Agent Chat and Advance Work Assignment VS Sidebar

[Community Alums]

Hello All,

We are transitioning to Tokyo and since been made aware that Connect chat and Connect support are deprecated. My question is since Sidebar is limited to a few configurable workspaces for this Tokyo version which is preferred the Sidebar or Agent Chat and the Advance work assignment?

[SatyakiBose]

Hello @Community Alums 

For the workspaces, it's recommended to have the Advanced work assignment sidebar enabled on the configurable workspaces.

If the AWA plugin is not enabled, and you configure the Agent Chat to be visible on the workspace side bar.

[Eliza · Accepted solution]

Hi @Community Alums,

Sidebar and Agent Chat are different products designed for separate use cases.

Sidebar is for internal conversations - that is, fulfiller to fulfiller communication. only those within ServiceNow itself can use it. When creating a Sidebar conversation you specify the recipients, so Advanced Work Assignment is not used. You can find the Sidebar FAQs here.

Agent Chat is for connecting requestors to fulfillers - you'll have the fulfiller/agent within in the workspace responding to incoming chat requests. Advanced Work Assignment is used with this product to route chats to the appropriate agent. This product serves as the recommended replacement for Connect Support.

A guide to migrating to Agent Chat from Connect Support is available here.

[Community Alums]

Thank you Eliza,

Spot on was hoping it was included in the ITSM pro or Enterprise but can not see same ITSM

[Astrid Sapphire]

Hi there,

Just for completeness- Connect Chat is technically not deprecated and planned deprecation has not been announced. However, the Next Experience isn’t supporting Connect so it’s a good time to plan cutting over from this tool.

Sidebar and AWA are both platform capabilities so there should not need to be a callout to it in a specific license or application as such, but always check with your Account Executive and contract.

Lastly, Sidebar can be enabled on more workspaces than it is configured for in the baseline version as is detailed in the Tokyo and Utah documentation: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/tokyo-servicenow-platform/page/administer/conversational-interfac...

Hope this additional insight helps.

Kind regards,

Astrid Sapphire