Get To Know The Main ServiceNow Building Blocks

0:00Hi, Sean here and welcome to this skill where we're going to be taking a look at the basic building blocks of ServiceNow and how to use them. So first of all, let's talk about what I mean by building blocks. When you're looking at the ServiceNow interface as an admin versus as a user, things look a bit different, right? Kind of the cool thing about ServiceNow is that all of the just basic users in your organization are going to be navigating through this thing and getting work done, right?

0:32They're going to be maybe reporting incidents and handling incidents, things like that. And you know, they're not really going to be worrying too much about how all this stuff is set up behind the scenes. All they really care about is that it works, right? If they want to create a new incident, they can just create a new incident and submit it and they know that, you know, the IT help desk or whoever's job it is to handle incidents is going to be able to take care of it and get notified about it in the first place, right?

1:03But as an admin, right, your job is going to be to configure all of these things behind the scenes and, you know, you're not going to need to configure things like incident reporting from scratch, but a big part of your job is going to be to make modifications to different workflows like this. And yes, in some cases, you are going to need to create things from scratch. So you know, as an admin, right, when you're doing things, when you're enabling everyone else at your organization to get work done in an organized manner using service now, there are what I refer to as building blocks that you're going to need to learn how to use and learn how they're connected to one another.

1:46Okay. So that's what I'm going to do in this first video is just introduce you to these different building blocks, show you the basics of how they fit together. And throughout the rest of this skill, we'll be going into a little bit more detail on each of the building blocks and, well, at least some of the most important ones and seeing how they work and just some some initial details about them again, we're going to be going into much more detail on pretty much all of these later on in the course. But for now, just to get you just to give you an orientation, that's what I want to do.

2:21So this is a final side note. The reason that I'm doing things this way, right, most, most courses out there on service now will do things in, they'll kind of do it, they'll kind of do things depth first, where, you know, maybe they'll start off by looking at lists and then they'll go miles deep with lists and they'll, you know, maybe go through, you know, the anatomy of lists, how to use them, how to, wow, that's a really messy way to write anatomy. Let me try that again. So go through like the anatomy of lists, they'll talk about how lists relate to tables, they'll talk about how to configure lists and the whole time, they'll fail to mention how lists are connected to other pieces of service now, right, other, other building blocks as I'm going to call them of service now.

3:07So that's why I'm kind of doing this more breadth first here is because this was something that was very, very frustrating for me when I was first learning service now is I learned all about lists, I learned all about tables, I learned all about users, I learned all about, you know, applications and modules in the interface and whatnot. But I didn't really learn about, you know, how do these things all fit together ? So I'm starting off there because that's kind of how I wish things had gone for me when I was first learning service now. So anyway, let's get started here with, you know, by meeting these building blocks, the first building block and I'll show you the basic interface and how to access these things in service now along with each of these two.

3:50It's not just going to be whiteboarding. The first building block is kind of like a kind of a trifecta of building blocks. Don't worry about it. We're just going to treat it as one building block right now. And this is users, groups and roles. Now basically, this building block here represents who's using service now in your organization and what they are or what they do in the organization, right?

4:21So let's say that a new employee joins your organization. Well, as an admin, you're going to want to create a new user and also make sure that that user is assigned to the group that they belong to. So if they were hired for your IT help desk team, you're going to want to make sure that they're added to that group in service now. And furthermore, this idea of roles, that's something that we'll talk about in more detail later on in the course. But this basically defines what different users and different groups are able to do, right?

4:56Or what their responsibilities are, I guess you could say, in service now. So it's a big, this roles thing here is a big mechanism by which we control who 's allowed to do what in service now. All right. So as far as these, as far as where to find users, groups and roles in service now, if we go back to the service now interface, we can just open up this all menu here . We're going to go to users and underneath organization, there's actually a lot of different ways to get to users here, but we'll just go into organization.

