We are excited to announce our November 2023 release for Employee Center, Employee Center Pro and Now Mobile. This article summarizes the key new features and enhancements included with this release. These include:
- New Employee Center homepage(s) - with added configuration options, new widgets, and new layout designs
- Employee Profile enhancements
- Employee News enhancements – including Categories for News and News Center updates
- Now Mobile enhancements
Download the latest Employee Center (version 31.0.3) and Employee Center Pro (version 29.0.4) from ServiceNow Store to get access to the features and enhancements. Also refer to Employee Center release notes, Employee Center Pro release notes, Content Publishing release notes, and Now Mobile release notes for additional release details.
1. New Employee Center Homepage(s) – with added configuration options, new widgets, and new layout designs
We are thrilled to announce exciting updates to the Employee Center (Pro) home page. We encourage organizations to revisit their entire experience every one to two years to better align with feedback received and capabilities added since the initial design. We have done the same with our out-of-box Employee Center experience that is designed to provide a great starting point and best-practice example for organizations. This comes with multiple new configuration options and new widgets that organizations can start leveraging in their deployments and create their desired experiences. Find details on each below:
1.1 Enhanced Mega Menu configuration options
Organizations can now create their desired content browse experience on Employee Center with the newly enhanced Mega Menu configuration options. Our February 2023 release laid the foundation for this with the introduction of Advanced Portal Navigation (APN). With the Nov 2023 release, we have extended the APN module to include additional configuration options that provide the flexibility needed for the portal admins and designers to align the top navigation with experiences they are building beyond the unified taxonomy. See below for details on the new configuration options available within APN:
- Mixed Hierarchy - Admins can now configure the Mega Menu drop downs, along with the top-level menu items, to be a mix of Taxonomy Topics and direct Service Portal page links. Note that this is in addition to surfacing quick links on the Mega Menu. It allows admins to blur the difference between a Service Portal page and taxonomy, helping create a more seamless content browsing experience for end-users.
- Display 4-levels of Mega Menu hierarchy – We have also added a new tab layout for the Mega Menu, which allows for the display of 4 levels of topic sub-trees, as opposed to the standard 3-level view. This expanded view is particularly beneficial for organizations with complex Mega Menus, providing a clutter-free experience by clubbing similar menu items under a common umbrella menu topic. For instance, you will see in our new out-of-the-box information architecture (IA) – described later in this article - all service delivery related topics are clubbed under ‘Help Center’.
- Left or right aligned menu items - Furthermore, you can now configure some menu items to the left and others to the right, giving you greater control over the alignment. For example, the 'Get Support' menu item – a new Mega Menu widget described later in this article - comes pre-configured on the right-hand side of the Mega Menu.
1.2 New ‘Get Support’ experience on Mega Menu
Let's delve into the next highlight – the 'Get Support' experience via the Mega Menu. We understand that finding help quickly is quintessential for great employee experience. With this in mind, we have added a new ‘Get Support’ experience on the Employee Center. It is a new widget pre-placed on the Mega Menu for easy access to important support content, irrespective to where the user is on the portal. When clicked, it opens as a modal window (see screenshot below) that provides easy access to quick links (such as Ask HR) and static text content (such as help-desk contacts) as defined by the portal admins.
Out-of-the-box, the Get Support widget is pre-configured for use cases such as 'Report Profile Update,' 'Ask HR Questions,' and 'Request Password Reset,' along with static text like the help-desk number as demo data.
Refer to ‘Get Support’ product documentation for additional details.
1.3 New ‘My Favorites’ widget
Employees love the ability to favorite content on Employee Center. They can now easily access their favorites through a ‘My favorites’ widget directly placed on the home page. The widget provides quick access to recently accessed favorite content and the ability to ‘view all’, which navigates the user to the My Favorites page. Admins can configure the ‘My Favorite’ widget to appear as a list or in a card format.
The list view of this widget is pre-placed on the new Employee Center home pages as shown later in this article. Additionally, the Employee Center header now calls out “My Favorites” instead of just the heart icon for navigating to the My Favorites page.
Refer to ‘My Favorites’ product documentation for additional details.
1.4 My Active Items widget updates
Employees now can directly complete their tasks, such as approvals, from the Employee Center Home Page. With this release, the 'My Active Items' widget brings in actions configured as part of the tasks to automatically appear on the home page. For instance, approval tasks will now feature 'approve' or 'reject' actions directly on the homepage in the 'My Active Items' widget.
In addition to this, admins now have new layout configuration options, including the card view alongside the traditional list view. Furthermore, we've enhanced the visual hierarchy of 'My Active Items,' placing primary action items at the top and secondary items at the bottom, for a more streamlined experience. Admins can configure what items they want to configure as primary, out-of-the-box tasks are configured as primary.
