This blog is a deep dive into the new features for the November 2, 2023 release of the Workplace Service Delivery (WSD) Store Apps.
Please note that this is a summary of the most notable items, not an exhaustive list. For full details, refer to the Product documentation and release notes on the ServiceNow Store.
New Features:
- Workplace Event Planner
- Workplace Entities
Enhancements:
- Reservation Management - Multi-day reservations
- Space Management - Neighborhood focused employee assignments
- Workplace Connectors – Near real time badging events framework
- Indoor Mapping - Capture floor size from CAD file
- Workplace Profile enhancements
- Next Experience Dashboards
Workplace Event Planner
Persona: Workplace Planner, Facility Manager, Space Planner
Roles:
- Workplace Planner (sn_wsd_rsv.reservation_planner): can view and edit reservations
- Workplace Viewer (sn_wsd_rsv.reservation_viewer): can view all reservations but cannot make edits
Plugins: Workplace Core, Workplace Reservation Management, Workplace Central
This feature enhances the Workplace Planner's visibility by offering an optimized schedule view of all reservations made for each location. This empowers the Planner to gain valuable insights into space utilization and enables them to easily make adjustments to any reservation.
The feature can be accessed through Workplace Central > Event Planner
The Planner will get a dashboard view of all reservations/events with a list view of all active reservations as well key metrics on events happening today such as:
- The number of planned reservations for the day
- The number of reservations which have extra services associated for the day
- The number of cancelled reservations
- The number of reservations that are still in the pending approval state
The view can be changed from a list view to a schedule view by selecting Open Schedule View to enable the Planner to have more visibility. This schedule view will display the building’s time zone to reflect in real-time the planned reservation times and dates.
The Planner can choose to change the schedule view to any of the following options to view the information over different periods of time:
- Day view 30 minutes
- Day view 1 hour
- Week view which will help support the needs of planning events that span over multiple days or for when reservations need to be moved to a different day
To begin viewing the reservation information, the Planner needs to select, at a minimum, a campus. From there all buildings and floors within that campus will be automatically selected. To limit the view, a single building or single floor can be selected.
Viewing reservations can be refined at a space level by searching for spaces based on their reservable purpose or by searching by space name.
All reservations will then be displayed in the schedule. Clicking on a reservation will show the reservation details such as:
- Reservation owner
- Start and End date and time
- Total duration of the reservation
- Reservation subtype
- Reservation status
From here, the Event Planner has the option to open the reservation and make certain edits. Simple edits to the time of the reservation can be made using the drag-and-drop capability in the schedule view if the reservation is not passed or is in a read-only state. Reservations that are "In progress" or created in a calendar provider will be indicated as "read only" and cannot be edited in the schedule view.
The Workplace Planner can also make edits to a reservation by opening the reservation record and adding services if required.
The colour coding of the reservations enables the Event Planner to view the status of each event at a glance. To better understand the event colouring, the legend can be viewed by selecting the question mark on the right. If needed, the System Administrator has the possibility to change the colour for each state through the System Properties.
Workplace Entities:
Persona: Space Planner, Facility Manager
Role: sn_wsd_core.admin, sn_wsd_spcmgmt.manager
Plugins: Workplace Core
Workplace Entities allow customers to define and utilize unique hierarchical business structures (which often vary from organization to organization) for use across Workplace Service Delivery in the following ways:
- Space allocations to these entities through map-based space administration
- Tracking of space consumption per entity
To get started, the Space Planner defines the Entity Types which act as the main structure for the custom business hierarchy. By default, the system supports up to 15 different types/levels, however this can be extended if needed.
Example of a customer business hierarchy using the 6 Entity Types defined above.
Once the Entity Types have been defined, the Space Planner lists all Workplace Entities. For each new Workplace Entity, the parent and Entity Type need to be defined. The hierarchy is then built using the self-referencing parent column and the defined Entity type.
Once the full hierarchy is configured, Space Planners will be able to allocate all spaces, areas, and floors to these entities (of any level).
Map-based space administration will then help Space Planners visualize how spaces are being allocated. Space Planners can make an edit by selecting a specific space, or can make a bulk edit by selecting multiple spaces.
