This blog is a deep dive into the new features for the Nov 3, 2022, release of the WSD Store Apps. For a summarized list of enhancements and features, please see: 'What's New in November Quarterly Store Release for Workplace Service Delivery?'.
Please note that this is not an exhaustive list. For full details, refer to the Product documentation and release notes on the ServiceNow store.
New features:
- Space Management
- Workplace Central Workspace
- Scenario Planning and Space Optimization
- Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) Space Classifications
- Health and Safety Incident Management
- Health and Safety Incident & Observation logging
- Health and Safety Workspace
- Injury and Illness logging
- Health and Safety Incident & Investigation Workbench
Enhanced features:
- Indoor Mapping
- Enhanced floorplan importing and configuration
- AutoCAD configuration suggestions/templates when importing multiple floor plans
- Ability to copy direction graphs from one floor to another
- Ability to parse more complex CAD files
- Mapping admin experience
- Display direction information to detect errors
- Preview maps before publishing them to WSD
- Key Board shortcuts to facilitate map configuration
- Enhancements to the view editor
- Enhanced floorplan importing and configuration
- Reservation Management
- Ability to make a reservation for spaces from different buildings
- Auto-resolve conflicts in recurring reservations
- Ability to find an alternative space/time in case of a conflicted recurring reservation
Space Management
Workplace Central
Persona: Space Planners with the sn_wsd_central.workspace_user or sn_wsd_spcmgmt.space_planner roles.
Plugins: Workplace Central (sn_wsd_central), Workplace Space Management (sn_wsd_spcmgmt)
Pre-requisite: Workplace Indoor Mapping (sn_wsd_indoor_map) with configured maps
Workplace Central is the new workspace that provides Space Planners with a central spot to view and manage space allocations, and conduct space optimization and scenario planning from a visual interface. This feature requires the Workplace Space Management and Workplace Indoor Mapping plugins to be installed. Configuration of Floor plans using Indoor Mapping is a pre-requisite for Space Management.
Scenario Planning and Space Optimization
Space Planners can create one or multiple scenarios to manage and allocate spaces within a building. A Scenario is a copy of a building with its floors and space and user assignments, which allow space managers to view unallocated spaces and modify the allocations without impacting the published building in production. Scenarios allow space planners to view and modify the allocations in a stack view, for all floors in the building together, or a floor view, to narrow in on a specific floor. Once a Scenario is deemed optimal by the space planner, they can publish them for other Space planners to review, and Deploy them to generate Move cases for employees who have been re-assigned spaces.
New Scenario form:
Active Scenarios:
Stack Plans
Within Workplace Central, Space planners can visualize how spaces are allocated within each floor of a specified building based on their assigned Cost Centers or Departments. They can also build scenarios from a stack view, or a building to better optimize and assign spaces.
Stack Plan View:
Floor Map view
Space Planners can also leverage the interactive floor map view within a floor to easily identify unassigned and flexible spaces. They can also assign users directly, change a space's assignment type and view details of each space by directly selecting the space on the floor.
Additionally, in the Scenario mode, space planners can also make department or cost center allocation changes for one or more spaces directly from the floor map view.
Floor Map View (scenario mode):
Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) Space Classifications
BOMA provides an industry standard way to classify and measure spaces. Space Planners can now map BOMA classifications to WSD Space types.
A new table called BOMA Types (sn_wsd_core_boma_type) is now available to store BOMA Classifications which can be mapped to WSD space types, via a new "BOMA type" (boma_type) field on the WSD Space table. This field is also visible on a Space record form.
BOMA Types Table:
WSD Space Types mapped to BOMA Types:
WSD Space Record (Space Management View):
Space Planners can also populate space measurements based on BOMA types within the Space table.
For more information regarding Space Planning, please refer to the docs site here.
Health and Safety Incident Management
Health and Safety Incident & Observation logging
Persona: Employees with sn_ohs_im.requestor (health and safety requester) role.
Plugins required: Health and Safety Incident Management (sn_ohs_im)
Note: This release introduces the new ServiceNow®Health and Safety package in a controlled Go-to-Market capacity. Please contact your account team or sales rep if you are interested to learn more about this package.
Employees can report a Health and Safety Incident or Observation via the Employee Center on both desktop and mobile via Record Producers and Virtual Agent.
