Introduction to ServiceNow

0:00Hi, Sean here and welcome to this course where we're going to be taking a look at the incredibly popular ServiceNow platform and how to use it. So if you're new to ServiceNow, whatever your eventual goal is, right, whether you're looking to become a full power user of ServiceNow or if you're just looking to, you know, finally be able to get things done in it, you've come to the right place. And I guess that's really the first thing that I'd like to start off by saying about this course is no matter what your eventual goal is with ServiceNow, there are lots of sort of fundamental concepts, right, basic interfaces, basic features of ServiceNow that you're going to be using on a regular basis. And that's really what this course is going to focus on. All right, so now that we've got that out of the way, let's move on to another question.

0:44And that question is, what is ServiceNow exactly, right? This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer, so much so that in my opinion, and I don't know, maybe I could get in trouble for saying this, I honestly don't think that even ServiceNow's website does a great job of explaining what it does, at least not on a high level. It does cover a lot of the features and it obviously hits on a lot of the core buzzwords that, you know, businesses are looking for when they 're looking for a tool like this. But overall, there I think is a lot of confusion over what exactly ServiceNow is, right? It's a lot like that very often, too often quoted metaphor or parable, if you will, of the blind men feeling the elephant, right, where one thinks it's a tree, one thinks it's a snake, one thinks it's a fan, depending on which part of the elephant they're feeling. And ServiceNow is really very similar in that way, where, you know, one person might think it's a project management tool, one person might think it's just a timesheet tool, one person might think it's an automation tool, and really it's all of those things wrapped into one. So back to the original question, what is this thing exactly, right? Come on, Sean, just give me a sound bite to tell me what this thing is. Well, ServiceNow is essentially an all-in-one product for tracking,

2:02managing, and automating everything that's going on in your organization, right? All of those email threads that you have to sift through to find out what's going on in a particular project, all those times when customers give someone an order and that order gets lost somewhere or forgotten about. And all of the times when you've had to ask that question, "Hey, did anyone ever follow up on this?" All of those things are things that ServiceNow can really help you out with. Now, the way it does this, and this is really kind of the key concept of ServiceNow in general, is it gives you ways to centralize, organize, and automate all of these things, right? So really at its core, that 's what ServiceNow is about. Centralization, organization, and automation. And we're going to take a look at all of these things throughout the rest of this course. All right, so before we move on, what I'd like to do here is make this a little bit more concrete for you by giving you a few examples of how ServiceNow can help, right? Situations, rather, where ServiceNow can really help you out.

3:07So first of all, imagine that you're doing something like onboarding a new employee, right? Maybe you've done this recently at your organization. Well, as you know, that process has a lot of very specific steps in it, right? Things that need to be done. The employee needs to get a laptop. The employee needs to get access to all of the company's software. The employee needs to, you know, meet their teammates, things like that. Right now, the problem with processes like this in most organizations is that, first of all, it requires lots of different teams to coordinate on this, right?

3:40You need to coordinate the HR team, the IT team, whatever team the employee is joining, and many other teams as well, in order to make that a successful onboarding and actually complete the onboard ing process. And most of the time without a specific way to track all of this stuff, right, make sure all of this stuff is getting done, the process just kind of turns into a haph azard and somewhat embarrassing mess, right? But what service now does is it gives you a way to basically define this process in a very concrete way. And also, it provides tools for making sure that the right tasks get assigned to the right people at the right time. So, you know, when the employee is about to start their first day of work, it makes sure that the IT department or whoever's in charge of that kind of thing in your organization knows that that employee is going to need a laptop to get started at work, right? Things like that. All right, so that's one example.

4:36Another example would be, you know, think about every time someone at your organization needs to get access to something sensitive, right? Maybe a piece of software, maybe a, maybe an account. Well, what's the process for that like? And is it actually specified in a concrete way somewhere in your organization, right? Or is it just in people's heads? Or is it just kind of this, this haphazard process where, you know, hopefully it's done right? No one really knows. Well, service now again, gives you the tools to actually define that process, right? Define the actual permissions that should be in place in order for an employee to get access to something sensitive like that.

