What do I see? - ServiceNow Tutorial

- [Instructor] After you log into ServiceNow, you'll see this standard screen. Throughout this course, we'll be using an instance of ServiceNow running New York patch two release, and we'll often show users representing the fictional landscaping company, Leaf and Mortar. We'll take a brief tour of all the components in the standard user interface and then zero in on some of them. On the left is the application navigator. There's a slider bar to the right that lets you page through all of the entries in the application navigator. We'll explore additional details about the application navigator, applications and modules and favorites in the two videos immediately following this one. At login, the middle frame shows a homepage. Here, we're shown the ITIL homepage. This dropdown, this small downward facing triangle, allows you to select different homepages. ITIL homepage was originally configured, but you can conceivably look at a different homepage, the one for Self Service. The gear on the far right refreshes the ITIL homepage so you can decide what the refresh rate is going to be. You can also refresh at will with this curved arrow. If you'd like to reconfigure what appears on a homepage, you can add content, which says there are different variables and fields and records that can be shown on the homepage, depending on what you choose in here. You can also decide that you might want to change the layout of the homepage. Even though you're satisfied with the data that is present, you want to change its appearance in the way it's laid out. Across the top of the screen, the banner frame has a number of icons at the far right. There's an avatar representing you, there's a magnifying glass allowing a global search of the entire instance, there's some thought bubbles that allow you to converse with another user, there's a question mark that opens up user guides and the ServiceNow documentation site, and lastly, there's a gear icon that lets you change individual user interface options. Under the user avatar, there's a panel that shows different options. You can show the profile, which shows information about your user record, first name, last name, date format, and time zone that you've elected, and an option to log out. And here's a confession: you also see information about impersonating other users. You probably will see neither of these options. It's one I configured for many of the sample users in this course so I can quickly change user personas for the purpose of these videos. Now you may be granted this permission at your company, but it is atypical for all fulfillers to have this ability. The global search icon allows you to search entirely across the entire instance for a given string. Here we're going to search for the string George Washington, and we'll find that George Washington is a user in this instance. We can also search across the entire string for a little more germane to our purpose at hand, and that is try to find out how many incidents, problems or changes have the word critical in it. And now we see a census of how many incidents, change requests, change tasks, et cetera have the word critical somewhere in their descriptions. This is a way to be able to float things that are important to look at by searching across the entire instance. The two thought bubble allows an individual to communicate with another user. So here Josephine is going to add a user to a communication path, and she's going to send it to Jason, who's her manager. And the message she's going to send is, "Is the oracle project on track?" And when she hits the return, that sends a message. You may have heard a small beep. That's an audible sign that a message has been sent. Now in Jason's screen, he sees the message coming in from Josephine saying, "Is the oracle project on track?" He can click on the message and place the reply. So that shows the way in which the connect application is utilized. Now you may want to check out within your environment as to whether that connect application is used pervasively throughout the entire organization so you're sure that messages being sent are going to ultimately be seen or read. So we've looked at the user avatar, we've looked at the search string, we've looked at the connect application. The question mark icon is one that brings up a list of user guides that may have been written by ServiceNow and/or custom ones for your organization, or a way to go to the ServiceNow documentation site in order to be able to read more about the way ServiceNow is operated. The last icon on the very very far right is the one for system settings, and we're going to dive into that in detail in the next few videos. The last user interface icon that we want to talk about is this small directional arrow to the far right of the application navigator. This allows you to collapse the application navigator and expand it in order to preserve more real estate for your screens. So that's a whirlwind tour of the primary ServiceNow user interface. It orients us and gives us some common terminology for use in almost all the videos to come.