Whats new with Q? Flow Designer - Feature Access Control

[Kieran Anson]

ServiceNow's Quebec family release is just around the corner and is one of the largest (I think) family releases we’ve had. It contains some really jaw-dropping features that will have any inner-nerd dancing for joy to get started with exploring what they can do.

If you haven’t already, get an early start and upgrade your PDI to Quebec now.

It’s no lie that ServiceNow as platform is growing exponentially with more and more product domains being covered but this also introduces a demand for ServiceNow administrators and developers in order to keep up with the demand of continuous development and service improvement.

With this has come the role of citizen development and shifting tasks that are low-code/no-code to business users in order for them to fulfill their requirements themselves…sometimes even directly in a production environment!

Before Quebec, flow designer access was either managed through the creation of an application using delegated development; direct user roles which introduced the risk of potentially giving someone direct admin; and/or content filtering which restricted based on a condition builder and roles.

Introducing Feature Access!

Feature access removes the risk of providing the flow_designer role by effectively allowing you to filter this access further with additional roles.

This can be access from Process Automation > Flow Administration > Feature Access List

The “Enable feature access filtering?” toggle defines whether the flow_designer role is to be restricted further based on the roles defined on this page. Each feature can then have role(s) attached in order to grant access.

How Can I Utilise This?

As an example, I’ve created a user role called “itbm_power_users” as well as a user group called “ITBM Power Users”. This group has both the role I just created and the flow_designer role. With access filtering enabled, I can assign roles using the selector options against the feature.

Below you can see I’ve granted the itbm_power_users role access to properties to manipulate a flows name and description; ability to copy a flow and the ability to test a flow.

As an administrator you no longer need to worry about telling people what they should and shouldn’t be doing and have to rely on trust when asking someone to not use the publish button in production. If you tell a kid not to do something it’s all they can think of. Fully grown adults are the exact same and this enhancement removes that worry of Tony from PMO doing something they really shouldn’t be doing…..sorry Tony.

Interested to learn more? Check out the Quebec Flow Designer Release Notes