5:18It documents that process and the decisions that were made. And it makes sure that the status of that process is visible without having to send out emails to a bunch of other people in your organization. All right, so to put all of this in another way, right, to give you kind of a sound bite here in order to understand what service now is, service now really gives you a way to get all of that work, right? Permissions, statuses of different projects out of your inbox where they often get lost in, you know, endless email threads and into a system where all of those things are highly visible and very easy to track.

0:00All right, so hopefully those examples helped you to understand a little bit more some of the capabilities or at least the main focus of ServiceNow and we'll be going into this in much more detail in later videos. But what I'd like to do first is get into the specifics a little more and give you kind of like a whirlwind tour of some of the things that we'll be covering in this course. All right, so I've had ServiceNow at behind me the whole time. Let's take a look at what this thing can do. So the first thing that I want to show you here is one of the major use cases for ServiceNow is keeping track of what are known as incidents in the ServiceNow world.

0:34And basically these are just something that happened that was bad, right? So you can see these are just some examples and we'll be working with this example environment in much more detail in later videos. But as you can see this thing has things like unable to access the shared folder, email server is down, unable to post content to a wiki page. Really it's just anything that went wrong anywhere in your organization is now tracked. And here's a cool thing that I think you might like. It's also very easy to create visualizations from this so that you can understand what's going on with all of this a little bit better. So just to give you an example, let's say that you want to know where all of these incidents are in case of priority, right? How many are critical or high or regular? Well, you can do that very easily by just going to pie chart and that 's immediately going to show you a pie chart of where your incidents currently stand. And you can really do this with any kind of data. And that's one of the cool things about ServiceNow is just how flexible it is. So if we go back here, let's say that instead of the incident priority, we want to know who's reported the most incidents. Well, that's a really easy thing to find out here. We can just create a bar chart and that will show us, sure enough, this person over here on the left hand side

1:52definitely wins in that respect. All right, now besides that, there's also the ability to create different dashboards, right? So when you need a central view of multiple data sources like tasks, charts, and, you know, things like performance indicators, you can get that all in one place by either building your own dashboard or having someone else build it for you. Essentially, this just helps you to stay on top of what's happening and create an interface that's specific to your job.

2:22So, you know, let's take a look at this here. We're going to go into human resources overview. And as you can see, this immediately contains several different visualizations that really help someone in the human resources department understand what's going on on a day to day basis in their department. All right, besides that, there's also this ability to manage what's known as knowledge in ServiceNow. And this is basically just anything that's useful that someone knows ServiceNow provides you with a centralized place to put that. And it also makes it searchable. So let's say that we want to search for, you know, let's say that we just got our new computer and we're not familiar with Mac. And so we want to look up Mac related knowledge. Well, we can do that really easily here by searching that.

3:05And that immediately brings up everything that anyone's ever written or added to this knowledge base about working with Macs, right? Some common problems that you might encounter. And you can do the same thing with Windows too, right? So let's type in Windows. And that will give us all of our organization's knowledge that's been cataloged about working with Windows. All right, now, just to move on to the next thing here, we just saw that in ServiceNow it's possible to build custom dashboards. But sometimes you might need an entire interface that will be used by some sort of internal team or maybe even a customer. And ServiceNow actually provides you with something called the UI builder that makes it very easy to create those, right?

3:45Essentially, you can just drag and drop these things into place instead of having to get a development team in house to build that for you. All right, so just to show you what this might look like , let's go into experiences and then we're going to scroll down to HR agent workspace. All right, so this might be something used by of course an HR agent in your organization. And if we take a look at something like the landing page default, this is a custom interface that we can actually move around ourselves, right? So if we want to change the positions of things, we can do that very quickly and easily, again, without having to consult a programmer or get the development team to work on this for us, which provides you with a lot of capabilities as far as setting these things up . Now, in addition to being able to design these custom interfaces as part of ServiceNow, another thing that you can do, right? I talked earlier about processes like onboarding into employee, there's actually a specific editor for doing that as well, where you can actually design the flows that different things go through in your organization, such as employee onboarding. And you can modify those and link those to different parts of ServiceNow as well. All right, so let's browse over here to maybe let's do service catalog item request, right? So as you can see, this