Refer to ‘My Active Items’ product documentation for additional details.
1.5 Tile Layout of Content Experiences widget banner (requires Employee Center Pro)
In this release, we've introduced a new tile layout for the Content Experiences Widget (CEW). With this addition, organizations can create a more contemporary portal look and make communications more visual on the portal. The new tiles layout is fully responsive, ensuring a seamless mobile experience.
Additionally, you have the flexibility to adjust the height of the CEW widget instance to align with your specific design preferences. Furthermore, admins can switch to this new layout option via Instance Options and it utilizes existing publishing rules and ordering, making the transition to this eye-catching layout option effortless.
1.6 New Employee Center (and Pro) Designs and Information Architecture (IA)
With our continued efforts to provide organizations with a research-backed starting point for their Employee Center implementations, we have taken a fresh look at our out-of-the-box home page designs and Information Architecture (IA) on the mega menu. These designs leverage all the above-stated enhancements and are based on additional portal capabilities we have introduced since Employee Center’s first launch.
See below for understanding the updates made on Employee Center and Employee Center Pro out-of-the-box experience:
1) Updated Employee Center Home page: We focused on the Employee Center home page re-design to better position it as an enterprise service delivery portal. Below are the key changes made:
a) Updated Taxonomy Topics Names for Employee Center’s IA – Based on learning and deployment experiences of customers and partners, we have made some elemental changes with respect to nomenclature of root topics. For example, we renamed IT to Technology Services, HR to Human Resources, and so on. This is specifically done to better position the taxonomy for an enterprise service delivery portal and avoid the connotation of a departmental-based taxonomy structure instead of employee-based. We have also placed the Get Support widget on the mega menu to make it easy to get help from anywhere on the portal.
b) Reordered widgets to bring Quick-links upfront - The next improvement involves the visual hierarchy of widgets. We have reordered the widgets to make Quick Links widget appear above the fold, making it visible without any scrolling. This change will help ensure the key resources identified by the admins are easily visible for employees and makes the portal more visually appealing.
c) Made the right-hand column focused on personalized, actionable content – We focused the right-hand column on widgets and items that are focused on personal content, making it more actionable for users. This includes the updated ‘My Active Items’ widget and the new ‘My Favorites’ widget.
2) Updated Employee Center Pro home page – Since our first launch, we have continuously added additional capabilities that help create an Employee Destination Site or Intranet experience on Employee Center Pro. Thus, we focused the Employee Center Pro homepage redesign to better position it for the same. Below are the key changes made (note that the changes made in the Employee Center home page also applies to Employee Center Pro):
a) New Information Architecture on Mega Menu: We have updated the Information Architecture on Employee Center Pro to make it better positioned for employee destination site. First, we’ve introduced a new top-level menu item called ‘Help Center’ which consolidates all service delivery-oriented Taxonomy Topics into a single menu item - including Technology Services, Workplace Services, Human Resources, and more, with updated nomenclature. Second, we have added a new ‘Your Team’ menu item that provides direct access to Manager Hub pages such as Team Insights. Third, we have introduced ‘Company’ as a new menu item where organization-level details like Org Chart and Location Directory are placed. Lastly, we have added 'Your Career' menu item, creating a space for Employee Growth and Development related pages such as Trainings and Learnings appear. All these menu items have been added in addition to a dedicated 'News Center' menu item to streamline access to the news experience launched in August 2023.
b) Placed additional Employee Communications widgets on the homepage: We've introduced new Content Experiences widgets on the homepage to create room for accommodating different types of communications, making the homepage more versatile and user-friendly. This includes featured news widget on the home page, a secondary styled content widget in the center, and a personal communications (such as birthdays) on the right column to align with the purpose of it.
c) The new tile layout of Content Experiences widget is pre-enabled in the Employee Center Pro new design.
How to get access? - The Employee Center homepage enhancement is available by upgrading to Employee Center (version 31.0.3), and the Employee Center Pro homepage enhancements is only available with Employee Center Pro license by upgrading to Employee Center Pro (version 29.0.4). For existing customers, new page layouts will be shipped as inactive to avoid clashing with existing updates and for new customers, the page layouts will be active by default. The new Employee Center homepage (ec_home) can be added as a default homepage to the Employee Center portal or the new Employee Center Pro homepage (ec_pro_home) can be added as a default homepage to the Employee Center Pro homepage. Refer to ‘Enhanced Homepage’ product documents for additional details.