5:30If you click on users, this is going to bring up a list of all of the users in your organization. And as you can see, there's a number of different pieces of information we have on each user, such as their user ID, their name, their email, whether they're active or not, when the user data was created, when the user data was last updated. And if you click on one of these, that's going to take you to a form that allows you to edit the user.

6:02And by the way, lists and forms are two building blocks of service now, kind of the cool thing. One of the cool things I'll say about being a service now admin is that you actually get to edit the forms and the lists that the rest of the users in the organization work with on a regular basis. All right, so I'm going to actually add that to the list here, right? We have users groups and roles, but we also have lists and forms, okay? And we'll take a good long look at how to work with both of those as an admin as well.

6:35Cool. Now, as far as groups and roles, there are sections in service now for those as well. So if we go back and take a look at those, we saw how to get to users. If you search for groups, it's going to be a little bit tricky to find those. If you search for users and groups, that might be a little bit easier. And then it's just groups underneath that. This is where you can create new groups. So if your corporation decides to add a new team, this does go beyond just actual, you know, differentiated teams in an organization, right?

7:10As you can see, some of these define sort of like a group that has a specific permission to do something like approve requests, things like that, approve time off requests, approve, you know, if an employee wants to order some expensive equipment and have that expense, right? Things like that. All right. And as far as roles go, those are going to be under users and groups as well, okay? And again, we'll go into much more detail on how these fit together. But anyway, let's go back to our list.

7:44And the next thing that we're going to talk about here, we've seen users groups roles, lists and forms. The next thing here is applications and modules. All right. So applications and modules, the way that I'm going to describe them here isn't 100% correct, but it's going to be useful for now at least to describe them this way . They're basically the way that different interfaces are grouped and organized in service now. So if you go back and take a look at that list that we've been using to get around, right, for example, we search for users and groups.

8:18In this case, we saw that this brought up this users and groups, group, so to speak, right? And this menu and inside this, we have users, groups, roles, and each one of these clicking on one of these will actually take us to a different part of the platform. All right. So there are names for these things. And here, let's actually search for something else like incident, if you search for incident, notice that the same thing applies here, right? We have these individual things that will take you to different interfaces in the platform, but they're grouped together with sort of these drop down menus.

8:54Now these drop down menus, they're much more than just menus as you'll see a little bit later, but these are called applications and everything inside them that provides a specific interface when you click on it is referred to as a module, right? So hear me say things like click on the incidents module under the service desk application. And that's kind of the basic terminology there that you'll hear me use. All right. So, you know, the interesting thing about applications and modules and how they 're related to basically everything else in service now is these are how we provide users with the ability to do things in the service now platform, right?

9:39So as we just saw, there's a specific module for editing users and adding users , right? There's a specific module for editing and adding groups. There's a specific model for editing and adding roles. The way that it's tied into lists and forms is that modules, you know, the interface that comes up when we select a specific module in service now tends to be either a list or a form. As you'll see, there's there are many other interfaces that you might encounter , but lists and forms are by far the most common interfaces that you'll see when opening up a module.

10:15All right. Cool. So anyway, those are the first three building blocks in service now. In the next video, we're going to continue on and take a look at some other somewhat more advanced building blocks and how they relate to these ones that we've talked about so far. [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00Alright, so now that we've taken a look at the first three building blocks, we 're going to move on to a few other ones. And the next one that we're going to talk about is tables and records. Now, I think this really brings things together for a lot of people, you know, who are hoping to become a ServiceNow admins, because ultimately a lot of the power of the ServiceNow platform is based on this idea of tables and records. So, what are tables and records? Well, a table in ServiceNow is a place for us to store a specific type of data.

0:37So, for example, there's a user's table, and there's also an incidence table, and there's also a changes table. And there's also, we'll take a look at this one a little bit later, an ACL table, which keeps track of, you know, permissions in the ServiceNow platform, who's able to do what, things like that. So, basically, a table is quite simply that, right? Picture an Excel spreadsheet, where each column in the spreadsheet contains a very specific type of data.