To view and edit the Workplace Entity allocations, Space Planners can use the gear icon within the building view to define the view of the stack plan and floor plan which is by default set to open on the department allocation view.
Space Planner can use the stack plan to visualize the Workplace Entity allocations by floor at a glance, and have the option to view allocations at different entity levels.
In the following example, the Entity type selected is the Business Units level, therefore only the allocations that are part of the defined Business Unit will be shown using colour coding to differentiate each BU.
Spaces that are allocated to higher Workplace Entity types will still be shown on the stack plan, however they will appear under Others.
The Space Planner can drill down on a specific Entity Type at the floor level by selecting it. From there the capacity, assignments and Workplace Entity details will be displayed in the sidebar. Within the Workplace Entity details, the small hierarchy icon will display the different levels of hierarchy within the level selected.
In the above example, the Space Planner can see more granular information on how spaces are allocated at different levels. The spaces that have been allocated to the Sales and Marketing BU are split into 2 different Cost Center Functions (5th level) that each have different Projects (6th level).
Note: The Scenario Planning feature does not support creating scenarios based on Workplace Entities.
The Workplace Admin has the option to map Workplace Entities to Workplace Profiles which will simplify the reservation experience for employees by automatically suggesting the allocated reservable spaces.
To track space consumption using Workplace Entities, the allocation system property (sn_wsd_core.ALLOCATION_TYPE) needs to be set by the Space Planner to enable this to be captured when reservations are made. Setting the system property to Workplace Entity will then enable the reservable module allocation configuration (seen below). This ensures a match between the allocation and the user assignment to surface the correct and available spaces during the reservation search.
This capability also needs to be configured by the Reservation Admin at the Reservable Module level, by checking the “Require allocation check” field. This ensures the users associated to the higher/same entity level can access all spaces allocated to that hierarchy branch.
Workplace Entity filters have also been added to the Space Optimization dashboard in Workplace Central. The filtering capability enables users to easily drill down to the defined Entity types.
Note: The ‘Cost Center and Department’ allocation type has been removed during this release. However, the space allocations can now be defined separately as ‘Cost Center’, ‘Department’, and ‘Workplace Entity’.
Reservation Management - Multi-day reservations
Persona: Employee, Reservation Admin
Role: sn_wsd_core.workplace_user, sn_wsd_rsv.admin
Plugins: Workplace Core, Workplace Reservation Management
This enhancement enables employees to easily create a reservation spanning multiple days.
To activate this feature, the Reservation Admin will need to define the ‘Max days for multi-day' at the reservable module level. This defines the time span that cannot be exceeded by users creating reservations spanning multiple days. If the value is set to 1, this is a single reservation, however, if the value entered is 2 or higher, it is a multi-day reservation.
Note: Enabling multi-day reservations will automatically disable the ‘Allow all day reservations’ field.
When making a reservation, employees will now be able to select start and end dates/ times that span across days.
If the Employee selects the end date to a day past the limitation defined, the following warning message will be shown, and the end date will revert to the start date selected.
The Employee can also select the schedule view to get a day view of the available spaces.
Once the start and end dates are entered, the employee can select the spaces that will be reserved for the entire duration.
The reservation details will prompt the employee to add:
- A reservation subject
- Define if the reservation is for them or made on behalf of a colleague
- Add internal coworkers and/or external visitors
- Add extra services that will all be delivered at the start date and time of the reservation
Once submitted, a reservation spanning the days selected will be shared with all attendees, who will then be prompted to accept the event and any defined visitor policies as applicable.
If a check-in is required for this reservation, the action will only be completed as early as the start date and time of the event.
Space Management - Neighborhood focused employee assignments
Persona: Space Planner, Facility Manager
Roles: sn_wsd_spcmgmt.admin, sn_wsd_spcmgmt.manager, sn_wsd_central.workspace_user
Plugins: Workplace Core, Workplace Space Management, Workplace Stack Plan
Space Planners can now make edits to employee neighborhood assignments from the stack plan view. Previous to November, neighborhood assignments could be viewed in Workplace Central at the building level from both the stack plan and floor map views and Space Planners could use map-based space administration to make edits.