2. Employee Profile Enhancements
In our upcoming November release, we're bringing multiple enhancements to the Employee Profile experience on Employee Center. See details below:
1. Configurable Employee Profile Header: Firstly, we're enabling admins to configure the Employee Profile header to display specific fields that will help employees quickly identify other employees. This is particularly helpful for cases where multiple employees may have common first and last name, thus providing unique identifiers like preferred names can help in the recognition of colleagues.
Additionally, for employees that are using Microsoft teams, and if they've installed all the Microsoft teams core Plugins, they also can choose whether they want to show their Microsoft Teams availability status or not.
Refer to ‘Configure Employee Profile Header’ product documentation for additional details.
2. Widget overview section for easy navigation: Admins can enable a widget overview section that will let users quickly scroll to other content in the tab. Additionally, users can navigate to a tab and focus on a specific widget by specific URL links highlighted in the overview section. This eliminates the need to scroll through the entire page, offering more efficient and targeted access to profile information.
Refer to ‘Employee Profile Overview widget’ product documentation for additional details.
3. For added flexibility and customization, we're enabling the creation of multiple instances of the Profile Overview widget, such as the About me widget. Admins can place different instances of this widget across one or multiple tabs on the employee profile to add additional user-related information like work details, making the Employee Profile even more comprehensive and user-centric.
4. In addition, for HR Customers, we've expanded the ability to build ML models based on the Employee Profile. These ML models are used for use cases related to similar users like recommended for you.
Refer to ‘Employee Profile AI and ML model’ product documentation for additional details.
These enhancements collectively enrich the Employee Profile experience, providing a smoother and more personalized user journey while offering Admins greater control and customization options.
How to get access? – In addition to the Employee Center (version 31.0.3) plugin, an upgrade to the Employee Profile (version 9.0.1) plugin will provide access to the Employee Profile enhancements. New customers need to opt-in to the employee profile functionality.
3. Employee News Enhancements (requires Employee Center Pro)
In our August 2023 release this year, we launched the much awaited Employee News capability on Employee Center Pro. With this release, we have added Categories for News and made many front-end layout and design enhancements. See details on them below:
3.1 Categories for Employee News
This release, we have added News Categories that allows employees to browse News articles based on a specific category, as defined by the author. Employees can filter and navigate to dedicated News Category pages to review all the associated news articles, providing a more streamlined and user-centric experience.
Behind the scenes, content authors can now easily set up categories for tagging news articles, creating a more organized and structured content management process. They can also assign the Content Templates at a category level to assign a pre-defined publishing plan for all New articles within the category. Additionally, content authors have the flexibility to tag articles with one or more categories, offering a more versatile approach to content classification.
Refer to Content Categories product documentation for additional details.
3.2 Tile Layout for Featured News widget
Similar to the updates made with Content Experiences Widget (as explained earlier in this blog), we have introduced a new stylish tile layout for the featured news widget to draw attention to the most important updates.
Admins now have the flexibility to switch to this engaging tile layout for Featured news using the widget instance option. The transition follows standard ordering rules, considering factors like order fields and publish dates to ensure the most recent and pertinent content takes center stage.
Furthermore, the widget infrastructure has been meticulously maintained natively, with attention to details like overflow controls, accessibility, and text contrast handling. This ensures that the new tile format not only looks stunning but also provides a seamless and user-friendly experience.
To add a touch of interactivity, we've introduced new mouseover animations that highlight the tile when the cursor is placed over it. This feature not only enhances the visual appeal but also provides an engaging and intuitive browsing experience for your users.
3.3 News Feed Grid layout & Pagination
We're taking the Employee News Feed experience to a new level with new layout options and pagination enhancements. With these enhancements, we're making your News experience not only more visually appealing but also more user-friendly and customizable, catering to the diverse needs of your users.
Employees can now enjoy a more dynamic browsing experience by toggling between two distinct layout options – the classic list view and the fresh, visually appealing tiled-grid view. This feature offers users the flexibility to select the layout that suits their preferences, creating a more engaging and user-centric News Feed. Portal admins can configure News Feed widgets to default to the preferred layout option using widget instance options. This way, admins can ensure the portal's News Feed aligns with the organization's visual identity and user preferences right from the start.
Additionally, we have made significant improvements to the pagination shown on the News Center. Users can now see numbered pagination at the bottom, making it easier to navigate through news articles. This is an alternative to the traditional dotted pagination, providing more options for customizing the user experience.
With these enhancements, we're making your News experience not only more visually appealing but also more user-friendly and customizable, catering to the diverse needs of your users.
3.4 Ability to ‘favorite’ news articles
Lastly, employees can now favorite News articles and access them directly from the new My Favorites widget and the My Favorites page. This leverages our current favorites capability allowing employees to favorite an article and access it across channels.