1:11So, for a user, this might be like the user's name, we might have the user's email address, maybe we have the user's age, maybe we have, you know, other properties besides that, and the records in a table are simply the individual users that are stored there, right? So, if we have user one in here, user two in there, user three in there, and their corresponding name, email, age, and so on, filled in in each of these columns there, those are records in the user's table . That's how we say this.

1:42All right, now, the interesting thing about tables in ServiceNow, one of several interesting things that I'm going to discuss here, is that once we've created and configured a table in ServiceNow, our users will very rarely, if ever, interact with the table directly, right? Instead, what users will typically do is they'll interact with your table through lists and forms. So, let me give you an example of this. I'm going to just go back over to the ServiceNow interface.

2:14Let's say, and I'm going to use users as an example here again, so let's search for users and under organization, we're going to go to the user's module. All right, so we'll select that. And once again, this brings up a list showing some of the users that are in the user's table. Now, we'll talk about this in much more detail a little bit later in the course , but the first thing to know is that the data that you see here is not the table, right?

2:46You may have heard the saying, "The map is not the territory," right? And it's the same kind of thing in ServiceNow, right? So even though we see this data here about some users in our ServiceNow instance, there's actually a lot more data that's hiding behind the scenes that we can see just by adjusting the settings for this list. Now, again, we're going to talk about this in much more detail a little bit later in the course, but just to give you a little sneak peek, let's say that we wanted to see more columns, right?

3:18There's actually a lot more columns here that are available for our users besides the ones that are shown here. These are just the defaults. So if you click on this little gear icon up in the top right-hand corner, right , what you can see is that, um, let's go down and search for "department." If we click on "department" and click this little right-hand arrow and say, " Okay," then now what we'll see after it updates is that this shows what department each user is in. Right? So we can see that AbleTutor, for example, is in product management. We can see that, um, let's see here.

3:54We can see that Alfonso Griglin is in the IT department and so on and so forth, right? Now, that data, again, wasn't available to us or it wasn't visible to us before we made that change. And that's what I mean when I say that users usually don't interact with a table directly in ServiceNow. They're always going to be looking at it through some sort of lens like a list. Now, the other way that they're going to interact with a table, again, in a somewhat indirect fashion, is through forms.

4:27So let's open up AbleTutor's form by clicking on the user ID here, right? That will open up AbleTutor's information in this form. And again, this does not necessarily show all of the data that's available to us about this individual user, right? This is only the data that we, in particular, right, we're currently logged in as the system administrator. This is only the data that we have permission to see. Now, you could probably imagine that it's going to be fairly complete since we 're the system admin, but there might be things even here that we're not able to see.

5:03So, you know, the interesting thing about a form is that this is how we can edit a user's information. All right, so if we make a change here, right, if we add another L to AbleTutor 's name and then click update, what that's doing is that is updating AbleTutor's name field in the user's table, right? And you can also make changes directly to fields here by just double clicking. And so if we wanted to add another L there and we click this little, you know, save button, we'll see that that will automatically update to now again.

5:36This is making changes to the data that's in a table, but we're not actually looking at the table itself. I think I've probably hammered that point home enough by now. But anyway, another interesting thing about tables, if we go back to here, is that there are tables for pretty much everything in service now. And when I say pretty much everything, I mean, everything, right? So, for example, we already saw that there's a table that stores our users.

6:06There's a table that stores our groups. There's a table that stores our roles. And there's even a table that stores the different forms that we see in our application and what fields are available, what users are able to see those different fields. There's also a table for specifying what applications are available in our service now instance, as well as what modules are available and what they show. When a user opens them up and just to demonstrate that one for you, let me open this up again.

6:38And I'm going to search for forms module, all right, and that's going to be under the system UI applications. So let's open that one up. And what you see here, we're going to go into this in much more detail. So this might not look like anything to you right now, but this is a list that 's allowing us to view the data, right? The records that are in the forms table in our instance. So in other words, every form that we're looking at, right? So if we open up the, you know, incident and then we go to service desk incidents here and let's say that we click on one of these incidents here.

