ServiceNow San Diego Upgrade Checklist

The San Diego Release

In March and September of each year, ServiceNow unveils their latest release, named after a global city. In March 2022, ServiceNow users can begin upgrading to the San Diego release.

ServiceNow supports only the current release (San Diego) and the one prior (Rome) for technical support. To realize the full benefits of your ServiceNow investment, it is critical that you keep your organization’s instance up-to-date with the latest release and work with a trusted implementation partner to ensure a smooth transition.

While each release comes with an extensive list of product upgrades and new features, the most notable new additions to the San Diego release are the Industry Solutions that ServiceNow has created.

Upgrade Best Practices

To ensure a safe and successful upgrade, be sure to read the San Diego release notes, develop upgrade plans, and test the upgrade in a sandbox or in your test instance before applying the upgrade to your production instance. The goal is to prevent any disruptions to active development within your instance while simultaneously testing the new release and features.

There are a few additional steps that our certified and expert consultants recommend for every upgrade. This checklist shares the general steps you should follow before upgrading to the San Diego release of the Now Platform.

What’s New in the San Diego Release?

The Now Platform® San Diego release adds more capabilities to deliver cross-enterprise digital workflows, enabling organizations to thrive in the new world of hybrid work.

The San Diego release helps our customers:

• Create compelling employee experiences — Guide employees through the moments that matter with the Employee Center and Employee Journey Management, which includes Lifecycle Events, Journey Accelerator, and more.

• Deliver AI-powered service operations — Identify opportunities to automate with Automation Discovery and keep people productive by helping to predict and resolve problems more quickly with AIOps enhancements.

• Solve customer problems more quickly — Direct against the most critical tasks in the new focused layout for Customer Service Playbooks.

• Create and configure mobile apps — Enable developers of any skill level to create engaging experiences with the Mobile App Builder.

GlideFast’s Most Notable Feature Picks

Customer Service Management

• CSM Configurable Workspace: Drive agent productivity with a modern visual design. Enhance productivity by using compact mode to make better use of space and reduce scrolling.

• Order Management: Capture orders automatically from third-party systems and enable agents to capture, monitor, and fulfill orders.

• Case Management: Detect language using AI and resolve cases faster. Provide customer access management by enabling related parties to track cases to improve CX and efficiency.

• Engagement Messenger: Continuously chat in asynchronous conversations over time. Enable guest and authenticated users to continue conversations over several days.

Field Service Management

• Field Service Multi-Day Task Scheduling: Increase dispatcher efficiency. Define tasks of any duration with improved calendaring capabilities.

• Contractor Management enhancements: Improve contractor scheduling. Provide visibility into task distribution across contractors using Dispatcher Workspace.

• Dispatcher Workspace: Drive productivity with modern visual design. Navigate seamlessly across user interfaces, mark favorites, and leverage navigation history. Eliminate manual refreshes. Allow dispatchers to schedule work prior to notifying technicians with Soft Booking.

IT Service Management

• Automate and optimize technology service operations.

• Digital Portfolio Management: Holistically manage services and applications through their full lifecycles. Manage services and applications through one unified workspace.

• Process Optimization enhancements: Leverage automation to drive greater process efficiencies. Optimize processes more quickly by using AI-powered root cause analysis to detect undesired process behavior.

• Virtual Agent enhancements: Provide customers with conversational AI capabilities. Provide an intuitive interface to easily manage configuration via the admin console.

• Walk-Up Experience enhancements: Improved user experience for the hybrid workforce. Book and manage all walk-up appointments via the self-service portal.

• DevOps Change Velocity

• System health dashboard: Use the dashboard to share connectivity health and trends for DevOps integrations, easily maintaining DevOps connectivity to ServiceNow.

• Historical pipeline data importing: Improve value stream management by importing historical data for immediate insights. Import elements like Work Items, Commits, Test summaries, and Packages from existing teams.

• Manual change traceability: Improve value stream management by providing unique visibility of production deployments. Associate artifact and release versions, build numbers, and other information to change records during manual creation.

IT Asset Management

Reduce hardware, software, and cloud costs.

• IT Asset Management:

• IT Asset Offboarding: Automate the request, reclamation, evaluation, and removal of hardware and software. Simplify technology asset offboarding processes with prescriptive tasks.

• Software Asset Management

• Content Library Portal: Intelligently search for technology assets in the expansive ITAM Content Library. Quickly search the ITAM content Library for information on software lifecycle dates, versions, and port numbers.

• Virtual Agent for Software Requests: Simplify and automate the software request process. Help expedite service delivery times by leveraging Virtual Agent to automate software applications and installations for a simplified end-user experience.

• Hardware Asset Management

• Hardware Asset Manager Workspace: Drive asset manager productivity with a purpose-built workspace. Discover important actions in a single intuitive dashboard for critical hardware asset tasks.

• Cloud Insights

• Reservation Plans: Optimize spend and usage of AWS and Azure reserved instances. Find discount opportunities by identifying resources to reserve for a committed period.

To learn more download our San Diego Release Checklist

About GlideFast Consulting

GlideFast is a ServiceNow Elite Partner and professional services firm that provides tailored solutions and professional services for ServiceNow implementations, integrations, managed support services, application development, and training. Reach out to our team here.