5:01here contains all of the steps, right? The order that they're supposed to go in as well as things like branches, right? If you need to add in like an if then structure there into the flow, that would go along with requesting an item from the service catalog. And speaking of the service catalog, you don't know what that is yet. The service catalog, which is yet another part of ServiceNow, this is a comprehensive listing of all of the goods and services that your organization provides. And basically by interacting with this interface here, you can make sure that any incoming orders from customers or internally from employees are kept track of and addressed. So you can do things like, you know, if we go into hardware here, you can do things like request laptops for new sales people, right? If you're onboarding someone, you can go in here, you can even select like optional software. And of course, all of this is also configurable too. That's another thing that you'll find with ServiceNow as it's very tends to be very meta, right? Everything you see on the screen can be configured. And in many cases, even the screens for configuring other screens can also be configured. That's just one of the many fun things about ServiceNow as you 'll see. And one last thing I want to show you here before we move on is in case you think that this

6:20interface here looks a little bit like a 1990s website. There's also a customer facing version of this, right? This is the internal facing version called the service portal. You can do the same basic things in here. And they'll also be automatically kept track of and assigned to the right people. So, you know, if we wanted to order the sales laptop through here, let's just look for it there. Sure enough, sales laptop in here, and we can do things like add it to our cart and check out. And ideally, within a few days, we'll see that new sales laptop show up. And of course, one last thing I want to add here again is that all of this can be configured too. So you can change anything that you're seeing in this customer facing portal to look different to behave differently, things like that. So anyway, that's just kind of a whirlwind tour of ServiceNow. So again, what we're going to be doing in the following videos and throughout the rest of the course is taking a deeper look at all of these interfaces that we've seen here, seeing how they can help your organization, and also, of course, seeing how to use these things to their fullest. So without further ado, let's jump in and get started.

0:00All right, so now that we've discussed the basic ideas behind service now and kind of the goals of service now and how it can help organizations, the next thing that I want to do before we jump in and take a look at ServiceNow's interface and kind of the basic layout of the platform is I want to talk about some similar tools to ServiceNow . Right, so the thing that, you know, the question that people usually ask at this point, once they've seen what ServiceNow does is, oh, well, isn't that just like something like Trello, all right, or isn't that just like, isn't that just like what Asana does, or, you know, insert your other project management tool that you've seen advertisements for on TV or online, right?

0:47So here's the thing, right? And I think that this will help kind of put everything in perspective here. These tools such as Trello and Asana, I'm sure that everyone has worked with at least one like Trello board, right? Most people are more than aware of what a Trello board is, right? But you may have also worked with things like basically any kind of like Kanban board or a similar, you know, similar task management tool. Here's the thing, those tools are primarily meant for smaller companies, right?

1:21So if you have a little company here with maybe like 20 people at it, then these tools here are going to be really the best fit for those companies, right? The fact is, as you'll see very soon, and just by the fact that there are courses out there on how to use ServiceNow in the first place, the fact is that ServiceNow is very complex, right? There's just a lot you can do with it. And for companies that are like this small, they don't really need that, right?

1:52They're perfectly fine, either just with like emailing back and forth because it's a small enough network or using tools like these in order to, you know, in order to make sure that things get done on time and that everyone can see what's going on. So that's really the biggest difference here is when you have a company that's maybe like, you know, 5,000 people, and that's not even a truly large company, these tools, right? Could you imagine 5,000 people using like trying to use a few Trello boards to keep track of things?

2:25That's really just not doable, especially when you start to have like multiple departments in this company that have to communicate with each other and, you know, things like compliance. These tools just don't have what it takes in order to do that. And that makes sense because they're not really trying to do that. They're trying to be something that helps teams, right? Pretty small teams keep track of tasks. All right. So you can kind of think of service now, right? Because service now does have tools that allow you to do pretty much the exact same thing as Trello or Asana or any of these other tools, Monday.com and so on.