How to get access to Employee News Enhancements? - The employee communication enhancements are available with Employee Center Pro license by upgrading to Employee Center Pro (version 29.0.4) and Content Publishing (version 30.0.6). Refer to ‘Content Publishing’ product documentation for additional details.
4. Now Mobile enhancements
We are focused on continuously evolving the mobile experience within the Now Mobile app to align it with all the new capabilities being added for the portal experience. In this release, we have done the same.
4.1 Employee News in Now Mobile (requires Employee Center Pro)
Many employees rely on mobile devices for accessing content, especially News. Our goal is to provide a seamless mobile experience, consistent with that of the portal, without the need for additional content creation/publishing efforts by the content authors.
With this release we’ve ensured that any news targeted for mobile and featured news in the Employee Center Pro will appear in this dedicated mobile section. Moreover, we've introduced the News Center as a navigation tab on Now Mobile for Employee Center Pro customers. This feature empowers employees to explore News categories conveniently and access news items related to specific categories with a single click, all within their mobile application.
In Now Mobile, employees can now view related news for a specific topic and search for News articles via AI search, offering a holistic and streamlined browsing experience. Additionally, employees can now favorite news articles, and these favorited news items are easily accessible in both Now Mobile and Employee Center Pro.
In our latest release, we've put the power of unified content authoring and accessibility at the forefront, making it easier for communication managers and content authors to create and share news articles across multiple channels, including portals and the Now Mobile app. We've also expanded the reach of Employee News by including Mobile as a destination channel within Content Templates, enabling author-once, publish-to-both-desktop-and-mobile functionality. This release provides support for desktop-only or mobile-only use cases, ensuring that native features like translations, governance, and audience targeting remain consistent without any impact on the content admins.
Lastly, as an update to the Information Architecture on Now Mobile, we've updated the Support section to Help Center, benefiting both Employee Center and Employee Center Pro customers.
How to get access? - The employee news for Now Mobile enhancements is available with Employee Center Pro license by upgrading to Employee Center Pro (version 29.0.4) and Content Publishing (version 30.0.6). Refer to ‘News in the Now Mobile’ product documentation for additional details.
4.2 Approvals Hub integration with Workday for Now Mobile (requires Employee Center Pro)
In our August 2023 release, we launched the pre-built Approvals Hub integration with Workday for the portal experience on Employee Center Pro. With this release, we have extended it to make approvals housed in Workday surface up on the Now Mobile app as well, offering employees unified access to their approval tasks across these channels.
Employees can now easily approve or reject various Workday task types directly from the Now Mobile application on their phone, including time-off requests, leave of absence, timesheet approvals, compensation changes, job requisitions, corrections to time off, terminations, spend authorizations, and job change requests. With this enhancement, we're ensuring a smoother and more unified mobile experience for your workforce.
How to get access? - The Approvals Hub integration with Workday for Now Mobile is available with HRSD Pro/Ent license which includes Employee Center Pro. Please note that this feature will NOT be available for EC Pro standalone.
The integration can be accessed by upgrading to Approvals Hub integration with Workday application (version 1.0.2). Refer to ‘Workday approvals in Now Mobile’ product documentation for additional details.
4.3 Now Mobile Approvals enhancements
Approvals is one of the top use cases for Now Mobile. While some core approvals like REQ, RITM, and HR were available out of the box, many other approvals tied to the Sys Approval Approver table previously were not accessible out-of-the-box with the Now Mobile app. With this release, all ServiceNow approvals now appear on the mobile app, making it seamless for employees to complete these tasks while on the go or using their mobile devices. Whether it's approving or rejecting, employees can easily manage their approvals directly through our mobile app.
Moreover, additional details beyond the standard ones from the sys_approval approvals will also be displayed, providing a more comprehensive view of the approval process.
This enhancement not only fills a significant functionality gap but also offers Admins the flexibility to customize the fields and details shown for specific approval types, thanks to the existing mobile app builder and card builder. With this improvement, we aim to make the approval process more accessible and user-friendly for employees using the mobile experience.
How to get access? - The Now Mobile Approvals enhancement is available by upgrading to Tasks for Mobile application (version 27.0.1). Refer to ‘Approvals in Now Mobile’ product documentation for additional details.
For a comprehensive look at all the exciting updates and what lies ahead, we encourage you to join us in our upcoming 'What's New in the Vancouver release: Employee Center' webinar and Employee Center Confidential Roadmap Webinars. Stay tuned for the latest advancements and insights that will help you make the most of our enhanced features and capabilities.
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