Employee Center Health and Safety Category:
Report Health and Safety Incident Record Producer:
Report Health and Safety Observation Record Producer:
Health and Safety Workspace
Persona: Users with the sn_ohs_im.agent (safety agent) and sn_ohs_im.manager (safety manager) roles.
New Health and Safety Workspace allows safety agents and managers to view active incidents, observations, actions, and investigations, along with key metrics and to-dos from a new Health and Safety Workspace.
Health and Safety Workspace:
Injury and Illness logging
Persona: Users with the sn_ohs_im.agent (safety agent) and sn_ohs_im.manager (safety manager) roles.
Safety agents are able to create an Injury and Illness Report from a reported Incident to indicate additional details such as the location and severity of the bodily injuries, the time of the event, and the objects causing the injuries.
Injury and Illness Report:
Health and Safety Incident & Investigation Workbench
Persona: Users with the sn_ohs_im.agent (safety agent) and sn_ohs_im.manager (safety manager) roles.
Thorough Investigations can be completed for Health and Safety Incidents and can include Findings, Sequence of Events, Actions, People involved, and conduct a Root Cause Analysis from a single location.
Investigations Workbench:
Indoor Mapping
Enhanced floorplan importing and configuration
AutoCAD configuration suggestions/templates when importing multiple floor plans
(Persona: Map Admin)
Once a CAD file has been loaded into the Map Studio and configuration around layers, layer types, and points of interest is made, the system will automatically apply the same configurations to subsequent floors that are imported.
This feature will be helpful to speed up configurations of buildings with multiple floors where all the CAD files have similar layers: If the CAD layers within the subsequent files have the same names as the layers within the initial file, then layers, layer types, and points of interest will be autocompleted with the same values as the initial imported file.
Note: This feature makes suggestions based on the last CAD file added to the instance (irrespective of the campus they were in).
Ability to copy direction graphs from one floor to another
(Persona: Map Admin)
Admins can now copy directions from one floor to another - all segments and connectors will be copied over. This feature will speed up mapping directions where several floors have the same layout, and hence we can reuse directions defined for a previous floor.
Note: If a building has identical floor layouts across floors (say floor 1, 2, 3) and we want to replicate directions from one floor to another, admins should copy directions from floor 1 to floor 2 and then continue by copying floor 2 to floor 3. This will ensure all connectors are linked between all floors.
Navigation: Map Studio > Manage Directions
Ability to parse more complex CAD files
(Persona: Map Admin)
There are improvements made to parsing capabilities for CAD files. This will allow the ingestion of more complex floorplans that contain additional levels of detail within each layer. It is still strongly recommended to continue to simplify floor plans and remove details that are not required.
Mapping admin experience
Display direction information to detect errors
(Persona: Map Admin)
Indoor Mapping admins can now visualize how all directions segments are linked to spaces and connectors to be able to adjust if needed without having to test directions individually in the location directory.
Green lines will be displayed on your map to indicate the entrance and connectors link. This will ensure all connectors are linked between all floors. Admins can make edits to redirect the user to the exact entrance of a room rather than have the direction graph select the shortest route and have the user directed through a wall.
Navigation: Map Studio > Manage Directions
Preview maps before publishing them to WSD
(Persona: Map Admin)
Mapping admins can preview the map before pushing the data to WSD: they can search for specific points of interest and test the wayfinding feature to make sure the map is working as expected before adding it to the WSD configuration. This will save time and ensure the map admin can view Indoor maps from an end-user perspective.
Navigation: Map Studio > Preview (the button should appear next to the view editor on the campus’ main page)
Key Board shortcuts to facilitate map configuration
(Persona: Map Admin)
Mapping admins can now use the below keyboard shortcuts to speed up the process of loading and configuring an Indoor map.
Note: Use the Control key, instead of Command, for Windows machines.
- Command + H: Show/Hide keyboard shortcuts
Directions:
- Command + M: Toggle draw mode
- Command + S: Save everything
- Escape: Stop drawing
- Backspace: Delete selected elements
Points of interest:
- Command + I: Create a Point
- Command + P: Create a Polygon
- Command + S: Save everything
- Command + E: Edit Place
- Escape: Cancel the creation of a place
- Backspace: Remove the place
Enhancements to the view editor
(Persona: Map Admin)
Indoor Mapping admins can now add or remove content related to Buildings, Layers, Place Types, Connectors, and Direction Modes by clicking on it directly from a View editor, instead of having to navigate through each category sequentially.