3:03But it also has a lot more, right? There's just a lot more that you can configure. There's a lot more that you can customize. There's a lot more that you can add on to the process. And so that really is the main difference between service now and a lot of these other much smaller tools. It's just the scale and the complexity behind what service now is capable of. So hopefully that helps clarify this point because again, this is a question that comes up a lot at this point. [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00Okay, well hopefully at this point you kind of are starting to wrap your head around what ServiceNow is, so it's time for us to jump in and start taking a look at what it looks like. Now probably the most confusing thing for a lot of people about ServiceNow is the fact that it looks different for pretty much anyone who's using it, right? So this thing that you see here, this is just the dashboard. Your dashboard on ServiceNow might look completely different from this. And by the way, for the demonstrations that I'm going to be doing in this course, I'll be using a ServiceNow simulator instance. Basically this is just an instance that ServiceNow has pre-configured for you to play around with the interface. Now if you want to do this as well, you can usually access these from ServiceNow's website. Oops, I have no idea why that wasn't showing up there. But if you go to just the homepage of ServiceNow and then go to learning and start learning, and then there's a few more steps here that you'll need to go through, right?

1:02So you'll need to go into like one of these things that actually walks you through ServiceNow. You can usually get to it. It is rather deeply nested by going to this thing here, and you should see like this button that says create an instance or something like that for just kind of learning purposes, right? So that's what I'm going to be using here. That's, you know, this instance that you see is just a simulator instance. So I wanted to point that out. And anyway, again, going back to the main point that I was making there, ServiceNow is a highly, highly configurable platform. Essentially, no matter what your large business or medium-sized business is trying to do, ServiceNow has tools for it. And in pretty much all cases can be configured to be what you need it to be, right? And again, the confusing part about this for many people is that it can look different depending on who's using it and what they're using it for. So, you know, if you're a salesperson using ServiceNow, the interface that you're used to is probably going to look completely different than what, you know, like a customer service agent's interface looks like. Just something to

2:20keep in mind. All right. So with all of that in mind, here's how we're going to go about this. We're going to start up here in the nav bar because frankly, the nav bar, right? These little things here, I'll talk about what these are in much more detail shortly. This menu bar here really contains the majority of the complexity that you're going to find in ServiceNow. As you can see, some of these menus are pretty large. And when a menu has a filter in it, right, a little search box, that's usually an indicator that you found like, you know, kind of like a central hub of the application. Okay. Now, first of all, let's talk about what this what this navigation bar is. ServiceNow is actually given this thing a specific name. This is called the next experience. All right, this is rather lengthy to write out here. The next experience user navigation. So, essentially, this is like, kind of like a nav bar on steroids, right? As you saw, it already has things like search bars and whatnot. And basically, the idea here is that anywhere you need to get in ServiceNow, any task you need to perform, you can get there through one of these five links. Okay. And if you're not an

3:37admin, right, this the current setup here for this simulator instance is that this is an admin user. You'll notice also that that is not my face in the top right hand corner. It's just kind of the default setup. So, you might not have this little admin thing there either. But anyway, the idea here being that this nav bar contains kind of the tools or it's kind of like a roadmap almost for how to get to the rest of the features of ServiceNow. All right. So, let's go through each of these and take a look at the different things you can do with them. First of all, if we click on this all button, this here is basically a list of all of the applications that you can access in ServiceNow. So, first things first, a little bit of terminology is in order. You'll hear the word application in the context of ServiceNow. And this is not referring to ServiceNow itself, right?

4:37ServiceNow is more of a platform, right? A collection of applications. And so, an application in ServiceNow really refers to a distinct core functionality of ServiceNow. So, I'll go through those in just one second. But inside each application, there are what are referred to as modules. And each module basically represents a specific thing that that application can do or a specific action that you might want to perform within that application. Again, that might be a little bit confusing. Really, just keep in mind they had to choose some kind of consistent terminology here. So, application and modules might not seem like the right choice to you after you've learned what these things do. But that's just what they're called. And so, to keep things consistent, we'll be calling them those as well. So, let's click on this all thing again. And what you'll see is that there are quite a few applications in ServiceNow. So, one thing that you might want to search for is something like incident, all right? If you search for incident, what you'll see is that first of all, incidents are modules in a few different applications. We'll talk about that shortly. But what we're

