Collaborative Work Management release notes
Summarize
Summary of Collaborative Work Management release notes
The ServiceNow® Collaborative Work Management (CWM) application serves as a centralized platform for planning, visualizing, and collaborating on work across teams. The Australia release enhances CWM with new features that streamline task management, improve visibility into work progress, and foster better collaboration.
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Key Features
- Task Import with Now Assist: Import existing tasks and stories from spreadsheets, documents, or images into CWM Boards, reducing manual data entry. AI proposes column mappings for easy review and customization.
- Inline Comments and Email Notifications in Docs: Add inline comments with @mentions and hyperlinks directly within documents. Comment threads are tracked, and users receive email notifications for replies or mentions, improving communication without leaving the workspace.
- Team Member Roles for Project Work: Define read and read-write roles so team members can view, comment on, or update project and demand tasks directly in CWM, enhancing role-appropriate collaboration.
- Formula Columns in List Views: Use formula columns to create automatic calculations across tasks, such as summing hours or calculating dates. AI-assisted formula generation speeds up creation and validation of formulas.
- Kanban Board Filters: Apply quick filters on Kanban boards to find relevant work efficiently. Filters sync with saved views and templates to maintain user preferences.
- Scrum Tasks with AI Generation: Break down user stories into scrum tasks for better sprint planning and progress tracking. AI can generate initial task sets from story descriptions, which can then be customized.
- Task Dependencies and Relationships: Link work items as blocking or related with visual cues across Kanban, List, and Gantt views, allowing teams to identify bottlenecks and dependencies early.
- Image Download from Docs: Save images embedded in CWM documents directly to your device for easy sharing and external use.
- UI Enhancements: Improved inline comment indicators, editable comment threads, active text formatting indicators, and refined sprint planning footers provide a more intuitive user experience.
- Accessibility Improvements: The workspace supports WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance with features like content reflow and zoom up to 400%, ensuring usability for users with low vision or other accessibility needs.
Activation and Related Applications
CWM is available for installation via the ServiceNow Store. Integration with related applications such as Now Assist for CWM leverages generative AI to enhance productivity within the workspace. Additionally, Strategic Planning can be used alongside CWM to align organizational goals and execution, available with an SPM Professional license.
The ServiceNow® Collaborative Work Management (CWM) application provides a central hub to plan, visualize, and collaborate on work with team members across your organization. CWM was enhanced and updated in the Australia release.
Collaborative Work Management highlights for the Australia release
- Find relevant work easily by using filters in the Kanban view.
- Generate scrum tasks for user stories using AI and improve visibility into sprint work.
- Spot bottlenecks early by linking work items as blocking or related, with visual cues that surface dependencies across Kanban, List, and Gantt views.
See Collaborative Work Management for more information.
New in the Australia release
- ServiceNow product tiers
- The ServiceNow AI Platform now brings you a new AI experience with three licensing tiers available:
- Foundation: AI basics to deliver insights
- Advanced: AI to boost productivity across relevant use cases
- Prime: Act autonomously with all AI assets and create your own
Depending on your entitlements, you will have access to certain application features, generative AI skills, agentic workflows, and AI agents.
- Team member roles for project work
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View and update project and demand tasks directly in CWM using team member roles, installed alongside Collaborative Work Management.
The team member read role lets users view project and demand tasks and leave comments. The team member read-write role also lets users edit those tasks. Team members can view and manage the work assigned to them and their team through My Work and Connected Work in CWM.
- Formula columns in CWM
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Gain deeper insights into your work by adding formula columns to your List view in CWM Boards. Create calculations that automatically compute values across your tasks, such as summing hours, calculating date differences, or deriving metrics from existing fields.
Build formulas manually using the Formula Builder panel, which guides you through selecting functions and referencing columns with inline suggestions. As you type, the builder validates your formula in real-time and displays clear error messages if corrections are needed.
You can accelerate formula creation with AI by describing your calculation in natural language. AI generates a valid formula that you can insert directly into the editor, saving you the time to manually build a valid formula.
- Kanban board filters
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Save time finding the work that matters most by applying quick filters directly on your Kanban board.
As you adjust filter conditions in the header, the quick filter panel stays in sync, and vice versa. Your filter choices automatically apply to saved views and CWM Board templates, so the next time you open the board, your preferences are readily available.
- Scrum tasks
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Improve sprint execution by breaking user stories into scrum tasks that make estimation easier and daily progress visible. These tasks appear as nested children in the List, Kanban, and Sprint planning views, so that your team sees how individual efforts roll up into the larger story.
Using AI to generate an initial set of scrum tasks based on your story descriptions, you can reduce the overhead of task creation. Trigger scrum task generation from the story form or from the Sprint planning view. The result is a relevant set of tasks to use as a starting point. You can then review, edit, and add the generated tasks to fit your team's workflow.
- Task dependencies and relationships
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Increase visibility into how work is connected by linking related items directly in CWM and avoid switching context to track dependencies.
As these relationships surface across Kanban, List, and Gantt views with clear visual cues, you can improve planning confidence for your teams. Blocked items stand out at a glance, helping teams spot bottlenecks early, communicate delays quickly, and plan tasks in the right sequence.
- Image download from docs
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Save images from your CWM documents directly to your device, making it easier to share or use them outside of the Docs environment.
UI changes
- Formatting toolbar changes in Docs
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Quickly confirm which text formatting is active for your text selection. A green checkmark now appears next to the currently applied format in the formatting toolbar, giving you a clear visual indicator of the active formatting.
- Sprint section footer changes in Sprint planning view
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For sprints that are not started yet, the footer of the sprint section in the Sprint planning view now shows only the % of capacity utilized, and the story points remaining for the sprint.
Activation information
Install Collaborative Work Management by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store. Visit the ServiceNow Store to view all the available apps, and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.
Accessibility information
- Accessibility improvements
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Accessibility improvements were completed to create a configurable workspace that supports WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance.
- Reflow
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Docs in CWM Configurable Workspace supports reflow, which enables pages and content to be zoomed up to 400% through your browser settings without loss of content or functionality. Additionally, content can be enlarged without scrolling in two dimensions at a width equivalent to 320 CSS pixels or a height equivalent to 256 CSS pixels. Page layouts are transformed into a vertical, stacked view automatically when users increase browser zoom to 400%.
This enhancement helps users with low vision or who have trouble seeing web content in a browser due to monitor size, device type, poor lighting, or other situations. Reflow can be turned off with a system property for instances, experiences, and pages.