The Space Planner can now select any neighborhood and edit the employee assignments either by adding users or removing users. Once saved, these assignment changes are updated instantly.
Workplace Connectors – Near real-time badging events framework
Persona: Facility Manager
Roles: sn_wsd_wc.manager / sn_wsd_wc.admin / sn_wsd_wc.user
Plugins: Workplace Core Workplace Central Workplace Connectors
Workplace Connectors was released in the Workplace Service Delivery Enterprise solution in August. This initial release included an agnostic framework enabling organizations to integrate with any badging system to capture and integrate attendance data. This has been enhanced to provide near real-time integration of badge data.
To view this data, the Facility Manager must configure how the badging data is collected and at which frequency the scheduled job should run to collect the badge data. To do so, the following steps are required:
- Provider Configuration
The Facility Manager needs to create a Provider Configuration, which is a record for each badging provider data should be collected from. For each record, the source types should be set to webhook, and a token name and token value should be defined to access the API and generate a callback URL.
- REST API Explorer
In the Rest API Explorer, the namespace: sn_wsd_wc Workplace Connector Webhook should be selected, and the following information should be added:
- The token information: name and value configured while creating the provider record
- The sys_id which is found in the callback URL which gets generated in the provider record
- Scheduled Script Execution:
The Facility Manager should define how often the job should run to collect the badge data. By default, the value is set to every minute.
Indoor Mapping - Capture floor size from CAD file
Persona: Workplace Manager, Map Editor
Roles: sn_wsd_core.workplace_manager, sn_wsd_core.workplace_manager,
Plugins: Workplace Core, Workplace Indoor Mapping, Indoor Mapping
A new capability to track the measurement of a floor’s area has been added to enhance an existing capability which captures space areas. The surface of each floor can now be retrieved from AutoCAD if the floor layer has a closed polyline representing the floor outline.
Note: if polylines are not closed the system will not be able to retrieve the information. Please refer to the following guidebook for instructions on how to ensure the file has closed polylines.
To configure the capability the following steps are required:
1- Activate the Indoor Mapping Property: using the left filter navigator search for Indoor Mapping properties. Change the value for ‘Set true to activate floor size computation’ to YES
2- Set up the Indoor Place Properties Mappings
The Workplace Admin must define the table and field which stores the floor measurements in WSD. The configuration is done in Properties Mappings which is accessed through Space Mapping > Indoor Mapping administration > Properties Mappings.
3- Define the layer for each floor which should be used from the CAD file to extract the data.
The Map Admin can use Map Studio to define which layer of the CAD file should be used to extract the floor area. The system will then extract the value of the largest closed polyline on that layer along with the unit defined in the file.
Once the 3 above steps are completed, a synchronization in Space Mapping > Indoor Mapping Administration > Indoor Map / WSD Synchronization must be executed to ensure the floor measurement field is populated.
Workplace Profile enhancements
Persona: Workplace Administrator, Workplace Manager
Roles: sn_wsd_core.admin or sn_wsd_core.workplace_manager
Plugins: Workplace Core
Workplace Profile enhancements have been delivered to enable permanent employee assignments to be captured in the Workplace Profile. By consolidating the information of location assignments into one related list, there is no longer a need to duplicate records for each employee.
The Space Management view now provides Workplace Managers with full visibility of all location assignments and enables them to set the primary location for the employee, which will be used if auto-populated fields are configured.
These assignments are used to define the reservation rights for a given employee as the system will check the location assignments.
Next Experience Dashboards
Persona: Various personas depending on the application dashboard
Plugins: Workplace Core, Workplace Central + the plugin related to each dashboard
The following dashboards have been migrated to the Next Experience UI in Workspace:
- Workplace Reservation Dashboard
- Synchronization Health Dashboard
- Visitor Reception Dashboard
- Workplace Case Dashboard
- Workplace Manager Dashboard
The dashboards can be accessed through Workplace Central > Workplace Analytics > Dashboards.
Note that there have been no capability or feature changes made to the dashboards, this is just an enhanced UI.
To explore further and access detailed technical documentation, we recommend using: https://docs.servicenow.com/