7:16There is a specific record in a forms table somewhere that contains information for everything that we're seeing here, right? What fields there are, what those fields are called, what type of data those fields contain and so on, right? Which is pretty amazing, right? Because this means that as an admin, we can really change anything we want in service now just by making the right change to the right table, right? That's usually the answer to most questions that service now admins have, like, how can I change this?

7:50How can I change that? How can I set up this thing? How can I, you know, set up email notifications for when there's a new user created that go to these specific people, right? Just as a, just as a more specific example. Well, the answer to that, as I said, is by creating the right record in the right table, all right? So that's a very important concept to kind of get used to in service now is that this is how most things are configured. Now there's even to get even more meta on you here. There's even a table, if you search for tables in here and go to, where is it here?

8:25System definition tables. There's even a table that contains the configuration for all of the tables in our service now instance. So if you search for incidents here, or just incident singular rather, that brings up the incident table. And if you take a look at that, what you'll see, it may not look like much to you yet, but you'll learn to read these things pretty quickly. This contains all of the configurations for the table that stores data about all of the incidents in our service now.

8:58Instinct. Right. So anyway, bringing this back to the other, the other topics that we have discussed so far, tables and records are the way that pretty much everything in service now is stored from regular data like incidents or changes or orders, things like that. To actual things that affect the functionality of the service now instance itself. So again, this is a really important concept and that's why I wanted to mention these things upfront is because this is how as an admin, you're going to be making most changes to most things in the service now instances through some sort of table somewhere.

0:00All right, so moving on to the next building blocks in service. Now, what we're going to talk about next are filters and breadcrumbs, which are sort of like the, they're just a handy little UI feature that allows you to navigate filters a little bit easier as you'll see. So filters and breadcrumbs are the next building block we're going to take a look at here. And first of all, let's just talk about the basic purpose of filters. The fact is that in service now, right, in your service now instance, if you're working in a medium to large size organization, there's going to be way more data than any individual person needs in that instance, right?

0:43So let's say, for example, let's just go back to the, maybe the users, right? So as you can see, there are 640 users in here. And in most cases, we're not going to care about all of those users. In fact, we might want to, you know, only view the users that are in a specific department, let's say, or users that were added after a specific date or before a specific date or on a specific date. And the same thing is even more true or even more evident.

1:13If you just search for ACL under the system security application, right, we're going to click on the access control ACL module under that application. Look how many records are showing up from that table, 22,780. And there's probably even larger tables that I could have shown you here. But the point being that when you want to do pretty much anything in service now, one of the biggest problems you're going to face as an admin or just as a regular user even is going to be finding the data that you actually need to work with, right?

1:48And that is the job of filters. So let's go back to users, right? I'm going to search for users because that one's a little bit more intuitive when we're just getting started. So let's go to organization users. And up here in the top left hand corner of any list, right, this applies for any list that you're looking at in service now, unless the filter feature has been explicitly turned off. And we'll actually take a look at how to do that in a later skill because that 's something that admins are able to do. If you click on this little filter icon, what that's going to do is that's going to allow you to add a number of filters that will help to reduce the amount of data that you're seeing in the list so that you're only looking at what you're interested in.

2:31So let's just, let's go back to the situation where we want to see only users from a specific department. Well, in that case, all we would have to do, there are many different ways you can add filters and we're going to take a much deeper look at this a little bit later. But what you would do is you could say department, right, notice that this here is a list of all of the available fields in the table, right, which is much more than what we see here as I showed you in a previous video. If we search for department, there we go.

3:02We're going to say is, and then we'll search for a specific department. We'll just say, let's search for IT, okay, and it allows us to select that because this is actually a field that only has specific values that you can select from, right, because there's only a limited range of departments there. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. But if we click run now after adding this filter, what that's going to do is again, that's going to significantly reduce the amount of data that we're looking at.

