[Platform Academy] What's new in Zurich: Service Catalog

[tosinbells_sn]

What's new in Zurich: Service Catalog

In this Platform Academy session, we explore the standout new features for Service Catalog in the Zurich release:

1. Catalog Item Pre-fill: Personalized Forms Out-of-the-Box

This feature eliminates the need for end-users to repeatedly enter the same information by automatically populating service catalog forms with known data.

• How it Works: admins leverage known user information (e.g., department, location, manager) or data from previous selections to populate fields on the catalog item form. This significantly reduces errors and streamlines the request experience.

• Default Values vs. Prefill: It's essential to distinguish between Catalog Item Pre-fill and a standard default value. A default value is static (configured once and doesn't change from user to user). With Catalog Item Pre-fill, a field is pre-populated with data that's relevant to that specific user.

• Implementation: Admins and developers can implement this feature simply by appending key-value pairs to the catalog item URL in these short steps:

  
  
  

  This simple, no-code syntax makes catalog item pre-fill powerful for building custom service catalog forms.

2. Now Assist for Catalog Generation: Catalog Builder Super-Charged

In Zurich, Catalog Builder (and consequently, Now Assist for Catalog Generation) now supports more complex variable types and functionality, allowing developers and non-developer users to create richer, more powerful catalog item forms.

New functionality includes support for UI Policies, Client Scripts, and Masked Input variable types. With Now Assist, admins can use plain descriptive text to generate catalog items with configured UI Policies, for example.

3. Conversational Catalog and LLM Flexibility

Two other notable platform-wide updates also benefit the Service Catalog experience:

• Bring Your Own LLM (BYO-LLM): The Zurich release allows organizations to configure a different Large Language Model to power Now Assist for Catalog Generation skill via the admin console. This provides greater flexibility in model choice.

• Conversational Catalog Improvements: The Virtual Agent experience is enhanced with a deeper integration with Knowledge Graph and improved slot-filling efficiency. Critically, a new Graceful Handoff feature was introduced: if a catalog item is determined to be too long or complex for a conversational flow, Virtual Agent can now gracefully hand the user off to complete the request in a full-page form experience.

These updates collectively ensure that Service Catalog is not just easier to build but also more personalized, efficient, and secure for every user across the platform.

Watch the recap here:

[Daniel Oderbolz]

This is a feature that many customer have implemented previously - in fact most implementations I know do not use a JSON Object but simply use variable_name= in the URL.

It's certainly good that this is now available from baseline!

Here are some questions I have:

• How can we prevent a certain variable to be filled automatically? I know implementations where hidden variables exist that you do not want to expose being prefilled by the user/attacker. 
  One way would be some kind of flag on variable level (which might be a challenge for variable sets).
  Or more generally speaking: is there an extension point so that the customer can overwrite how the prefill is performed?
• Is there a plan to provide code to create a URL for pre filling, e.g. based on a given RITM? 
  That would be very useful in a mail script.
• Is it possible to fill a MRVS via URL? If yes, how does the Syntax look like? (Updated: the documentation mentions that MRVS are not supported. Are there plans to implement this? (I guess that was the main reason why JSON was chosen?)
  
  Thanks a lot & Best
  Daniel
  
  
  

[tosinbells_sn]

Great questions, @Daniel Oderbolz!

1.  You can prevent a specific variable from being pre-filled using the "Disable initial slot fill" checkbox under the catalog item variable field settings. It's also possible to disable catalog pre-fill entirely at a global level through the "glide.sc.enable_url_prefill" system property (it's turned on by default). 

2. Interesting idea. Can you describe what a use-case scenario would look like? (please look out for my direct message).

3. Yes, MRVS is not supported for now. If that changes I'll make an update.