The last of 3 Innovation lab applications I've been lucky enough to find time to take a look at recently, is the Event Organizer.
So what does it do? In summary, it allows event organizers to create and manage in person and virtual events, and engage with attendees. It allows attendees the ability to view events, register to attend, and access pre and post event content.
The same caveat applies. Innovation Lab offerings, as is made clear on the store are unsupported by ServiceNow, so they don't carry any warranties.
Installing the app was really straightforward. I simply requested it for my demo instance from the store, here.
Once that was done, from my instance, I looked for the event organizer application in the plugins list and installed it.
There is a very short pdf installation document linked on the store page for the app too. A 1 pager, which is worth reading. There are two or three steps that need to be considered & followed before you start to use the app.
I did have to re-login after the app installed to pick up the roles and see the event organizer entries in the menu.
The event dashboard link is available to all users. Here, I'm impersonating the ITIL User, who has been granted no special rights to access the application:
I can start creating events straight away.
There's a product overview PDF file on the store page for event organizer which walks though through the process of event creation, registration, etc. It goes into more detail about all the things that can be done. All I want to do right now though, is touch on some of the basics and see how easy it is to arrange a hackathon day. Something for my team of ServiceNow admins. So I'll end the impersonation and get cracking with that.
Event creation is really intuitive. A single form to fill in, basically. Here it is:
I want to invite a number of my developers to the event, a number of interested stakeholders and process owners from the business, and bring in two inspirational guest speakers. An internal senior executive, and an external expert.
No real surprises - the form is extremely easy to complete. Even adding a new external speaker, none other than Chuck Tomasi, is simple:
The additional tabs to complete somewhat depend on the type of event access. You can from public, or invite only. For invite only, you can specific whether you want a response - and if that response is just RSVP or registration. For my purposes, since it's an internal meeting and I'm bringing in speakers - I'm going to ask for RSVPs. I don't then see the registration section, but I do get to configure the attendees, emails and resources.
A note at this point, the event can be saved, and returned to later to complete, before we finally publish it.
Adding internal attendees is really easy. They can be imported, or you can select individual users, or members of groups. I'm going to invite members of my 3 dev and admin teams.
I'm also going to extend the invite to a few other people specifically.
The list automatically expanded to all the members of the groups I selected. Pretty cool.
Next, I'm going to set up the email messages. Sensible defaults are already in place for pretty much everything. I have control over enabling or disabling specific notifications, the invites, cancellations, reminders, etc. I can also change the content if I wish.
I'm going to add a small number of useful resources, perhaps for review by attendees ahead of the event itself.
And finally publish. That's it.
In a second post, I take a look at what this looks like from a recipients perspective, make some changes to the event and walk through the rest of the process
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