3:33And notice that we now only have 122 records in, you know, in this filtered list versus I believe it was 640 before, right, that might not seem like that much of a reduction. But let's say that we want to search for all of the users in the IT department who were added before maybe 2020, okay. Well in that case, all you'd have to do is add another filter here. And you would do that by clicking this and button. All right, and we're going to say created.

4:04Okay. That's just the, that's a field storing what date the user was created on, right? Well, not the user, the, the user record anyway was created on. So we're going to say created and we'll say before. And then we're going to say, I mean, you can, you can select a specific date or you can select, you know, relative dates like this year, last year, last two years, whatever.

4:35All right. So I'm going to click this little calendar thing and oh man, I really don't feel like going all the way back to 2020. Let's maybe go back to, we'll do January 2023. And in fact, we'll do January 1st. So this is going to be all users who, whose record was created before January 1 st, 2023. All right, we're going to select that. And then if we click run, what we'll see is that's going to narrow down the results even more. So apparently, you know, people tend to stay at this company a long time because that only retoosed it by three.

5:08Let's maybe, let's maybe modify that and notice this is actually brings up a good point. Notice that as we add filters, this little thing here changes, right? So we have all, then we have this little arrow department equals it, then we have this little arrow says created before 2020, 30101. And this is what's referred to as breadcrumbs in the service now interface. So again, these are, it might seem like kind of a strange thing to list these as one of the core building blocks of service now.

5:40But you know, the importance of these things really is difficult to overstate because first of all, it allows you to know what data you're looking at. Imagine if someone just sent you a link to service now as people will often do, you know, in your organization and you were just looking at this, you'd be like, okay, what am I going to be looking at? Are these all the users that are organization or these? What am I looking at? All right. And the way that you tell that is by looking up here. All right. So you can almost think of these breadcrumbs as kind of like a technical title for the exact list that you're looking at right now.

6:16So this is, you know, the department, all of the users who are in the IT department who were created before 2023. All right. And by the way, you can get rid of these things if you click on any one of these, or if you click on any one of the arrows next to it, you can change what filters are actually getting applied. So notice that we just removed that created before filter. And let's, let's maybe go through another, let's, let's maybe add another filter. So what we'll do here, we have department is IT.

6:47Let's add another one by clicking and, and what we'll do is we'll say created and maybe we'll, maybe we'll get all of the users who were created, maybe in the last two years, right? So users who joined our company that is in the last two years, we can say last two years, we'll click on that. And if we click run now, what we'll see is this really does winnow down the, the data that we're looking at because we only have four users now that are in the IT department and that were added in the last two years.

7:20Okay. So hopefully this, we'll go through filters and a lot more detail a little bit later, but hopefully this at least shows you how these things are very useful for any user, but also service now admins because of how they allow us to really zoom in on the exact data that we want in any of these situations. All right. And to give you maybe a more admin related task that you might use filters for, let's say that instead of working with something more intuitive like users, let's say that we're working with things like modules, right?

7:55There's a table for modules. And if you go under system definition modules and select that module, yes, there is a modules module in the same way that there's a tables table. Notice that you can see under here all of the modules that are, uh, rephrase, notice that among other things in this list, you can see what application menu a module belongs to now ignore these empty ones. Uh, we'll talk about those in more detail a little bit later, but you know, if we had a filter to this, right, let's say, uh, application menu, we're going to select that.

8:33And we'll say is, and let's say that we want to see all of the things that are in the self service application. All right. We're going to select self service and click run. Well, here we go. We now have a list of the 34 different modules that are in the self service application. So if you just search for self service, right? Here we go. Sure enough, we see all of these modules here and there may not be exactly 34. Some of these may be, uh, inactive. Some of them may be hidden from specific users or only available to specific users.

