This video demonstrates the features of ServiceNow Visual Task Boards in the New York release.
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The humble task board; a simple way to track tasks, and see the status of any one task with just a glance.
On the ServiceNow platform, Visual Task Boards, or VTBs...
... provide a simple way to create your own task boards for different purposes.
There are three types: freeform, flexible, and guided.
Freeform boards allow you to create your own tasks, add tasks from a form or list...
... and place them in customizable lanes that you create; in other words, anything goes!
Let’s create a new freeform board.
We’re logged in as Adela, our team lead for a new ad campaign.
She wants a way to track the team’s ideas for the campaign from concept to completion.
So we navigate to visual task boards and create a new freeform board.
We can rename the lanes to whatever states, or stages, we need for our tasks.
We can also add more lanes, and change their order.
Now let’s add our team members to the board.
Members of freeform boards can add and remove task cards and lanes.
Now we can create tasks for our new board.
We add task cards, fleshing them out with descriptions, and assigning them to users.
We can also add horizontal lanes, called swimlanes, to any board.
In a freeform board, we need to edit the swimlane names manually.
In our example, we want to group cards by primary assignee.
We can also add labels to our cards to help categorize them and visually distinguish them on the task board.
We can add attachments too; documents, images, videos, you name it!
Attachments can be edited, downloaded and deleted as needed.
When we add a comment, it’s posted to the timeline to become part of the record for this task.
Another cool feature in task cards are checklists.
We can define the steps to complete this task,…
…reorder them, …
…remove them, …
…or even create a task.
We can also remove the entire checklist, or save it as a template to reuse it.
As we complete tasks, we can check off each item, …
… and the checklist indicator on the card updates.
We can add our checklist templates to other cards.
But what if we want to remove this card?
A special feature of freeform boards is the ability to archive tasks, rather than deleting them.
We can view these archived tasks from the Info tab in the board.
We can also configure how cards display in the Configuration panel...
... but first we need to disable swimlanes.
You can choose whether to display compact cards...
… detailed card info,…
…. and attachments.
We’ll look at more board configuration options later.
Let’s look at the next option - the flexible board.
Flexible boards allow you to load tasks from a task table, like Incident...
... and place them in customizable lanes that you create.
You can add additional tasks and organize tasks by moving them between lanes as needed...
... just like in the freeform board.
Flexible boards are the best option when you don’t want to impact the existing work or workflow on the platform...
... such as when you want to create personal to-do lists, planning exercises, etc.
In a flexible board, lane changes will not update underlying task data...
.... in other words, they will not be shown outside of the board.
Let’s create a flexible board with Emil...
... who wants to track the incidents assigned to him without making changes to the records in the Incidents table.
We start by creating a new Data Driven Board,…
… and selecting the table to load tasks from.
For a flexible board, select None for the vertical lane.
Now we create a filter to control which tasks load into the board.
We select Assigned to, …
…is Emil Anderson, …
…and click Create.
All of the incidents load into the first lane.
Now we can define custom lanes, and move the tasks around accordingly.
As he completes each incident...
... he moves them to the Complete column, and uses them as a reference to update the actual records in the platform.
Now let’s look at the third option – the guided board.
Guided boards are similar to flexible boards...
... except that their lanes correspond to field values and cannot be edited in most cases.
Here’s another important difference – moving a task between lanes will change the value in the record.
Let’s create this guided board as an example.
We’re logged in as Lisa, who wants to see all of the existing work order tasks.
So we create a data driven board, …
…and select the work order task table to pull data from.
Then we select a field from that table for the vertical lanes.
For the board to use this field for the lanes, we need to select a choice field, like State, ...
…or a reference field like Assigned to.
A reference field stores a reference to a field on another table.
For example, the Assigned to field on this table is a reference to the User [sys_user] table.
For our example, we want the tasks to be sorted by state.
We can also select a swimlane to group them horizontally.
To reduce the number of cards, we create a filter to display only tasks where State is one of Assigned, Accepted or Work in Progress.
And here’s our new board.
Let’s look at our options for configuring any type of visual task board.
We can collapse, expand, and hide the swimlanes, …
…and hide vertical lanes.
Let’s hide these empty lanes.
We can also set a lane limit for the number of cards.
This will notify users when the limit’s reached.
This lane limit is already exceeded, so we set the value higher.
Let’s look at other options we have in the tabs here.
The Info tab shows us details about the board, and the structure.
We can edit the filter, vertical lane field, swimlane field, and due date field.
If we map a table field to the Due Date field, it pulls the value from the table, …
…otherwise, we can enter this value manually or remove it.
You can use the Due By search here to search by this value.
You can also filter by title, …
… or number, …
… or assigned user.
In this board, the assignees are pulled from the task records.
We can add new members...
... or promote assignees to members.
By clicking here, we can promote all employees to members.
We can configure labels here.
Any member can edit the labels on a board.
To add more labels or edit these new labels, you need the global_tags_creator role.
Under Activity Stream, we can see the live activity information for all task cards in the board.
The Configuration tab allows you to hide or show the quick panel, …
…user names, …
…labels, …
…and label names.
Advanced Settings allow us to change the color theme...
…as well as which lanes to display.
Finally, all board members can configure the notifications they receive from Visual Task Boards...
... here in System Settings.
Now these notifications include when cards are moved across lanes, …
…when lane limits are reached or exceeded,…
…and board members are added or removed.
For more information, see our product documentation, knowledge base, or podcast.
Or ask a question in the ServiceNow Community.