before, even if you do not possess the Professional or Enterprise licenses there is a way for you to explore these features for yourself. For once can you please pay attention, since you are just going to relay this to someone else anyway, simply stated, signup for a ServiceNow developer instance and then you can have every feature at your fingertips to present the full ServiceNow platform to your boss. Which really means that ADVANCE Solutions can setup and demonstrate this of course and even assist your team. I thought you would never ask!

Additionally, you also need to know what are all the feature changes that occurred in San Diego, so here is a summary of what changed, updated, or was removed within the San Diego release.

Removed features

Details
Service Catalog	The Ordering catalog item(s) from Wishlist test has been removed from the Service Catalog ATF test suite. You can still create your own tests for the Wishlist cart. From Source

Depreciated Features

Application or feature

Details

ITSM Mobile

Starting with the San Diego release, ITSM Mobile is no longer deployed, enhanced, or supported. The application is now available from ServiceNow Store instead. For details, see the Deprecation Process [KB0867184] article in the Now Support Knowledge Base.
For enhanced mobile-first experiences in the base system that help agents to triage, act on, and resolve incidents on the go, you can migrate to ITSM Mobile Agent. ITSM Mobile Agent improves productivity with an intuitive interface to manage all the work, view schedules, check who is on-call, respond to major incidents, and more. For information on how to migrate from ITSM Mobile to ITSM Mobile agent, see Migration from ITSM Mobile to ITSM Mobile Agent.

Problem Management

The Structured Problem Analysis (com.snc.kt_pa) plugin is no longer available because the best practices in the Problem Management Best Practice — Madrid (com.snc.best_practice.problem.madrid) plugin are not compatible with the Structured Problem Analysis plugin. If you’ve activated the Structured Problem Analysis plugin, you can continue to use the Structured Problem Analysis application without the Madrid release best practices.
Kepner-Tregoe has released their Advanced Problem Management (RCA) application through the ServiceNow Store that contains their latest best practices. The application is compatible with the Problem Management Best Practice — Madrid (com.snc.best_practice.problem.madrid) plugin. For more information, visit the ServiceNow Store or contact Kepner-Tregoe.
From Source

Accessibility Features

Application or feature

Details

Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management includes Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 accessibility improvements in the User Interface (UI) Builder workspace.

Service Catalog

A new tab icon is added in the tooltip for catalog item names that are truncated because of longer text size in the SC Category Page widget in Service Portal.

From Source

Localization Features

Application or feature

Details

Knowledge Management

Beginning with the San Diego release, you can request ServiceNow personnel to customize your Languages [sys_language] table. You can create translations of knowledge articles into any combination of language and region configured in the table. These combinations must be in compliance with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) BCP-47 standard. For more information, see The region subtag.

Service Catalog

You can translate a catalog item into multiple languages using various translation methods. For more information, see Localization Framework.

From Source

You are now ready to get started. Stay tuned for the next part of my blog on all the new features in detail and the seven steps we need to follow for a successful upgrade. Till then feel free to write to us with any query and we will be more than happy to help!

Click here to read part 2.

By Joel Kosmich

As our ITSM Practice Lead, Joel partners with clients to understand and to align their investment with their ITSM eco-system. Joel has a keen ability to connect business and technical use cases that align to processes that drive measurable outcomes using industry standards and sometimes employing common sense to drive streamlined efficiencies.