When Xanadu release is around the corner, it’s that time of year again for us to learn about the new features, enhancements, and APIs that may be applicable to someone developing an application to list on the store or OEM. I'm very excited and want to share with you about the followings.
New Features and Major Enhancements
ServiceNow IDE is a new application introduced in the Xanadu release that allows developers to create scoped applications using a Visual Studio Code-based environment on the Now Platform
ServiceNow Fluent is a domain-specific language that allows developers to define metadata files that make up applications and includes APIs for the different types of metadata, such as tables, roles, ACLs, business rules, and Automated Test Framework tests, enabling efficient application creation and two-way synchronization with the Now Platform
Now Assist Skill Kit
The Now Assist Skill Kit plugin for Now Assist enables you to create and activate custom prompts and skills for Now Assist. If the base system Now Assist skills don't fit your needs, you can use Now Assist Skill Kit to create custom skills
Analytics Generation in Now Assist for Creator lets you turn conversations into insights. Ask questions and get data visualizations instantly. For example, you can ask for information about the number of open incidents and get a single-score data visualization.
Flow Designer / Integration Hub
Flow Designer continues to grow in capability and Xanadu sees many new capabilities including:
- Control what users with read access can see in execution details
- Show annotations of the text directions used by flow generation
- Sign flows, subflows, and actions
IntegrationHub too has added capabilities/enhancements with the addition of:
- Send and receive messages in an Avro format with Stream Connect
- Track incoming requests for SOAP and REST APIs, and URL Export
- Enable parallel loading in custom (load by script) type data sources
- Use the CyberArk Digital Vault to store and access your OAuth 2.0 credentials
- Make outbound REST and SOAP calls through a MID Server using mTLS
- Use the Personal Authentication dashboard
- Enhancements to the external trigger endpoints
- Automatically generate a JSON payload for the JSON Builder step
- Enhanced OpenAPI step
Mobile Platform
The Xanadu release brings several exciting new features to the mobile platform. You can now define the visibility of specific areas based on user attributes, ensuring that only authorized users can access information. Agent-to-agent collaboration is streamlined with the Sidebar experience, making it easier for agents to communicate and work together. Additionally, the integration of Now Assist in Virtual Agent provides intelligent and conversational self-service capabilities, enhancing the user experience. Finally, the auto-fill feature dynamically populates input fields based on user selections, further simplifying the mobile interface.
Workspace
Added support to add email addresses to recipient fields with more flexibility, including the ability to use international characters, edit email recipient, and view concise error messages for invalid or blocked addresses, Categorize and filter records in the Activity Stream and, Help users access relevant reference search results by applying pre-filtered and removable query parameters to reference lists.
Virtual Agent
Added support for Configure One Extend Rate Limit for incoming requests for providers, Review and test large language model (LLM) topic descriptions against existing Natural Language Understanding (NLU) utterances, migrate Virtual Agent notifications and Proactive Triggers, and migrate NLU vocabulary sources in the NLU to LLM topic migration workflow, Enable Now LLM Service support for Virtual Agent conversations in Conversational Integration with Microsoft Teams and Conversational Integration with Slack and Integrate Now Assist for Virtual Agent with Microsoft Copilot to enable making IT-related calls and resolve tasks without having to leave the Microsoft Teams tenant.
Service Catalog
The Xanadu release enhances Service Catalog functionality by enabling in-line form filling in Virtual Agent, supporting Zero Trust Access security, improving catalog item loading speed in the Popular Items widgets, and allowing catalog item embedding in third-party websites.
Authentication
With respect to authentication,the Xanadu release enhances authentication by allowing users to use FIDO2 authenticators, passkeys, biometric authenticators, and hardware security keys for multi-factor authentication without requiring an authenticator app setup.
Scripting and App Dev Enhancements
New Scoped APIs - CMDBQBScopedScriptableAPI - Scoped, Global, HistoryWalker - Scoped, Global, and NumberFormatter are a few of the new scoped APIs and methods included in the platform.
UI Builder - The Xanadu release enhances UI Builder by providing a searchable library of resources, guided tours, a dark theme, responsive authoring, and, fetch information from multiple data sources and more easily bind the data to components of your choice with a new multi-table data resource right from UI Builder.
Some of the highlights for the Xanadu release include: The ability to use ECMAScript 2021 features in any server-side script, An upgraded TinyMCE editor with enhanced formatting options and editing capabilities, Capture multiple attributes and their values in a single column instead of adding new columns to a table and the new Automatic Jobs Scheduling feature with rollback and configuration retrieval abilities for events processing.
Release Notes by Product
I've covered Platform and Application Development release notes in this article, but if your app has a dependency or adjacency to a ServiceNow product, you should read through that product's Xanadu release notes. I've listed those here by product:
