Quick Start Guide for Collaboration in SOW

[Caelan]

Welcome to ServiceNow® Service Operations Workspace for Collaboration

Quick Start Guide  If you’re just starting your Collaboration in Service Operations Workspace (SOW) journey, then you’ve come to the right place. This guide will help you get up to speed on activating and realizing value from SOW and is a great place to come back to as our products evolve over time.

Let’s get started!

Guide Overview

Here’s an overview of the topics we will cover in the guide: 

• Collaboration Experience in SOW
• What are the business outcomes you can expect?
• What to know before getting started
• Steps to quick success
• Other helpful resources

Collaboration Experience in Service Operations Workspace

Collaboration experience is an intuitive and enriching experience in the Service Operation Workspace (SOW). With the new collaboration experience, agents can initiate and manage calls and chats from within SOW.  Additionally, agents can spin off either a call or a chat from the side panel to communicate directly with requestors and peers. Other users working outside of SOW can communicate with agents from their preferred communication platform. The embedded collaborations will be available with the following applications:

• Microsoft Teams Conference call
• Zoom Conference call
• Cisco Webex conference call
• Telephony call capability powered by Twilio (Custom integration an option too)
• SMS capability
• Sidebar Chat integration; available with Microsoft Teams

High-level features of Collaboration include:

• Initiate conferences with minimal clicks
• Initiate and manage conference calls and chat within Service Operations Workspace
• Effortlessly switch between calls, streamlining the process for agents to navigate between the meetings
• Manage chats across records through a unified view
• Ability to quickly reinitiate calls

What are the business outcomes you can expect from Collaboration?

Before you start to implement Collaboration in Service Operations Workspace, it is crucial to determine the provider you want to integrate with. Collaboration allows you to deliver numerous positive business outcomes, and you can achieve all this over time. However, by deciding which outcomes are most important for your organization and agreeing on them with your stakeholders, you can set clear expectations and tailor your initial implementation to realize these goals.

Collaboration for Service Operations Workspace benefits:

• Support greater business productivity - improved efficiency and focused approach for agents
• Minimize context switching while working on a record

Before Getting Started

Since Service Operations Workspace is a configurable workspace developed with the Next Experience UI, it is important to keep the following in mind: 

Customer Type	New and upgraded customers have free access to Collaborations in the Service Operation workspace. The plugins required to install are – Notify plugin (com.snc.notify), <Any Notify provider – mention list >. sn_uib_notify will be auto installed.
Customizations	If you're upgrading from a previous release, you need to validate the level of customization you've made to your instance. We suggest performing normal upgrade and/or regression testing when activating the Next Experience in a sub-production instance. The following modifications may need to be remediated when activating the Next Experience. For more information refer Considerations for activating Next Experience product documentation: Customized user interface, for example hard-coded styles or UI Scripts. Adopted a classic workspace and want to adopt a new configurable workspace. Created custom components in classic workspace and want to adopt a new configurable workspace.
Feature Support	Review the Considerations for activating Next Experience product documentation to identify any unsupported functionality and ensure that your instance is not currently utilizing these features. If such functionality is in use, it's essential to establish a migration plan for replacing these unsupported features. You can also explore our newly introduced Next Experience Readiness Tool. This tool is designed to thoroughly examine your instance for the utilization of these features, empowering you to make informed decisions about your implementation.
Workspace Status	Determine whether your teams are operating within a classic workspace. While classic workspaces can still be utilized, it's important to note that they won't benefit from the Unified Navigation features. Classic workspaces will continue to open in their own browser tabs and can’t be configured with the new full-featured UI Builder. If your organization currently uses classic workspaces, it’s recommended to migrate the process to a configurable workspace. This transition can take place either before or after activating Next Experience. We strongly recommend that customers who are not currently using workspaces explore our configurable workspace solutions after upgrading to any version above Utah.
Release Strategy	Create a plan to deploy the Next Experience in your production instance. It is recommended to activate the Next Experience in a sub-production environment and conduct thorough upgrade and regression testing to ensure that your instance is performing as expected. If there are any pre-existing user interface customizations address them as required and activate the Next Experience to configure your production instance.

Steps to quick success 

Step 0: Next Experience architecture and terminology

Learn about Next Experience either via our product documentation or free Now Learning courses.

Step 1: Upgrade to the Washington DC release or newer

Upgrade to Washington DC or newer on a sub-production instance if you haven't already. The Next Experience UI is available starting with the San Diego. We encourage you to read the family version release notes and follow your normal upgrade process. For helpful information, refer the . If you're new to upgrade process we recommend exploring our Now Learning course .

Step 2: Activate Next Experience

Review the product documentation for considerations to activate Next Experience. Prior to enabling Next Experience in your production environment, it is important to configure the required essential customizations. Before enabling Next Experience, ensure you have a plan in place to replace unsupported features like Connect Chat or Connect Support. Prior activating the Next experience, plan for the options regarding the unsupported features like Guided Tours and Live Feed. 

Step 3: Configure Next Experience

Prior to or shortly after activating Next Experience, make sure to customize the theme to align with your organization's branding colors. If desired, create user-selectable color choices in your theme with the use of variants if you're a new customer and haven't already, begin tailoring your landing pages to your user's personas. Upgrade customers can continue to utilize the dashboards, but we encourage customers to begin exploring landing pages to see if landing pages can replace and enhance their current dashboards. If your organization has implemented the classic workspaces, begin your strategy to migrate to configurable workspaces and if you haven't used workspaces yet, start to explore our new product workspaces to replace your processes in the classic environment.

Step 4a: Learn about the Workspace UI

A workspace is a suite of tools that provides personas such as agents, case managers, service desk professionals, managers, and other process users with the tools to assist customers quickly and perform process-based tasks. 

Step 4b: Explore our product workspaces

We've released new product workspaces with the San Diego release that can be configured in the full-featured UI Builder. Our workspaces enable you to deliver personalized experiences that engage teams and enhance their productivity. We encourage your organization to explore our product workspaces before building a custom workspace for a process.

Step 5: Explore further with training

Now that you've implemented Next Experience UI and explored how it works seamlessly with workspaces, you're ready to take the next step into configuring and customizing workspaces and landing pages with UI Builder.

Other helpful resources

• Collaboration product documentation

  • Notify Zoom connector

  • Configure Notify with Twilio

  • Notify Cisco Webex Connector

  • Notify connector for Microsoft Teams

  • Sidebar

• If you are new to ServiceNow, we also strongly recommend that you take this very short Get Started with the Now Platform course to learn platform basics. If you want a deeper dive into using the Now Platform, a longer ServiceNow Fundamentals course is also available.

[Marcos Kassak]

Hi @Caelan,

Awesome post! I had a question a while ago regarding this very same subject:

https://www.servicenow.com/community/itsm-forum/collaboration-tab-with-conference-call-in-interactio...

It would be really helpful if you could have a look at it.

Thanks!