9:09But anyway, that is, um, you know, all of the modules that are there and if we wanted to work on these, right, if we wanted to maybe, uh, make a change to some of these modules, this is how we would do that. Right. As from this filtered list. All right. And something that we'll take a look at a little bit later, right, to sort of tie filters in with things like modules in a different way that is, uh, here, let me just come back here. This is possible to create a new module that shows a list that have specific filters already applied to them.

9:42And in fact, I didn't record all of the videos in this, uh, in this course in order. We're actually going to do that in a later skill. You may have noticed that if I search for incident here under service desks, I have this high priority incidents module. This is a module that we're going to create in a later skill that shows the regular incidents list, but with this high priority filter automatically applied to it. Right. So, um, that's just one more thing that you can do with filters is you can associate them with a specific module so that when you go to that module, you're viewing a list with some filter already applied to it.

10:22it.

0:00All right, so at this point, we've talked about a number of different key building blocks in ServiceNow. And the last one that we're going to talk about here, I think, is one of the more, um, maybe exciting, or at least visually interesting ones, uh, in the ServiceNow universe. And that is something called Workflows. So, you know, one thing that you may have sort of picked up on about the data in ServiceNow, at least so far, is that it's all largely static.

0:34So what I mean by that is, you know, think about users. If we hire a new employee and want them to be able to use ServiceNow, what we as an admin would have to do is we would have to go in, create a new user. And then if we want them to have certain permissions or be part of a certain group, we would have to manually add them to that group. If after we've created that new user, we want to create some sort of like tasks in some other table for making sure the user gets onboarded appropriately, then we have to go in and add that manually.

1:07And the, um, you know, the key thing, one of the key concepts about ServiceNow, that ServiceNow aims to, uh, kind of fix in modern organizations is simple tasks like that. We should not have to do manually, right? There is no reason for us to have to do all of that manually by pointing and clicking. That's just a waste of our time, right? So that's where this idea of workflows comes in in ServiceNow. And to show you what this looks like, let's go back to ServiceNow.

1:39And we're going to search for something called the flow designer. All right. Now what this is going to do is this is actually going to open up a new tab in your browser. And, you know, this is something that you'll see from time to time in Service Now. Certain things have a much more sophisticated interface for allowing you to create them. And sometimes they do take a little while to load as you saw with that one. So in this case, the flow designer is a visual tool. As you'll see, it's a drag and drop tool really for automating things in the ServiceNow platform.

2:15So if you ever find yourself saying like, hey, it would be great if when I did this thing, this other thing automatically happened, or when another user did this thing, this other thing automatically happened. If you're ever using the word automatically with regards to something happening in ServiceNow, chances are the solution is to come in here and create a new workflow. All right. So if we pick one of these workflows, just pick any of these, all right? We'll just do a change emergency implement. I have no idea what this workflow is.

2:45But if you take a look at this, I just wanted to show you the interface. You can see that this defines a series of steps that will happen. Whenever something called a trigger happens, right? A trigger is basically just any event in ServiceNow. It could be creating a new user. It could be modifying a specific field on a specific type of table, right? There's really a lot of configuration you can do here. And when that thing happens, you get to define a series of actions that occur in response to that.

3:18So you can do things like send out emails in response to something happening. So if you wanted to automatically send out an email when a critical incident is created, you could do that. You can also, in this actions section, have things like creating a new record in another table. So if you wanted to automatically create an onboarding task for a user after creating their new user record, then that would be something you'd use the Flow Designer to do. So again, we're going to talk about the Flow Designer in much more detail a little bit later in the course.

3:53But I just wanted to show you this interface because this tends to be one of the more exciting features for people who are learning about ServiceNow. And one of the more important things that you can do as a ServiceNow admin, right? The fact is that when you automate even the simplest tasks in ServiceNow, like automatically sending an email or automatically creating a new task when a user gets created, things like that, that the cumulative time that that saves people at your organization can add up to be a pretty impressive amount.

