Australia Release: Modernizing the ServiceNow Experience
If you’ve been following our Developer Passport series this week, you’ve seen AI agents in playbooks and new debugging tools in Flow Designer. But today, we’re talking about the layer your users actually touch: Experiences.
Whether it’s the Workspace UI or the classic Filter Navigator, the Australia release brings some long-requested quality-of-life improvements that make the platform feel more like a modern web app and less like a legacy database.
Lists and Forms: Finally, "Excel Mode"
We’ve all had those users who want ServiceNow to "act more like Excel." (fun aside: my first at-work programming experience was with automating excel via VBA). Well, we’re getting closer. Brad Tilton walked us through several enhancements to Workspace lists and forms:
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Pinning Columns: You can now freeze columns to the left or right, making it significantly easier to navigate wide data sets.
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Visual Cues: You can now change the background color of a field based on conditions (like highlighting a high-priority incident in blue or red).
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Rich Text Work Notes: No more plain text limitations. You can now format your comments and work notes directly in the activity stream.
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List Calculations: Sums and averages are now available directly in the Workspace list view.
The End of "Order: 100, 200, 300"
The biggest "crowd-pleaser" of the session was the new All Menu Configuration. If you’ve spent years manually ordering application modules by increments of 10 just in case you need to squeeze one in later, those days are over.
The new editor allows for a full drag-and-drop experience. And it allows for new experiences to be brought into the filter navigator. Also, it’s integrated with Now Assist! You can prompt the AI to "Create a new record form, list view, and a page for incident statistics," and it will build out the modules for you.
Bridging the Gap
One of the most important takeaways is that these features are designed to be a bridge. You don't have to be a UI Builder expert to start giving your users a modernized experience. Whether you’re adding data visualizations directly to a list or configuring the contextual sidebar with the new simplified settings, the platform is becoming much more accessible for admins and developers alike.
Want to see the live demos? Watch the full stream above.