5:56looking for here is the incident application itself. So, the incident application, the purpose of this application is to track and manage incidents, right? So, things that go wrong, right? If there's a customer who's having trouble with your site or internally, right? If there's someone who is, you know, who's having trouble doing their job or needs help with something, that's what this application is going to be used to manage. So, if you click on this application here, well, what you'll notice is that that actually collapses it and extends it, right? Applications are a little bit more abstract than that, right? It's not like opening an iPhone app where the incident application comes up and it's got its own home page and stuff, right? Instead, when you want to do something with an application, you're usually going to have a specific thing, a specific action you're going to want to do. So, take a look at these modules that are available under incident. We have create new, assigned to me, open, open unassigned, resolved, all overview. There's lots of modules in there, right? So, let's just click on create new. This would be, you know, the action that we're taking here would be creating a new incident. Let's say that we're unable to access some key piece of software that we need to do

7:16our job, right? Well, we could come in here and create an incident and we'll go through this in much more detail in another skill, right? Obviously, these things are pretty complex or at least give you a lot of room for configuration, right? But that's the idea is this is an action that you would want to perform and notice what this action here, right? This module replaces, let's just scroll back here so I can draw this out again, what this module replaces is people at our company, these are supposed to be little person icons here, just kind of drawing them as quickly as possible. This specific create incident module replaces multiple people at our company emailing each other, right? Maybe this person is having trouble logging on to some key piece of software that they need to use, right?

8:06Right? So that person's having a problem? Well, that person's gonna maybe email this person and then that person doesn't email them back fast enough. So they email this person, then this person gets back to them and says like, "Hey, you need to email this person, this person emails that person, this person says, "Yeah, sure, I can do that for you." And it's just total confusion, right? So that's what this structure is meant to do. Instead of having all of those back and forth communications, things like that, this person simply creates an incident in service now, right?

8:39And whoever's in charge of that, they'll just automatically be able to see that and manage that. And then if a manager wants to know what happened, right? Like the manager maybe hears that 10 people weren't able to log on to this or that software, well, they can check where that's at by looking at those incidents, right? So this provides just a nice centralized place to manage things like that. And that's just one of many, many features in service now, all right? So anyway, getting back to this all thing, you know, you can obviously search through it with this filter and you know, you can also like refresh it. If your company adds new applications, you're gonna need to do that in order to see those. So, you know, these applications are flexible and applications can be added, modules can be added, things like that. So anyway, that is the basic structure of how things are done in service now is with this whole like application module structure. The next thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna take a look at things like favorites, history, workspaces and so on.

0:00Okay, so now that we've taken a look at the basic way that applications are organized in service now and how you can access them and the modules that they contain through this all menu, let's take a look at some of the other ones. So favorites, this one's probably not going to come as a huge surprise to you. This is basically where you can save the applications and modules that you use most often. Now it's no secret that when you have a list of different things like this, right, let me just go back there.

0:30When you have a list of different applications like this and each of those has like a lot of different things inside of it. Oops, I didn't mean to click on that. It's no secret that you're going to use some of those much more often than others, right? Some of those you might use daily. Some of those you might use maybe like once in a very long while or never. And so favorites provides you with a way to really create sort of shortcuts for the applications and modules that you use most often. So here's what you need to do in order to add favorites.

1:01Once you've identified which ones you want, all you need to do is go into all and click on the star next to it. So let's add a few to our favorites here. These are probably going to be the most useful ones and ones that will demonstrate in skills a little bit further down the line. So we'll start off with incident here. That was a very common one and we're just going to leave those things there. So you can see there are different locations. So just like how you can organize your favorites in your browser into different folders, you can do that with your favorites in service now.

1:34All right. So we're just going to leave top level selected. We're going to click done. I'll show you how we can kind of organize these in a minute. We'll also do this change thing, change management, right? Basically keeping track of things like switching over servers, things like that . That is a huge and very commonly used part of service now. So we'll click done there after adding that as a favorite password reset. We'll do that one as well. That's another example of something that service now allows you to keep track of and make sure that that's taken care of.

