My Knowledge 20 Session Picks
Knowledge 2020 is virtual this year - and 6 weeks long!
Pros - It is all FREE, has tons of content, and is accessible in your sweatpants, from the comfort of your own home.
Cons - There are literally hundreds of sessions available on-demand and it can be difficult to sort through them - a bit like drinking from a fire hose.
To help you select some session options, I am sharing my session picks (from the first 4 weeks of content) – recommended for fellow ServiceNow developers.
Theatre and Breakout Sessions
Theatre sessions are often useful for information on processes and best practices. As a developer, I find many of them too high-level to be helpful unless I’m looking for a particular process or have a burning question that need answers. However, there are always a few good ones - and these are my top picks so far.
C2C dev factory [THS1547]
A brief, and to the point, informative session on some best practices and key considerations for implementing ServiceNow and ServiceNow features by Acorio all stars: Ryan Gillespie and Kourtney Brewster. These folks are well known on social media channels. The session is good for those relatively new to ServiceNow development and a good reminder for those more experienced.GlideQuery: A modern upgrade to GlideRecord (CCB3052)
The session highlights exciting things coming down the pipeline with the ServiceNow development API, making it a must-see for ServiceNow developers. In this session, we are introduced to GlideQuery and provided with examples of how GlideQuery is an improvement over GlideRecord.
If you prefer to read about it, you can see this supplemental article on GlideQuery by Jace Benson.
If you want code that you can try out, see Jace’s YouTube video and Twitter post for the code you can copy and paste.App(s) showcase: Quality of Life items available on ServiceNow Share [THS2122]
Earl Duque, ServiceNow developer who epically streamed his CreatorCon live coding in VR, highlights useful tools that developers can find through ServiceNow share to help make development faster and more efficient. The presentation is short and to the point. If you prefer to read about it, Earl has also posted the content with links to the Share app on his blog.Building components with the Now Experience UI framework [THS2903]
Confession time, I have not actually absorbed the information presented in this session about the Now Experience (aka Seismic framework, aka Now Design system), but I do know that the Now Experience is the future of ServiceNow and many hardcore developers are really looking forward to it. I would be remiss not to recommend any sessions on this topic. This one is just an example - There are definitely other sessions on the Now Experience.Becoming a Certified Master Architect (THS1628)
A particularly interesting insight into what it takes to get one of the highest levels of certifications available for ServiceNow. Though, to my knowledge, this certification is only available for partners and not for customers. A huge kudos to the co-presenter, Anders Figenshchow, who put himself out there and shared information with us despite not receiving the master architect designation.Agile Module or PPM Module in IT Business Management? Stop. They're both right! (BRE1724)
This is my pick for a non-technical breakout session because it talks about the age old battle of waterfall vs agile. I thought the presenter did a good job of highlighting the need and use cases for both, as well as the relationship between the 2 methodologies and how ServiceNow can be used to aid both processes.Potholes & pathways: How working women can achieve success & inspire others (THS2965)
ServiceNow’s Chief Strategy Officer, Lara Caimi, talks about the challenges of being a woman and a mother. She offers some advice for working mothers and people in a leadership position who can help drive change.
WomenNow highlighted session.
The Digital Butterfly Effect – the unintended consequences of Technology (BRE2935)
A refreshing, thought-provoking session on technology in general - not ServiceNow specific, but interesting nonetheless. Dave Wright is an engaging speaker. He will have developers thinking about the longer term and more widespread effect of the technology they are creating, some of which they may have never thought about or intended.
Hands-on Labs and Workshops
Hands-on labs and workshops are often the highlight of the Knowledge conference for me as a developer. It’s where I feel like I learn the most and get the most value from the conference. While the LAB sessions can be good, ServiceNow developers (aka builders) will likely get the most out of the CreatorCon Workshop (CCW code) sessions. I suspect many of them are quite good but here are a few of my picks.
The labs/workshops are available through Now Learning and will be hyperlinked in the title. For a better guidebook experience, go to the Developer site links provided below.
Advanced reporting [LAB1141]
This is a lab (as opposed to a CreatorCon workshop (CCW)) so it is not developer specific and would be good for anyone that does extensive reporting, someone who deals with Business Intelligence. However, I learned a few tips and tricks from this lab and found it to be worth while, having only mediocre reporting skills and experience.
https://developer.servicenow.com/connect.do#!/event/knowledge2020/LAB1141Building your first spoke [CCW2510]
A succinct workshop by some familiar faces to from ServiceNow developer program. Dave Slusher leads the lab on creating a spoke in Flow Designer, a relatively new, but increasingly popular feature of ServiceNow, successor of the Workflow Editor. The workshop makes use of a real live API for the London transit system, making the examples and exercises feel less trivial than, perhaps, some other hands-on workshops.
https://developer.servicenow.com/connect.do#!/event/knowledge2020/CCW2510Using data stream action to load large datasets into ServiceNow [CCW1427]
I found this one particularly interesting because it touches on yet another capability of the new Flow Designer feature of ServiceNow. Flow Designer seems to be all the rage these days. Deepthi Bhogle leads us through how to load a large set of data into ServiceNow - seems like it could be a very useful feature.
https://developer.servicenow.com/connect.do#!/event/knowledge2020/CCW1427Git on Board with Source Control [CCW1438]
A good primer on the capabilities of git integration with ServiceNow studio, including highlights of new features in Orlando. Ben Sweetser leads the lab with a couple of helpers to pose well timed and probably planted, but nevertheless, interesting questions. Ben ‘live’ tests various scenarios to answer the what-if questions that his co-hosts pose him. Their interaction feels so natural that it’s almost like watching a group of friends hanging out.
https://developer.servicenow.com/connect.do#!/event/knowledge2020/CCW1438Add a chatbot to your application [CCW2790]
If you have seen and/or done a Virtual Agent lab before, you can skip that part of this workshop and go straight to the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) setup, which was the part that interested me most about this workshop. Watching the NLU demo was enough to see the interesting new ways that ServiceNow is leveraging AI and the amount of work it takes to setup a topic in Virtual Agent - good for planning your Virtual Agent implementation project.
https://developer.servicenow.com/connect.do#!/event/knowledge2020/CCW2790
Article written by Nia McCash. Find her on social media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nia-mccash-19a086b0/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/niamccash
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the article above belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author’s employer, WomenNow, or any other group or individual.