4:26So anyway, again, we'll take a look at that in much more detail a little bit later, but that's the final building block that I wanted to show you here. These are obviously not the only building blocks in ServiceNow. There are plenty of other things I could have talked about here, but really in my experience, these are the six most important things that anyone working with ServiceNow needs to understand, but especially ServiceNow admins. So anyway, hopefully this helps you to understand everything that we learn about ServiceNow going forward.

4:57And the next thing that we're going to do in this skill is we're going to wrap the skill up by doing a challenge.

0:00All right, well now that we've learned about the main building blocks of service now It's time for you to do a challenge and in this challenge You're just going to be going through these questions that I've created for you And you'll also see the video that I'm recording right now show up here I couldn't put it there because well I haven't recorded it yet And so as you can see we have to fill in the blank questions. We have And as you can see we have two fill-in-the-blank questions we have one Multi-select question. I think that's what they're called and we have one matchup question for you to match the building blocks with their descriptions, so feel free to give these a try and Once you've walked through these and given your answers Feel free to go on to the next video where I'll walk you through the answers myself and offer a little bit more of an explanation to these to make sure that we're clear and really the ultimate goal of this challenge is to To take what we've learned about service now through these main building blocks and try and synthesize it into Some you know some key principles that we can keep in mind when going through a lot of the details that we'll be covering About service now itself right so as you can see I've named this section

1:17creating some mental models And the idea here is that many people find service now to be a pretty Shall we say inscrutable platform when they start working with it? especially if they take kind of the piecemeal approach and just learn about lists than just about forms then just about you know Whatever other concepts they're trying to learn about in service now without covering the basic Concepts and applying those right so with what we've learned in this skill the idea is that you'll have some Mental models as I said that you can take through the rest of the course with you and apply to everything we cover there. So best of luck with these questions, I'll see you in the solution video.

0:00All right, well, hopefully you gave this challenge a try and answered these questions as best you could. So let's take a look at the solutions and also talk about a few final remarks I wanted to make just with, you know, kind of how to think about these different concepts in service now as we go through the rest of the course. So the first thing, in fact, I think I said this thing exactly, you know, word for word in one of the videos, pretty much everything in service now is a record in a.

0:30And if you were listening, you should have put table. And in fact, my browser obnoxiously lists the previous things that I've typed here underneath the, you know, underneath the cursor. But anyway, if we click submit, sure enough, we see that that is correct. All right. So again, we talked earlier about the fact that basically everything from, you know, just raw data like incidents or changes or users to actual configurations such as the tables in our application is defined in a table.

1:05Right. So tables are absolutely fundamental as a concept in service now. And as I said earlier, pretty much anything you want to do in service now you can do by adding the right records to the right tables, the specifics and what we're going to spend pretty much the rest of the course learning is what the right records look like and what the right tables are for a wide variety of tasks. All right. So the next question here says blanks show data for many records and blanks show data for only one record and also allow us to edit that record.

1:39So this one is you can tell from my very helpful little drop down from my browser. This first one is lists. And the second one, which we're going to separate with a comma here is forms. Right. So lists show data from many records and forms show data from only one record and also allow us to edit that record. All right. And if we click submit, sure enough, we see that that is correct. All right. So the third question here in this challenge was which of the following are correct statements given what we've learned in this skill select three.

2:11So it's sort of like three truths and one lie here. All right. So this happens, at least in my case here, the lie has been put up at the very top. And that is automation is not something that service now allows us to do. If you watched the previous video before the challenge, you would have saw that service now offers us the ability to create workflows through the flow designer. And those allow us to do an incredibly wide variety of automations in service now. So, um, we know that since it says select three, we don't even really need to read through the rest of them, but I'll go through each of them and, uh, you know, and kind of explain why they're true.

2:50So this second one says users navigate service now by selecting specific modules, which are organized into applications, right? We saw that, um, you know, you had sort of like these top level groups, which were applications and then modules were the individual things you could click and it took you to a specific interface, whether that was a list or a form or some other interface. All right. The third one says filters are a critical tool in service now because they allow us to find the data we're looking for in a specific table or list.