2:09And last but not least, we'll search for something here called knowledge and we 're going to search for the application called knowledge. Basically this one as we'll see allows you to keep track of all of the different knowledge in your organization. So you know, if there are documented procedures or training materials, things like that, that's usually where they're going to be if people are using this feature correctly, right? So now that we've added all those, let's go over to favorites. And as you can see, those things are all in there.

2:40So those are going to be much easier to access now. So if you wanted to create a new incident, you just go into favorites. You don't have to search anymore to find it and you can just do create new right from there. All right. Now, another thing that I wanted to point out real quick, we'll go back to favorites and see how you can edit colors and change the symbols next to them, things like that. Very exciting stuff. Notice that as we navigate around service now, this little thing here, this little pill up at the top tells us where we're currently at, right?

3:10So this is sometimes referred to as like a context pill. And that just, you know, it really just helps you, helps keep you oriented with where you're currently at without that. It would be pretty easy to get lost in this, you know, in this platform. So that is the basic idea of favorites. If you go back into favorites, what you can see is if you click on this little edit button, that will actually bring up this wonderful little menu that allows you to edit different things and assign different colors, different symbols to different actions.

3:45So let's say that you wanted to, you know, let's say that you wanted to maybe highlight things in yellow or red that were important. So maybe something like, maybe if you go into assigned to me, maybe you want to change the color of that to yellow. Well, as you can see, that just changes the color of that icon. This can be used to help you kind of keep track of what's what. And one thing that we'll discuss in much more detail shortly is, you know, notice that each of these things here has sort of like a default icon assigned to it, right?

4:22So all has this little like list icon. So it is resolved and open and open, unassigned, things like that. And some of these other ones have like, you know, this picture icon next to it or this information icon. Well, basically those kind of give you a hint as to what you're going to find when you follow that link. So if we find or if we follow rather that assigned to me thing, and here we'll say leave, there we go. So if we go into favorites and follow this assigned to me thing, what you're going to see.

4:55Well, there's no records to display in this list, but ultimately this is a list and the same would be true if you were to go to like open, unassigned, right? This one does have some things in there. And again, this is all just kind of like default filler data provided for us by , by service now. But you can see that this is a list as well. So again, really those just serve as kind of like a hint to what you're going to find when you reach those now create new. We saw that that was a form here. If we go to overview, what are we going to see there?

5:28And that's actually a dashboard. If we take a look at one of these other things here with that little info sign, like incident properties, this is just going to be kind of like this, this other form that you'll see here as well. So really, you know, while that info icon might not be quite as consistent, a lot of these other things are especially that list one there. So anyway, that is kind of the basic idea of this favorites thing and how you can edit those. Let's take a look at some of these other ones. So history here, this is really just a, you know, a record of the different applications and the different modules that you've visited recently.

6:09So this can really be great if you were doing something maybe like 15 minutes ago and you close that tab by accident or something. And you're like, okay, how do I get back there? Or what was that exactly that I was using? That's a pretty common one in service now as well. It's because there's so many different, you know, apps and modules that it's very difficult to remember the names of all of them. But anyway, the last thing here is workspaces and workspaces. This is kind of an interesting concept. And in order to show you this, let me just go back to my little whiteboard here .

6:43So the idea of workspaces in service now is that depending on the role of the person using it, right, depending on the role of the person using service now, they're going to have completely different needs with regards to what they use on a regular basis, right? So you know, let's say that we have a collection of different applications and modules, things like that. I'll just draw these as little boxes here. All right. Well, the fact is that, you know, a manager over here, let's say that this is maybe a sales manager, and then over here we have maybe like a customer service agent.

7:21All right. And then over here, maybe we have like a software developer. Well, all of these are going to, you know, all of these different roles are going to have significantly different needs from this, you know, this pool of applications and modules, right? There's probably going to use the applications and modules for things like, you know, things like project management and features, right? Whereas the sales manager, they're probably going to want access to like the database of all of their contacts at different companies.

7:59And the customer service agent, they might need to have access to, I don't know , a few things like creating incidents if someone calls and is not able to access their account or something like that. So you know, because each of these people is going to have different and oft entimes overlapping, you know, needs in this software, in many cases, it's easiest to just create something called a workspace, which basically is just a custom interface that includes the most necessary tools for the job for that person.

