We’re excited to share the latest enhancements to Employee Center! Our November 2022 store release for Employee Center and Employee Center Pro is now available for customers to install. This article summarizes the key new features and enhancements included with this release.
For further details, please refer to Employee Center release notes, Employee Center Pro release notes, and Content Publishing release notes for additional features and version numbers.
Create Dynamic Topic Microsites (requires Employee Center Pro)
Organizations can now create richer topic page experiences with HTML content to better guide, engage and inform employees. Unlike legacy standalone microsites - these Topic Microsites are tied into the taxonomy-driven portal navigation to make it easy for the employee to discover them.
Topic Microsite examples:
This capability is enabled through the introduction of a new content type, called “Rich Content”. This new content type comes with a drag-and-drop editor that is designed to enable non-technical content authors to create their HTML content with pre-defined layouts and components including texts, images, videos, links, and action buttons.
Below is a view of the Rich Content editor:
The Rich Content feature is integrated into Employee Center Pro’s content authoring and publishing capabilities (i.e., Content Library), so authors of microsites can leverage the same targeting, scheduling, distributed ownership, and governance capabilities that is already available to them for other employee communications.
Microsites are pre-enabled on Topic Pages – authors add rich content to any topic page by simply targeting a topic during the publishing process. Admins can also create custom or standalone microsites by adding the Rich Content widget to an existing (or new) portal page so that non-technical users can publish rich content to the page.
To learn more, refer to the Rich Content Editor product documentation. To see a demo of Dynamic Topic Microsites and how it works in tandem with other Employee Communications capabilities, watch the Employee Center Academy: Employee Communications replay.
Configure Filters on the “My Tasks” page
Admins can now configure filters for the task list, enabling employees to better manage their tasks with filtering options such as task type, priority, and due date.
Below is the "My Tasks" page with the configurable filters enabled:
The following filtering options are pre-configured on Employee Center:
- Overdue - Tasks that passed the due date
- Due soon - Tasks that are due in a week
- Task types – Approvals
- Priority - Critical, High, Medium, Low
- My team - Tasks related to direct reporters (for managers only).
Admins can configure multiple, multi-level filters and apply user criteria to the filters to personalize the experience e.g. configure a filter that is only applicable to managers. This capability builds on the roadmap focus on tasks & approvals that began with the Configurable Approvals Experience that shipped with the August 2022 store release and is backward compatible with Rome and San Diego family releases.
For additional details, refer to the configurable task filters product documentation page.
Search secured SharePoint content from ServiceNow (requires Employee Center Pro)
Organizations can enable their users to search SharePoint Online content from Employee Center Pro using the SharePoint Online Search Connector for AI Search. In the November ’22 release, the SharePoint Online Search Connector has been enhanced to also retrieve and respect SharePoint access controls so employees will only be able to search on SharePoint content that they have access to.
Below is an example of SharePoint content included as part of AI search results:
To learn more, refer to the documentation available on the SharePoint Online Search Connector store listing.
Note – connectors to search content from other systems are available via the ServiceNow store from Raytion.
Enterprise Service Management Success Dashboard
Business leaders and process owners require visibility into the enterprise-wide service performance and quality to make data-driven decisions on service improvements. ITSM stakeholders already had access to the ITSM success dashboard to gain visibility across the IT services. We have extended that to include HR Service Delivery metrics.
Business leaders can now review performance across IT and HR, using metrics such as self-solved percentage, call deflection percentage, Requests completed, and successful predictions, and evaluate service quality, using metrics such as Customer Satisfaction Score, Mean Time to Resolve, % breached SLA, and % first assignment resolution. Process owners can dig deeper to analyze what is contributing to the metrics and inform their improvement plans.
Below is a view of the HRSD Success Dashboard:
To learn more, refer to the HRSD Success Dashboard product documentation.
Create Recurring Campaigns for Birthdays or Anniversaries (requires EC Pro)
Lastly, content authors can now schedule communication campaigns for recurring events e.g. for birthday celebrations or to recognize anniversary milestones. The new “Recurring” campaign stage/bundle trigger makes it easy to configure these popular types of communication campaigns.
Below is an example recurring campaign with a happy birthday gif:
Content authors can pick a date, recurrence frequency, offsets, and time windows. Once published, employees will see configured content when they meet the month and day variable the campaign was configured for.
Refer to create campaign stages (bundles) using campaign builder in product documentation, for more details.
Additional Enhancements
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Maintain filter selection while browsing on Topic Pages: Employees’ selected filtering & sorting options on Topic pages will now be maintained as they browse across Topic pages
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Improved shareability of Knowledge Article URLs: Article URLs will now be based on kb-id instead of sys-id so employees can easily bookmark or share links to articles (using the browser tools that they’re familiar with) and recipients of the link will always see the latest article that they have access to. This enhancement eliminates the need to use the explicit 'Copy permalink' button on the article page.
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Employee Communications Workflow (Content Governance) enhancements: Content authors can now easily kick off the content creation flow and access the associated content item directly from the content request. They can also send the content item associated with a request for review/approval as part of the authoring experience within the Content Library interface. Note: Content Governance is the new pre-defined end-to-end Employee Communications workflow that shipped with the August 2022 store release.
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Added flexibility to Content Experiences Widget: We no longer require authors to specify a Heading for banners targeted to the Content Experience Widget. To achieve this we have created a separate field for the headline (the text that shows up on the right tabs) and made it optional along with the banner text.
Download the latest Employee Center (version 27.0.4) and Employee Center Pro (version 27.0.2), apps from ServiceNow Store to get access to the above-listed features and enhancements.
