Digital Product Release – What’s New in May 2025?
With the May release, we’ve expanded the scope of DPR to include service releases and made updates to the data model and release creation process.
Highlights include:
- Support for service releases
- Revamped data model
- Streamlined release creation
- Time-based scheduling improvements
1) Effectively plan, manage, and execute service releases
Previously, releases were limited to software only. With the May release, we’ve expanded the scope of DPR to include service releases. Release managers and product managers can now plan, manage, and execute releases for their services. Additionally, they can manage multi-product releases, which include a combination of services and digital products.
2) Revamped data model
Replaced the 'Software Model' table with more intuitive and structured 'Software Version' tables (Software Component Models table and Service Offering Models table). Avoid confusion and limit possible conflicts with existing Software Asset Manage (SAM) dashboards, which also use the Software Model table. See #3 Streamlined release creation video for demo
3) Streamlined release creation
Enjoy a simplified, step-by-step flow to create releases faster and with fewer errors. Create releases and plan product features directly from release planning page without first creating a version. DPR will create versions automatically once the release is started.
4) Time-based scheduling improvements
Releases now account for weekends and holidays using schedules, ensuring deployments align with operational calendars.
_______________________________________________________________
Digital Product Release – What’s New in February 2025?
With the February release and launch of DPR 2.0, we’ve introduced a new multi-product release experience and added additional integration and planning support.
Highlights include:
- Multi-product release experience
- Ability to link any task record to a release
- SPM and DPR better together experience
- Integration support for Agile 2.0
1) Create, manage, and report on complex, multi-product releases
Introducing a new multi-product release experience. Guided release creation experience to help customers create a release with the relevant products, versions, templates, and target dates. Manage release execution (e.g., task and policy compliance) both at the aggregate (multi-product) level and at the individual component product level. Gain visibility into release readiness status across all products in the release.
2) Associate any task record to a release as a work item
Linkage of tasks to a release. Associate incidents, problems, and catalogue requests to releases OOTB. Gain visibility into which issues are being addressed as part of which release, closing the gap between build and run.
3) Seamless release planning to execution experience in ServiceNow
Introducing a new integrated experience between release planning in Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) and release execution in DPR. Use the new ‘Digital Product’ lens in SPW to plan and visualize in a way that directly translates to release execution in DPR. Feel confident that the scope prioritized for releases are in line with your organization’s strategic goals.
4) Integrate DPR with Agile 2.0 and auto import epics and stories
Easily setup tool connection with Agile Development by leveraging DevOps tool integrations. Automatically import epics and stories into DPR and associate them to releases. View imported stories as work items in your release scope and track release execution.
_______________________________________________________________
Digital Product Release – What’s New in November 2024?
With the November release, we’ve introduced a new experience for creating releases and added enhancements to help with planning and conflict detection.
Highlights include:
- A new improved experience for creating releases
- Introduced Key dates to define release key dates like milestones and deadlines
- Capability to breakdown product features into product enhancements
- Improved experience for creating release calendars
- Auto-create product versions from GitLab Milestones
1) Easily and smoothly create releases for single and multi-product releases
Introduced enhanced release creation experience. New guided experience that will help users create releases easily and supports plans for complex, multi-product releases. Preview release templates and release readiness targets in the context of the relevant release calendar
2) Visualize and track toward all key dates in a release
Enables users to define significant dates (e.g., milestones, deadlines, key events, important dates) and visualize those dates on the release timeline. Additionally release readiness targets can now be defined to the hour of a day.
3) Capability to breakdown product features into product improvements
New product enhancement tab allows users to break down product features into multiple enhancements. These enhancements can then be planned into versions instead of the product features themselves.
4) Mitigate operational disruptions and delays with release calendar enhancements
The release calendar is now able to identify and surface potential conflicts when defining release readiness targets. This enables users to action overlaps (e.g., accept, select next available) on a date-by-date basis
5) Auto-create product versions from GitLab Milestones
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Digital Product Release – What’s New in August 2024?
With the August release, we’ve made several enhancements to improve the product manager experience and support RMv2 migration.
Highlights include:
- Migration utilities from Release Management v2
- Release calendar improvements
- Jira Fix Version integration
- Ability to manage product bundles
- Enhanced work item visibility
- Redesigned release execution page
1) Simplify migration effort to DPR for existing Release Management v2 customers
With RMv2 beginning deprecation in Xanadu, customers need tools to help them migrate data to DPR. We’ve added Scripts and UI actions to help with this migration. Customers can now:
- Create DPR release template from RMv2 Release record
- Generate digital product from RMv2 Product record
2) Support for additional schedules in the release calendar
A new release calendar entity has been created to group readiness targets together. Additional schedules (maintenance windows, blackout schedules, holiday schedules, etc.) can be added to a Release Calendar and will be shown on the Release calendar page.
3) Enhanced release planning support with Jira Fix Version automation
Product managers are now enabled to plan in Jira and execute releases in DPR without friction. When connecting Jira projects to a digital product in DPR, product managers can choose to have Fix Versions in Jira create corresponding release versions in Digital Product Release. When Fix Versions are used to generate release versions, any Jira task that is associated with the Fix Version will be visible within a Release on the Release Scope page.
4) Create and manage product bundles
Product managers can now add and remove additional "child" products within a product to create a hierarchy of bundled products. Ability to clearly see, expand, and collapse hierarchical structure of products once defined.
5) Enhanced work item visibility & linkage to release plans
We’ve added visibility into all planning items across releases. You can now link additional work items to release plans in DPR and filter imported work items from planning tool to quickly select and link relevant work items to a version.
6) Redesigned release execution page
We’ve created a more usable and visually appealing release execution dashboard. This includes a streamlined experience to manage execution of a release from release execution dashboard, improved information density and clarity on release execution task cards, and enhanced filtering experience to more clearly show what filters are applied.