8:35And usually it will include some sort of like custom dashboard as well. All right. So you, in this case, you would have like a sales manager workspace, you'd have a software dev workspace, you'd have a customer service agent workspace. And in that way, you'd have a lot more control over what each of those people is seeing. So if a new customer service agent, you know, joins the company, then you could just give them access to the workspace for their role. And they wouldn't have to go through the trouble of figuring out service now from scratch, like we're doing here, right?

9:09So anyway, that's the idea of workspaces. So you can see that I have a few workspaces in here in this simulator instance. If we click on any one of those things, so maybe like service operations workspace, you'll see that sure enough, this brings up sort of like a customized interface for us . That's going to make our job a lot easier. So you can see that the default here is that we have this nice little like list thing showing us the different interactions that are assigned to us. We'll go through what interactions are in another skill.

9:41But you can also see that over here on the left hand side, we have this really nice list that includes a lot of the most commonly used tools that we might need to access, right? So if we want to see what tasks are assigned to us, we can just go under catalog tasks assigned to you. We want to see incidents that are assigned to us. We can go there. If we want to see like, you know, any open changes that are in progress, we can go there. And this one actually has a lot of stuff displayed in that list. Ultimately, this is just sort of like a pre-configured setup that is going to make it much easier for someone in this role to get up and running without having to take the hours and hours necessary to set up their own custom, you know, their own custom flow for service now.

10:27And, you know, look through, find all the applications they'll need, specify their favorites, things like that. So that's the idea of workspaces. We'll go over workspaces in much more detail a little bit later as well. But let's go back for now to just a regular dashboard, right? You can get back to the admin dashboard just by clicking on the service now icon up here in the top left corner. And you know, if you find yourself using one of these menus very frequently, so if you want to have that all menu up at all times, instead of having to come up here and click it every time, you can actually select this little teeny tiny pin icon.

11:07And that will pin the menu over on the left hand side. All right. And, you know, if you wanted to do this with favorites instead, that's essentially going to replace all. And if you wanted to do it with history, that's going to replace favorites. Really, you can only have one of those up at a time. But let's just do all for now. Since that's probably what we'll be using for the near future. All right. So that's pretty much all I wanted to discuss about the basics of navigating service now. Obviously, from here, it's really just getting a taste and getting used to all of the different apps and modules that service now provides and things like how they all fit together.

11:49So anyway, that is the basic idea there. The next and final thing that we're going to talk about is how we can do things like customize our profile and also customize the instance that we're working on. [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00All right, so we've taken a look at the main navigation structure of ServiceNow . And so the last thing that I want to do is show you a few little extras. You'll notice that over here on the right hand side, there's a lot of stuff that we haven't looked at. Now this stuff is pretty simple. So I'm just going to run through it pretty quickly with you. And really the focus of it is this little icon here, which gives you a few more options. So first of all, what you'll see here is you have the application scope and you can actually change this.

0:32What this allows you to do is have different settings for different applications in the platform. And the default, of course, is global, which means that by default, the settings you change will just be, you know, adopted by all the applications. All right, we'll take a look at that a little bit later in more detail. We have the sidebar discussions thing here. This is just like, you know, messages that you can send to other people in the platform. And then you have also the help center. This is where you can go if you have, you know, questions about different parts of the application.

1:06And finally, there's this notifications thing that will light up when, you know , something happens, right? Something like a task getting assigned to you. There's a lot of other things as well, but that's really kind of the main idea there is, when when there's something that needs your attention, you'll see a little notification button light up on that. All right, so let's go into this user profile thing here. There's a lot of different, a lot of different things here. Really, I guess, first of all, if you're serious about becoming a power user with service now, I'd highly recommend at least testing out some of these keyboard shortcuts , right?

1:44These are obviously going to depend on your operating system. So I'm using a Mac right now. So these might look a little bit different for you. But ultimately, these are just, you know, hotkeys for doing different things in service. Now that otherwise would require you to point and click. And ultimately, these can just speed up your, your usage of service now quite a bit. Now the thing I want to focus on here is this preferences link. If you click on that, what you'll see is that this gives you a pretty wide variety of different things that you can change about the application, right?

2:21Things about like how things appear, different, you know, preferences that you might have, right? You can obviously change your language and region. You can change your date, time and format if you are in, you know, a region that is a little bit different date, time wise. And you want to actually see that natively. And overall, there's just, there's a lot here. So we'll start off with this display option. This one here basically just controls how everything looks in the application. Now this is obviously just personal preference a lot of this.

2:54So you can obviously choose what to, you know, what you want to have this look like. But an example here is going to be the use compact spacing mode. If you turn that on, what that's going to do is that will actually make items in certain parts of the platform appear much smaller. So here, let's actually find a list here. All right. So we'll go back and we'll go and find our favorites. And we'll just go to one of those list pages here. All right. So let's go into maybe incident and we'll go to, I believe there was some in open.

3:28Let's just take a look here. We got to find something. There we go. All right. So if we adjust that now, if we go into preferences and display and then say use compact spacing mode, what you'll see, it might not be obvious at first what that does. But, you know, if you click it a few times and kind of toggle it, you can see things going on in the background there. All right. So if you activate this and then exit out, you'll see that everything, you know , if you watched closely, you could actually see that that changed behind the scenes, right, or behind that little window.

4:00And if we turn that off now, you'll see that everything gets just a little bit bigger. Really, it's, it's kind of too little to notice if you're not looking for it. But, you know, if you're a power user and also have good eyesight, I suppose that can be pretty helpful in allowing you to just sort of take in more information visually at the same time. So there's a lot of other things as well. I'm not going to really, you know, go into these in much more detail. You can feel free to play around with those and see what they do.

4:31There's other things as well. So like for the theme, you can change the color scheme if you want to. So if you want to change it to dark theme, you can do that, which is pretty nice. I'll change it back though, just for consistency. All right. And what else? Accessibility, right? If you, you know, have any accessibility needs, this is the place to find those for notifications. This is where you can adjust some of the, you know, some of the options that you have with those, right? So you can choose whether you want to receive notifications as email or next experience or in a workspace.

5:04What else here? So this is if you're going to develop applications for service now, you can just kind of leave that for now because we're not really going to be using that at all in this course. Language and region. I already took a look at that one. And finally user experience. This allows you to choose your, your starting page. So if you want to use like, you know, if you want to start off on your dash boards or if you want to start off on the page where you're at right now, let's say that the page you're on right now is, you know, is, is a very important one that you usually want to go to when you bring up service now, you can always select that one and that will change where you come back to.

5:45So there's just a lot of fine tuning things here that you can use in order to get the most out of this platform. [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00All right, well, hopefully you gave these questions a try. Let's go through them one by one and see what the solutions are. So for the first one is if I want one of the N-E-U-N, that's next experience user navigation menus to be permanently shown on the left side, I can click the blank icon when I open the menu. For this one, it was the pin icon. We're going to just submit that there, and I can show you that here. There we go. And just ignore what's up here. This is from another course that I'm recording.

0:30So that's this little pin icon right there. So that's what makes it stick permanently over on the left hand side, and we can remove it by clicking that button again. Okay, so sure enough, we see that that one is correct. Next one is a workspace is the same as a module. This is definitely false. While there can be some similarities in between them, right? If we go to like a workspace here, this remember is more of a pre-configured setup for different roles, whereas a module is just a specific thing you can do, or a specific interface in service now.

1:04So sure enough, that's correct as well. The next thing here, the blank menu in the N-E-U-N bar lets you see the most recent modules you've visited. This is going to be the history menu, right? That was just one of the options there. Definitely isn't the all menu, and the other ones aren't even in that part of the app. And finally, we see that it says match up each of these modules here with the application that it belongs to. Feel free to use service now interface to figure this out. So those are already selected because I already, you know, I already went through and recorded this, and then I had to re-record it.

1:36But anyway, we see risk accepted. That is problem, personal backlogs, agile development, user functions formulas, and caller's service desk. And you could have gotten to all of those by just going into all and searching for the string up here. So for risk accepted, we could have just said risk accepted. And sure enough, we see that that's under problem there. So anyway, those are the solutions. Congratulations if you got all of these right.