Mentions in Next Experience
The Utah release of ServiceNow brought formal Next Experience Provider Notifications, extending the Provider Notification support from Workspaces and Virtual Agent into the platform. This was delivered in part to enable support of the Follow action back into the platform and the notifications that came along with it. Follow utilises Live Feed behind the veil to support this behaviour.
Another piece of functionality leveraging Live Feed is @-mentions; this ships with an email notification to alert users of these mentions. I wanted to explore an alternate approach that encouraged remaining in-platform, which led to implementing a provider notification and content for this. I packaged this into a utility that you can find here: Mention Notifications in Next Experience
A provider notification generated by a mention
How it works?
The utility consists of four (4) elements:
- Event Registration:
mention.nextexp.notification - Flow:
Emit event on live notification - Provider Notification:
Mentioned in Next Experience - Notification Next Experience Content:
Record Mention
The provider notification in this case was triggered by an event; using record triggers only pointed to the live notification, hence a crafted event gave the desired level of control.
Notification Flow
Simple workflow diagram
Learnings
Some takeaways I had from this were:
- Event-triggered Provider Notifications do not support event parameter references
- The hierarchy-style notification content interface present on other notification types does not work when related to an event-triggered notification
- Actions do not appear to be supported in Next Experience as they are in Workspace/VA
- Properties of the record provided to an event can be accessed
Something I hope to see in future is better enablement and more functionality into these notifications, bringing actionable notifications into the platform as well.
Closing notes
I enjoyed throwing this solution together in 10 minutes. It is supported in both Utah and Vancouver, and is a feature I know I'll find valuable in real-life situations.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed/found value in this article. As always, I am open to feedback and can be reached via Slack, LinkedIn, or email.
This article and others can be found on my website: SapphireNow.dev
