The Lost treasures of Kingston

[Goran WitchDoc]

The Treasure hunt is back on. Earlier this year we had the hidden diamonds of Jakarta(LINK) and now it's time for the lost treasure of Kingston.

For those who find the hidden diamonds of Jakarta, my main thoughts here is to highlight the new features in Kingston that might not have gotten the same amount of star power as for example Flow Designer or the entrance of AI.

Before I start, I must say thou that my personal favorite is the Flow designer. I really like it and I think it can really be a game changer when it comes to slim your process, have better performance, less coding and the potential of re-usability within the designer is huge.

AI is of course also really cool, but in Kingston it's still in it's cradle, but I think it will unleech it's true self (hopefully we dont all die ) in London.

So, back to the lost treasures. First I want to mention two things that ServiceNow has buried so deep in Kingston, that those functionalities is long gone and I don't have any treasure maps to find them

• UI11: I'm guessing many of you don't even know about this. I myself started my journey on Eureka where UI14 came, so I haven't even used it myself. Until Kingston, you could have lived in past and still using UI11, but in Kingston, it's gone.
• Next thing that also has vanished is the ability to hold "Shift" and hover over the "i" in the list meny to get a popup window with the record in edit mode.

Now for the fun part:

Service Catalog in Service Portal:

There coming a whole new bunch of widgets and other fun stuff. The Service Catalog gets whole bunch of loving and for example our beloved Order guide now gets support for attachments; even per item. And as you can see for the order guide, it reminds a lot of the view we got in the native UI.

You can read more about it here: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/kingston-release-notes/page/release-notes/it-service-management/s...

Automated Test Framework (ATF):

I haven't have have time to look deep into ATF as I want. But I can see that one things that I would really love if I used ATF, is the new feature to be able to rerun specific failed tests in a suite without need to rerun the whole suite.

You can read more about it here: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/kingston-release-notes/page/release-notes/servicenow-platform/aut...

The CMDB SDK:

he CMDB SDK provides a set of Representational State Transfer (REST) application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable third-party applications to use the identification and reconciliation engine to create, read, and update configuration item (CI) records. Thus, eliminating duplicate CIs and improving overall CMDB data quality.

So hopefully this will lighten up the life the CMDB people when it comes to make sure there isn't duplicate Cis etc.

You can read more about that and more CMDB news here:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/kingston-release-notes/page/release-notes/servicenow-platform/cmd...

"Workspaces":

In Kingston we see a few of these workspaces (not sure of the official label). In my eyes there are the future and I bet in London these will have grown and taking over a lot more applications. If you want to see how it works, take for example a look at the Agile Board. (You need to activate the agile 2.0 plugin to get it).

You can read more about the agile board here: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/kingston-release-notes/page/release-notes/business-management/agi...

Software Asset Management (SDM):

In Kingston there will be OOB integration to handle your Office365 subscriptions. I think there is a lot of money for companies to be saved in all kind of licenses and Office365 sure is a place there has saving potential as well.

You can read more about it here: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/kingston-release-notes/page/release-notes/it-service-management/s...

Performance Analytics:

Now you have the ability to use External Data sources to pull information from to your PA reports. Real simple and no data is saved in ServiceNow, only the scores is saved in ServiceNow.

You can read more about it here: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/kingston-performance-analytics-and-reporting/page/use/performance...

Function fields:

A new field type has become reality in Kingston. With this field you can do let it show the result of a database function like for example add, concat or datediff. And by doing this here instead of a business rule, you should get a lot better performance. So together with the Flow designer, I think we will see a lot less use of business rules in the future than we have seen in the past.

You can read more about it here: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/kingston-release-notes/page/release-notes/servicenow-platform/pla...

And for last,

Mobile App

The mobile app is really starting to evolve and now there is functionality for user to still be able to use the app even if they doesn't have an internet connection. I think this is a real nice feature and probably wanted by many.

You can read more about it here: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/kingston-service-management-for-the-enterprise/page/product/field...

Good luck on the treasure hunt!

//Göran