ServiceNow Automation Engine enables you to connect your ServiceNow instances with other apps in your ecosystem. Using our low-code approach in flow designer, you can design your custom flows supporting bi-directional integrations.
But what if you can further reduce your development time by taking advantage of pre-built artifacts? And what if you can further reduce runtime issues by relying on artifacts already tested and used by other customers? We have a number of prebuilt artifacts, and continuously adding to our repository. We offer 3 such categories, all available from the ServiceNow store:
- Spokes
- Flow templates
- Solutions
Go to servicenow.store.com and select Integrations:
You will see a filter on the left for the 3 categories.
Let’s take a look at each of these categories.
Spokes
A spoke is a logical grouping of related actions, subflows, and supporting application files to enables communication with a specific application or system. For example, the Slack Spoke includes actions to post messages, incidents, problems, change details, and more, to a Slack channel.
There are currently 180+ spokes available. Select the spoke(s) you need and install it onto your instance. Then, you can develop your flows between ServiceNow and the external application using the spoke.
Need to integrate with a system for which a spoke doesn’t exist? If you guessed that we offer you the tools to build your own spoke, you are absolutely correct!
Now it’s time to move one level up the stack, and look at flow templates.
Flow Templates
Flow Templates guide flow developers to create flows for common use cases. Now, you are not only taking advantage of pre-built spokes but also pre-built flows (which in turn typically use 1 or more spokes). Now, we understand it is quite possible that the prebuilt flows will not meet 100% of your requirements. So we give you, our dear customer, the ability to tailor these flows as desired.
We are proud to announce our latest template category, Flow Templates for Service Desk. These provide pre-built flows for syncing incidents, problems and change requests between ServiceNow and Service Management systems including BMC Remedy and Jira. Need to sync additional data not provided by the included flows, or tweak the field mappings to take advantage of your custom fields? Not a problem. Using flow designer, you’ll have the ability to make these modifications to the provided flows.
Here are all the flow template categories we offer today:
Now it’s time to move one more level up the stack, and look at solutions.
Solutions
You can also take advantage of one of our end-to-end solutions, which are fully integrated with the ServiceNow platform. One such solution is Client Software Distribution, or CSD. With CSD, you can set up your ServiceNow users (say employees at a company) to request software installs on their devices. For example, say an employee needs to install Microsoft Teams on their laptop. The employee can go into their ServiceNow portal, and bring up the catalog. They simply look up the Microsoft Teams app in the catalog and add to their cart, much like we order products from Amazon and other online retailers. After placing the order, it will go through an approval process as defined by your company. Upon approval, the software is auto installed on the employee’s laptop. Voila!
We are also proud to announce our newest solution – Cloud Deployment Automation! Say an employee needs to install software on a cloud environment such as AWS. Cloud Deployment Automation provides that capability, in a similar fashion as CSD – via the catalog ordering process. Now, instead of installing software on your device, you install software on the cloud. We also provide solutions for:
- Access Management Automation
- Password Reset
- Consuming Kafka messages
- Retry handling
- Financial Service Operations
So give a try and let us know what you think!
But wait, there’s more…
Embedded in ServiceNow offerings
Besides all the goodies we have just described there are many other integrations embedded within our ServiceNow offerings – as part of IT workflows …. Customer workflows … employee workflows… and industry workflows. For example, as part of our employee workflows, we offer “HR Service Delivery Integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory”. This solution is baked into our HRSD product. ServiceNow customers using Azure AD for identity management can use this embedded capability for efficient on-boarding of new hires, ensuring that they are granted the roles and entitlements required for their job.
What’s next?
We continue to evolve our prebuilt artifacts in all these categories. Our primary source of input is you, our customer. We hear our customers telling us that they need all capabilities of our hyper-automation platform to solve their business needs: Integration Hub for API-level integrations; Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for UI-level integrations; and Document Intelligence for efficient processing of semi-structured documents. Expect to see prebuilt solutions spanning these technologies to provide even better business value. All while continuing to make it easier for you to discover, assemble and deploy these solutions.
Have a spoke, flow template or solution you would like to share with others? As part of the ServiceNow Technology Partner Program (TPP), our partners can submit artifacts to the store. Quite a number of partner-provided integrations are available today. You can be next!
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