As part of my cohort I was asked to write a blog about the Paris release notes. I chose to write about Flow Designer and I picked this area because the updates to the Flow Designer enhance the capabilities of the now platform. As someone who is brand new to learning about ServiceNow, several of the new features and changes to the OOTB really stood out to me.
New in the Paris release:
- Send SMS action in Flow Designer. Send an SMS text message to specified users or groups as an action in a flow. This is going to be very useful going forward; the world is very busy and changing every day and this will expedite notifications for those involved in the flow.
- Duplicate and action or subflow. Duplicate an action or subflow within a flow. This new feature is going to help save time within what can be very lengthy flow creation, especially when you have nested sections or subsections.
- Create complex object templates. Save complex objects as templates for use as outputs in steps or actions. This is yet another feature that is time efficient and useful for testing.
- Create a flow with roles. Create flows and subflows that run with specific roles. Assigning roles enables you to create user-initiated flows that run with their own roles rather than the user's roles. As ServiceNow expands to many different customers, this feature is very indicative that Flow Designer is becoming center stage within the platform. This feature will be creating flexibility for many different users and groups as they create and test flows.
- New numbering for flow actions:In the Flow Designer interface, action numbers now start with 1 and then increment by 1 as you add more actions to your flow. Legacy action numbering incremented by 1 for each main section and then incremented by .1 for each nested subsection. The numbering order caught my interest because of the streamlining of scripting inside of workflows.The update to the numbering order has shifted; counting by 1's instead of having decimal increments. This update caught my eye because as flows can be quite lengthy, this new approach will help users and groups track actions/sub flows, and logic loops easily, without all of the decimals.
2. Identify missing actions in a flow: If adding flows with actions or ServiceNow®IntegrationHub spokes to an instance with those actions or spokes missing, the flow will successfully open and provide a warning for each missing action. Like many who are new to the ServiceNow platform, and those who are experienced, it is easy to miss a small step and throw the whole flow into disarray. This is a great update to the Flow Designer and will hopefully help prevent missteps to created and updated flows.
Although I am new to the ServiceNow Community and learning about ServiceNow, I feel these new changes and updates greatly enhance Flow Designer's capabilities. As ServiceNow continues its infinite and unique expansions within the industry, Flow Designer will continue to take center stage and this will only serve to empower such an innovative company.
Please share below your favorite features of Flow Designer and your opinions on the Paris release version!
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