Navigation: Map Studio > View Editor
Reservation Management
Ability to make a reservation for spaces from different buildings
Employees can now create a reservation by selecting spaces from multiple buildings. While making or viewing the reservation, the applicable timezone and local timezone will be displayed based on the buildings selected.
This feature will be useful when you want to have a meeting where your colleagues are joining from different locations with different time zones. Previously, the organizer would have to carry out time zone conversions and make a separate reservation for each building. Now, they can do it in one go and have some of their colleagues may join from, say, California while others may join from Amsterdam at the same moment and have spaces reserved for them in their respective buildings.
Configuration:
At the reservable module level, ‘Allow multiple building reservations’ needs to be checked.
Please note that if you are upgrading from a previous version and you have updated the form layout before, you may need to edit the form view again to make this new field visible.
User experience:
For the module defined previously, the user now sees an option to ‘Add another building’.
Clicking on this option allows users to select multiple buildings within the module before they click search to query spaces.
Note: Users can select other buildings even after they click Search - they will have to click 'Edit Search' again.
The first building you select is considered the primary building and the other buildings that you add after are secondary buildings.
WSD uses the date and time from the primary building to convert to the applicable time zones for the secondary building. This means that the start time and the end time that the user inputs must be in the time zone of the primary building.
Users can use the highlighted tabbed view to switch between the building card views and select available spaces. By default, the search results first show the primary building with spaces available in that building.
You must select at least one space from the primary building. The 'next' button will not be enabled until then.
If a selection is not made from a secondary building, the user is presented with a warning message.
The reservation details page experience is as below for multi-building reservations.
Please note that if any of the spaces selected need approval, the approval flow is honored as usual. The overall status remains ‘Awaiting Approval’.
Additional product documentation can be found here.
Auto-resolve conflicts in recurring reservations
While making a recurring reservation, only the availability of the first occurrence is checked, it is possible that a future occurrence of the meeting may run into conflicts. While scheduling a recurring reservation, the system will now automatically try to resolve any conflicts.
Previously, end users were required to manually resolve these conflicts in WSD - they were notified of these conflicts through OOB (Out of the Box) notifications.
Starting this release, admins can choose to auto-resolve such conflicts at a reservable module level. The system tries to find an alternative space automatically for Conflicted occurrences based on the logic below:
- If a floor map is available, the Workplace Reservation Management application finds a space closest to the same capacity, then looks for one with more capacity, and lastly, for one with less capacity.
- If no floor map is available, the application finds an alternative space in the same area or on the same floor.
- The favorite spaces are prioritized over 'location' (within the same area or within proximity).
- The application searches for a space of the same type.
- The application searches for space with similar standard services.
The employee is notified when the application assigns an alternative space.
Configuration:
At the reservable module level, ‘Auto-resolve recurring conflicts’ needs to be checked.
Please note that if you are upgrading from a previous version and you have updated the form layout before, you may need to edit the form view again to make this new field visible.
User experience:
Say, Abraham Lincoln has a reservation on Tuesday 11/22 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM in room A1-02-01.
Abel Tutor now tries to make a recurring reservation for the week of 11/21 to 11/25 from 9 AM to 3 PM for the same space.
After submitting the reservation, notice that Abel is now assigned a different space for Tuesday since it was already booked by Abraham.
The new space is visible on his reservation summary page.
Abel is notified of this change through an email notification as well.
Additional product documents on this feature can be found here:
Reservation Portal
Configuring a Reservable Module
Ability to find an alternative space/time in case of a conflicted recurring reservation
In case the ability to auto-resolve reservations has not been enabled, the end user can see it in the Reservation Summary page and will be notified through email as well. Users can update the time and/or space for conflicting occurrences.
User experience:
In the example above, say the auto-resolve conflict property is set to false and Abel tried to make the same reservation.
Abel will be made aware of the conflict on the Reservation Summary page.
He will also be notified through email.
Abel can edit the space or time for his occurrence himself to resolve this conflict.
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