ServiceNow Xanadu Release: An Overview of Key Upgrades

ServiceNow has once again impressed us with the Xanadu release. In this blog, we'll explore some of my favorite upgrades from this new release and what they entail.

When ServiceNow announces upgrades, they truly mean it. I appreciate how each upgrade not only enhances ServiceNow functionalities but also ensures that these enhancements benefit every professional using the platform. These upgrades are designed to improve operations not just for developers, but also for administrators, process owners, business analysts, and product owners.

In this overview of the Xanadu release, we’ll delve into some ITSM and ITOM product release notes:

ITSM Product Release Notes

Incident Management: Email notifications now offer greater flexibility by allowing you to choose where links to an incident record are redirected. Instead of opening automatically in the Classic UI 16 Interface, the incident record can be redirected to the Service Operation Workspace (SOW). The incident record link in the email will open in SOW under the following conditions:

• The (sow_email_notification_redirect) system property is set to true.
• The user clicking the incident record link has the sn_sow_user role.

Now Assist ITSM:

• Knowledge Articles: Enable your agents to create comprehensive knowledge articles by leveraging information from similar incidents.
• Chat Reply Recommendations: Assist agents in responding to common questions in chats using the “Write with Now Assist” feature for chat reply suggestions.
• Contextual Understanding: Help agents gain a better understanding of chat and incident contexts with Sidebar discussion summarization when proposing resolutions.

Note: The Now Assist for ITSM application requires an IT Service Management Pro Plus or Enterprise Plus license.

Service Operations Workspace (SOW):

SOW provides a unified experience for multiple IT Service Management and IT Operations Management capabilities. In the Xanadu release, several enhancements have been made:

• View VIP field decorators on call fields in incident records for VIP users.
• Test Incident Management features and workflows in SOW with quick start tests.
• Resolve password-reset related incidents using the password-reset UI action on an incident record.
• Obtain AI-powered search results for the following record types: Incident, Incident Tasks, Problem, Problem Tasks, Change Requests, Change Request Tasks, Interaction, and Request.

IT Operations Management (ITOM) Release Notes

The Xanadu release introduces updated features across ServiceNow ITOM products:

ITOM Health: Track and maintain the health of your organization's services, including Health Log Analytics, Event Management, Agent Client Collector applications, and more.
ITOM Cloud Accelerate: Provides workflows to assess cloud readiness and enforce ITOM Cloud Accelerate guidelines.
ITOM Optimization: Automates cloud workflows for managing resources throughout their life cycles, offering visibility into costs and enabling the deployment of certified, enterprise-compliant clouds.
ITOM Visibility: Provides a unified, connected view of your entire IT network and the services it supports.

ITOM Visibility Highlights in the Xanadu Release:

• Benefit from a unified workspace for configuring discovery, managing errors, and tracking progress with diagnostic tools that offer insights into discovered data. View discovery trends, tasks, and access relevant information through the Discovery Admin home. Analyze discovery errors and troubleshoot them using the Diagnostic tab.

• With the Xanadu release, you can enhance your application Service Mapping by installing the App Service Extension application from the ServiceNow store. Use Automated Service Suggestions and CMDB data to create a new application service, eliminating the need for Mid-servers.

The Xanadu release documentation includes many more powerful upgrades that I can’t all cover in detail here. I encourage you to review the release notes this week, identify your favorite upgrades, and make sure to update your PDI to Xanadu to experience these new features firsthand on the ServiceNow platform.

#TheWorldWorksWithServiceNow :)

Learn More About ServiceNow Xanadu release here:
https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/xanadu-release-notes/page/release-notes/family-release-notes.html

Learn More about Xanadu IT Service Management release notes:
https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/xanadu-release-notes/page/release-notes/it-service-management/it-service-management-rn-landing.html

Learn More about Xanadu IT Operation Management release notes:
https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/xanadu-release-notes/page/release-notes/it-operations-management/it-operations-management-rn-landing.html