TechNow Ep 38 | Advanced Workflow Tips and Tricks

[Chuck Tomasi]

Join Kreg Steppe, Dave Slusher and Chuck Tomasi as Kreg shows some tips and tricks with the ServiceNow Workflow GUI. We will take away a little of the mystery behind it and make it a more useful for you. Learn a bit about Timers, Waits, Scripting in Workflows and building your own activities to make Workflow work exactly as you want it to.

Originally aired June 22, 2017 8:00AM PDT  
(Be sure to change your YouTube Setting to 720HD)

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Featured Experts

Chuck Tomasi is a Platform Architect for ServiceNow.   He is a computer science major with over 30 years of IT experience. As a former ServiceNow customer, Chuck won the first Innovation of the Year Award at Knowledge 10. Since joining ServiceNow in 2010 as a Technical Consultant, he has done many large scale ITSM implementations and custom applications, acted as an adjunct instructor for Education Services, created and lead the Technical Best Practices program, and co-hosts the ServiceNow series "TechNow".

Dave Slusher has been developing software for 20 years for companies such as Intel, Orbitz, Dell Secureworks and many startups lost to history. He has been with ServiceNow for two years, first in Expert Services and now as the Developer Evangelist for the developer community and portal. He earned his BS from Georgia Tech and his MS in Computer Science from the University of Louisiana - Lafayette.

Kreg Steppe is a Senior Curriculum Developer within ServiceNow developing and supporting cloud training infrastructure. He specializes in developing integration solutions, automating repeatable processes and Cloud Management in ITOM. Kreg's prior experience includes operating his own ISP, developing web applications in PHP, network integration, managing network support, Application Development on cloud based networks, DNS and email server maintenance. He is a Linux enthusiast and enjoys Photography.

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[Robert Fedoruk]

Can't wait!

[Shawn Dowler]

What a great topic! Workflows are full of hidden gems.

I hope we get some tips on how to make the workflows easier to design and follow. I start with a logically arranged Visio in a requirements document, but when I make the ServiceNow workflow the boxes (activities) have to be arranged very strangely to keep the lines (transitions) from going under other boxes. Clicking Show workflow on a form brings up an unintelligible mess for fulfillers to follow.

Overlapping lines are one color and make it hard to follow workflow logic. Avoiding this requires the admin to do gymnastics to make sure none of the lines overlap. This is made harder with the way line paths are determined. I spend way too much time rearranging the activities.

We frequently get requests from people to be able to print the workflow, but if it's larger than one screen and you try to resize it in the browser, then the lines often don't match up to the boxes anymore.

Workflows are very powerful, but the Workflow IDE is painful to use sometimes and the results are not pretty.

[Robert Fedoruk]

Quite agree with you here Mr. Dowler.   I'm ServiceNow's biggest fan, and love solving business problems with its Workflow capabilities, but its the one part of the platform really showing its age, and the most likely to "disrupted" in the market.   Sincerely hope whatever product team owns workflow attends as well.   There's going to be some great questions.

[Chuck Tomasi]

FWIW, the automation team recognizes the issues with workflow (particularly showing its age) and is working on an updated (and extensible) framework. They are targeting the Kingston release, but as always, software timelines are fluid.