It is time for another Employee Center update! Our May 2022 Employee Center store release is now available for all our customers. As always, we are excited to announce the enhancements to both the core Employee Center as well as the Employee Center Pro package.
Please, refer to the Employee Center release notes, Employee Center Pro release notes, and Content Publishing release notes for additional features and version numbers.
Drive personalization with cross-channel Favorites
Employees can personalize Employee Center with the ability to bookmark content from the portal or mobile view. They can bookmark knowledge articles, service catalog items, applications they have access to, and more. They can also manage their bookmarks across all content types through the “My favorites” page via both the portal and mobile view.
The cross-channel favorites capability is designed to be extensible. Organizations who are using the Workplace Reservation Management capabilities with Employee Center can enable employees to favorite spaces to reserve.
The cross-channel favorites capability makes it easier for employees to find the content most relevant to them.
Note: Please ensure you are either on Rome Patch 9 or San Diego Patch 2 for the Favorites functionality. We have made a fix that affects this capability.
To learn more, refer to cross-favorites product documents.
Highlight relevant applications with the enhanced App Launcher
In our February 2022 store release, we introduced the capability to provide contextual access to applications within Employee Center. In our May 2022 store release, we have enhanced that capability to further simplify access to the most relevant applications.
First, employees can mark applications as favorites and review them directly on the App launcher widget on the Employee Center Pro home page.
Second, admins can feature applications that they want to highlight for the employee. Employees can review the applications featured for them directly on the Employee Center Pro home page.
In addition to the experience enhancements, with the May 2022 store release the App Launcher feature also includes pre-built integration with Okta for organizations who use Okta as their SSO provider.
Refer to the App launcher product documents for more information. Note that App Launcher is an Employee Center Pro capability.
Create great-looking banners with an embedded image editor
Content authors no longer need to go through the cumbersome process of editing & re-uploading an image every time they tweak their content. With the May 2022 store release, the Content Library module comes with an embedded image editor that allows authors to edit (resize, crop, rotate, etc.) and preview images as part of their authoring and publishing flow.
Note that Content Library is the non-tech content authoring and publishing experience for Content Experiences, available with Employee Center Pro. Refer to Content Library’s create or edit portal and styled content product documents page for more details.
Drive engagement with an actionable Employee Profile page
As part of our San Diego Enhancements, we introduced the new configurable and personalizable Employee Profile page on Employee Center that enables employees to learn more about their co-workers. In our May 2022 store release, we have enhanced the page to provide employees with information on their co-worker’s availability and options to engage with them directly from the profile page view.
Organizations who are using our ServiceNow for Microsoft teams capabilities will have the employee presence status (available, busy, do not disturb, etc.) from Microsoft teams visible on the Employee Profile page on Employee Center.
Employees will have the option to send an email or chat (via Microsoft Teams) with the co-worker or dig deeper with options like view org chart.
Additionally, employees also have access to an image editor capability (described above for Content Experiences) to update their profile picture and banner more easily.
Organizations who use the HR profile widgets (i.e. my Contacts, my documents, and my delegates) will also see these widgets pre-configured into the Employee profile page with the May 2022 store release.
To learn more, refer to Employee Profile product docs.
Other Miscellaneous Enhancements
1. Custom Topic Page support enhancements: With our San Diego enhancements, we introduced the ability to create differentiated topic pages. We have improved the cascading and overriding behaviors for the custom topic page template applied to a topic and its sub-topics.
2. Carousal layout for Content Experiences Widget: Organizations can now choose to use a Carousal layout for the Content Experiences Widget, which also has additional image alignment options available now.
3. Quick access to clone or delete content directly from Content Library: Content authors can close, delete, or view the content record directly from their Content library interface. This improves Content Library usability.
4. Publish campaigns immediately: Content authors can now enable the immediate targeting of the campaign audience upon publish (or scheduled start time). This can save valuable time (up to several hours) in which users are targeted via a Campaign. Note that this setting is recommended for Campaigns targeting audiences under 100k in size (number of users)
5. Improved handling of translated knowledge articles on Employee Center: Translated knowledge articles will be automatically associated or disassociated with the Taxonomy topics along with the original article. Moreover, if an article is available in a user’s preferred language then the translated article will appear on the topic pages and the ‘Recommended for you’ widget. These enhancements make it easy to provide a consistent, localized Employee Center experience across geographies.
6. Improved translation support for Content Publishing and Content Experiences: We updated the user-facing text fields to “Translated Text” type instead of “String” type. Content authors can now add translations directly within the sys_translated text table to show the communications content in the appropriate language.
7. Performance (e.g., load time) improvements: We have made improvements in various Employee Center widgets which will significantly improve the first and repeat load times across all Employee Center pages.
Employee Center also integrates with Microsoft Teams to "meet where employees are". Review May 2022 ServiceNow for Microsoft Teams Store Release blog for new features and enhancements.
Download the latest Employee Center (version 25.0.3), Employee Center Pro (version 25.0.3), and Employee Profile (version 4.0.2) apps from ServiceNow Store to get access to the above-listed features.
