After activating Next Experience, how do we "Follow" tasks?

[Ingrid de Cerqu]

We are planning on activating Next Experience after we upgrade to San Diego in the summer.

I have seen in the documentation that Connect is no longer supported when Next Experience is activated.

We currently only use Connect for "Following" tasks. Because Connect is gone, the "Follow" button is also gone.

What is the alternative, in Next Experience, for following a specific task?

[Maik Skoddow]

Hi @Ingrid de Cerqueira 

you can add yourself to the watcher list:

Kind regards
Maik

[Ingrid de Cerqu]

Hi Maik,

Yes, but that will only send me e-mail notifications.

I normally unsubscribe from notifications, as I only want to see messages when I am actually working on the platform. I know that many of my colleagues do the same.

Does that mean that e-mails is the only way of knowing when activities occur in tasks I am interested in? That is, if we go to Next Experience?

regards,

Ingrid.

[Brian Hatt]

Maik, this is not an equivalent alternative to following a record - that is different functionality.

We have also just upgraded to San Diego, and plan on enabling Polaris (Next Experience) soon.  I noticed the "Follow" button disappeared, and now see that it's due to the loss of Connect in San Diego.

We use the Follow functionality quite a bit.  The Watch list is an entirely different function than following changes made to a record and utilizing the real-time messaging functionality within the platform.

Is there a similar functionality to the Connect-based real time messaging capabilities handled by the "Follow" function?

Thank you,

Brian

[Paul Curwen]

Agree this is a major problem with Next Experience. We have teams who use Follow and the badge count extensively when managing tasks and monitoring updates. 

I'm trying to work out if Sidebar (introduced in Tokyo) is a viable alternative: https://docs.servicenow.com/en-US/bundle/tokyo-servicenow-platform/page/administer/conversational-in...