3:21This one was true because as we talked about earlier, uh, most tables that you 're working with are going to have hundreds, if not thousands of records in them. And you're usually going to be looking for maybe like a handful of records out of that number. So that's what filters, uh, you know, give us the opportunity to do. And finally the fourth one says lists and forms are just views into underlying tables. The tables themselves usually contain more data than what we see in a list or form.

3:51I demonstrated this for you, I believe in the first video where I showed you that we could hide and show individual columns in a list. Therefore, you know, kind of demonstrating that lists are just views and don't represent the entirety. Um, you know, the, the wholeness, if you will, of the data that the tables are storing. So let's click submit. And sure enough, we see that that's correct. And finally the fourth and possibly the hardest question here is match up the following building blocks to their descriptions.

4:24This should be fun. So we're going to start off with lists and forms for this one. This is convenient interfaces for viewing the data in our service. Now, instance, again, these are just interfaces. They're not, you're not viewing the data directly like you would, like you would be doing if you were working with maybe an SQL database, right? You're, it's just a nice convenient way for users, both technical and non- technical to see the data that is relevant to them. Okay.

4:55So that's the, you know, the basic description for lists and forms for tables. Let's see which one matches up here. This one is the database of our service now instance. And I described it this way because the tables are really the main location of all of the data and configurations of our service now instance. So you know, you really can think of the tables in our instance as being the database of it. All right. I'm going to skip users because there's something additional that I want to talk about here.

5:26Let's go to the flow designer and oops, you may have noticed that the order of these things just changed. That is because I had a typo in one and I just had to go back and edit it. So you won't even notice that when you go through and answer these yourself. But let's go back to the flow designer. This one was a drag and drop interface for automating things in service now. And finally, that brings us to users. And this description might have confused you or hopefully intrigued you a little bit. This says a representation of the people who will be using our service now instance.

6:00And here's the interesting part as well as the lens through which people will interact with service now. And it's really the second part there that I think is going to be very interesting for you is so far whenever I've demonstrated something in service now and here, let 's just click submit and sure enough we see it says correct. So congratulations. But anyway, going back to the user thing so far whenever I've demonstrated something in service now, I've been doing it as this system administrator user that service now provides us with in the test instance that we're working with here.

6:37However, it's a really important thing to keep in mind as a service now admin that most of your users are not going to be system administrators. And in fact, they're going to have a variety of different roles and responsibilities, things like that, that are going to control in a very real way what they see and don't see in the service now interface. So let me just demonstrate this with a very simple demonstration. If we go to this all menu and here, let's actually look for flow designer, right?

7:09As a system administrator, we're able to see flow designer when we search for it. However, if we log in as a different user and you can actually do this as a system administrator to by doing this impersonate user thing, if we impersonate able tutor who does not have the permissions to design workflows, all right, so we're going to say imperson ate user there, then what's going to happen is once we've switched over to this user, there we go, if we open up this all menu and search for flow, notice that nothing comes up there, right?

7:42And there's a lot of other things that don't come up either. For example, if we search for incident, notice that there's no incidents create new or high priority incidents or anything like that, because this user doesn't have the appropriate permissions to access those. Okay, so that's what I mean going back to where we were here. That's what I mean by the lens through which people will interact with service now because again, the settings that we have and the permissions that we have associated with a given user in that user's table, those are going to control in a very real way what the user sees and what they're able to do in service now.

8:24So anyway, that's something that we'll learn a lot more about as we go through this course, but that's just sort of again, a mental model that I wanted to give you here is that users, right, those users that we create in that user's table are the lenses through which the real people are going to interact with service now when they log in as that user. So anyway, hopefully that makes sense and congratulations on figuring out this challenge. And I hope you enjoyed learning about the main building blocks in service now.