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Viewing and sharing your visual task boards and cards

Suzanne Smith — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 17:02:20 GMT

"We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade."

-Steven Pinker

Visual task boards are a great new application in the Eureka release. Visual task boards are a graphic-rich method of showing tasks on cards organized into groups or lanes. For example, here is a visual task board created by a Problem manager showing open problems on cards that are sorted into lanes named To Do, Doing, and Done.

A key element of using visual task boards is controlling who can see the boards and cards you create. Keep the following in mind:

To see a list of the visual task boards you own or have access to, navigate to Self-Service > My Task Boards.
Anyone who is a member of a board can see that board. Use the Labels & Members toolbar at the top of the board to manage members.

To add a user to the board, click the add member icon:

After clicking the add member icon, search for the name of the user to add:

To remove a user, click the x next to their avatar:
There is a difference between board members and task assignees. If you create a board from a list, users assigned to the tasks in the list appear on the board with a grey background and do not have access to the board. For example, in our Problem board above, David Loo is assigned to a problem, but he does not have access to the board. Click the plus sign next to his name, however, and you can promote David to a board member so he can see the entire board.

We have received some interesting questions in the Community about visual task boards since the application was made available in the Eureka release:

jsoriano asked about modifying cards to only show a couple of fields. Community members Dimitar Dimitrov and Jason Aloia helped out with suggestions.
David Wall and Pete Beesley had some issues with the visual task board Welcome screen appearing and not appearing at times. Several community members, including Jason Bremer offered answers.
Sherry Sullivan had a issue with activating visual task boards and Chris Tucker was there with advice.

ServiceNow offers more information about visual task boards in the product documentation:

Visual Task Boards

Using Visual Task Boards

Re: Viewing and sharing your visual task boards and cards

jaloia — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 17:29:51 GMT

Thanks for writing up this summary on Visual Task Boards, Suzanne! We're happy to see ServiceNow customers making use of Visual Task Boards in Eureka - and really excited about the improvements becoming available soon in our Fuji release.

We depend a great deal on input from the NOW Community to inform our roadmap. So I want to thank everyone who takes the time to share their questions, feedback and experiences here. It's greatly appreciated!

Re: Viewing and sharing your visual task boards and cards

mitzaka — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:44:30 GMT

Yes, good article, glad to see that continuous improvement is alive here:) Just a quick question - when is Fuji expected? Roughly.

Re: Viewing and sharing your visual task boards and cards

Suzanne Smith — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 16:35:56 GMT

Hi Dimitar,

Thank you very much for your feedback.

No publicized release date for Fuji yet. Watch the Community for updates on Fuji's availability!

Re: Viewing and sharing your visual task boards and cards

bridun — Tue, 12 May 2015 18:16:08 GMT

Could you confirm the behavior I'm seeing, we are on Fuji using flexible VTB, there is no way to set or rank or sort within a lane. For example I'm using the board to organize my teams work and i want them to just pull up the board and whatever is on top of the "to do" column is what they should grab next. It appears the sort of cards within a lane is arbitrary? Correct? I can move the cards up and down in a lane but it doesn't appear to stick. We can get around this this with tags probably but curious.

Re: Viewing and sharing your visual task boards and cards

jaloia — Tue, 12 May 2015 20:23:18 GMT

Hi Brian,

Vertical movements of cards on a Flexible board do not impact the Priority (or any other field) of the task records.

HOWEVER, vertical movements of cards made by any member of the Flexible board will persist for any other viewer of the board.

So the ordering of the To Do lane in your Flexible board is not arbitrary at all. You can use it to denote priority for everyone using that taskboard as the source of their backlog priority.

I hope I've answered your question. If you have any others; message me here.

Jason Aloia - VTB Product Manager

Re: Viewing and sharing your visual task boards and cards

jaloia — Tue, 12 May 2015 20:23:33 GMT

Hi Brian,

Vertical movements of cards on a Flexible board do not impact the Priority (or any other field) of the task records.

HOWEVER, vertical movements of cards made by any member of the Flexible board will persist for any other viewer of the board.

So the ordering of the To Do lane in your Flexible board is not arbitrary at all. You can use it to denote priority for everyone using that taskboard as the source of their backlog priority.

I hope I've answered your question. If you have any others; message me here.

Jason Aloia - VTB Product Manager

Re: Viewing and sharing your visual task boards and cards

bridun — Tue, 12 May 2015 20:57:16 GMT

Thanks Jason, that was how I would expect it to work. I appear to be hitting a bug then I'm moving cards around vertically but after a few seconds they will jump back to where they were. I opened a HI case to see what's going on and had a few other users test with different browsers on different boards. Specifically, if I have 15 cards in to do lane and move card 15 to position #1 it will move back to 15. But if i move card 2 or 3 (visible without having to scroll) to position #1 it does stick. So a bit of weird behavior.

Thanks

Re: Viewing and sharing your visual task boards and cards

jaloia — Tue, 12 May 2015 21:10:28 GMT

Hi Brian - what Version/patch are you running?

Re: Viewing and sharing your visual task boards and cards

bridun — Tue, 12 May 2015 21:13:22 GMT

We run glide-fuji-12-23-2014__patch2-hotfix1-03-24-2015

I tested in clean fuji patch 2 instance and can't reproduce. Based on the delay we see in our prod instance there likely is some business rule/acl that once it processes messes up the lane move, because it can take a few seconds for it to move back to the position it moved from.

Re: Viewing and sharing your visual task boards and cards

jaloia — Tue, 12 May 2015 21:26:09 GMT

That's odd. Business rules and ACLs shouldn't impact vertical lane movements.

You may want to submit an Incident. I'm at jason.aloia@servicenow.com and will be happy to help. If we find anything issues not specific to your instance I'd like to post findings here.

Re: Viewing and sharing your visual task boards and cards

bridun — Tue, 12 May 2015 21:34:58 GMT

I have isolated further I'm able to reproduce in our dev and test and the only boards where this happens if the board is against the task table. If I do a board for INC or STRY tables it works as expected...odd indeed. Incident has been submitted. Thanks for your responses.

Re: Viewing and sharing your visual task boards and cards

bridun — Tue, 12 May 2015 21:47:49 GMT

Yeah I have a clean developer instance and can reproduce now. For example do a board for "my groups work" (task table) (make sure it contains all different task types). Then if you move say an INC to the top of the list and over other task types it will move. Resorting vertically within a group of the same tasks in that lane works fine. It's like that order index on the lane is specific to task type so if you try to order within different task types it reverts.

Re: Viewing and sharing your visual task boards and cards

jaloia — Tue, 12 May 2015 22:24:28 GMT

Hey, thank you, Brian.

Our tests don't cover this particular case - but should.

I've opened PRB630821 to address this. I can't quote an ETR just yet - but this qualifies for an upcoming Fuji patch and will certainly be addressed in our upcoming Geneva release.

Re: Viewing and sharing your visual task boards and cards

quiksilver — Mon, 02 May 2016 07:42:47 GMT

Hi All,

We have just recently upgraded to Cloud and Eureka instance and is about to deploy VTB to our end users. I am currently building a training/documentation on how this would benefit end users. Can I ask everyone if they can share some real life experience with VTB? How are your users utilizing this feature? i.e. Which table VTB is mostly used against.

Thanks in advance for your inputs

Broderick