Interesting facts about Vancouver:
- The city was originally named “Gastown.” It was incorporated as “Vancouver” in April 1886…and then totally burned to the ground two months later.
- Located on the Pacific coast and protected by mountains, the climate is mild and wet, with an average of 165 rainy days per year.
- Real estate is crazy expensive and is regularly ranked in the top 5 most expensive cities to buy property, higher than Los Angeles, London and New York.
- It is known as “Hollywood North” with most major studios filming both movies and series there.
- The city’s Stanley Park is 10% larger than Central Park in New York, and all of the grey squirrels found in the park are descendants of eight pairs of grey squirrels that Vancouver received as a gift from New York City in 1909.
Some highlights from the Vancouver release:
- New Generative AI functionality across the platform. Branded as “Now Assist,” you can see this in the new ability for agents to generate summaries and resolution notes in cases or easily create knowledge articles, developers generating code using natural language, or end users getting more directly actionable search responses. And we have a Generative AI Controller that easily connects your instance to OpenAI or Azure OpenAI. See the Gen AI apps in our store, and I’ll have a lot more to share in the coming weeks about our Gen AI innovations and roadmap.
- New security tools to help you discover sensitive data in your instance, limit access based on multiple factors like location or IP address, and easily view permissions for users, groups & roles.
- Guided Tours to help orient new users are now available for all Next Experience screens and workspaces.
- The Next Experience UI is turned on by default when upgrading. There’s an option to stick with the legacy UI16 interface, but my suggestion is to help your teams get used to the new UI, as it’s been shown to yield an average of 33% less time and 29% less clicks per task.
- You can now enable access to Employee Center within the Outlook fat client or web-based Microsoft 365 (in addition to Microsoft Teams), engaging your customers in the collaboration tool they use the most.
- Many improvements to the Service Operations Workspace, including more collaboration functionality like integrations with Twilio, Teams, Zoom, WebEx, and Notify for SMS; easier setup via "Admin Onboarding"; and Recommended Actions powered by ML/Task Intelligence.
With today’s release, customers are requested to upgrade to either Utah or Vancouver within 60 days (November 19, 2023). If you have a plan to upgrade after November, coordinate with Support and your account team (myself and Mike Ladd or Jack Lowell).
Key resources to help with your upgrades:
- >>>Update>>> Get the Upgrade Kit from our Customer Success Center, which is a great way to review Vancouver highlights, plus links to demos, upgrade advice and more.
- A Vancouver release keynote, available this Friday.
- The release notes on our Documentation site. Start with the highlights then deep dive into the release notes for the features and products you have deployed. If you’re upgrading from Tokyo, the release notes are combined here.
- The Community Forum for Releases and Upgrades is a great places to get help from peers and advice from ServiceNow gurus.
Thank you for reading to the bottom, check out this drone tour of Vancouver.
