What's new in IBM Business Process Manager V8.5.6

Introduction:

IBM BPM V8.5.6 provides numerous new product features and various enhancements and improvements to existing product capabilities. IBM® Business Process Manager V8.5.6 introduces many new features. IBM BPM extends the capabilities that are found in previous versions of WebSphere® Integration Developer, WebSphere Lombardi Edition, IBM Business Process Manager, WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, and other IBM business process management products.

Process Designer and Process Center

Create user interfaces that are enabled for multiple device types

v You can specify whether you want a new client-side human service or coach view to be used on multiple device types. When you configure your client-side human service or coach view for use on multiple devices, the coach palette is filtered to provide only responsive controls for all the new coaches and coach content.

v The responsive coach views are built with responsive, mobile-friendly user interface technology such as Bootstrap and AngularJS.

v To run your applications on multiple device types, you can use different methods to acquire the multiple device-ready coach views:

ü  Build your own coach views by using the responsive JavaScript library.

ü  Download and use the Responsive Coaches toolkit that is provided as a technology demonstration from IBM.

ü  Use third-party coach views from business partners.

Use controls that can run on any device

The Responsive Coaches toolkit, which is available as a technology demonstration that you can download, contains a set of controls. You can use these controls to design applications that can run on various device types, such as mobile and desktop devices.

All the coach views in the Responsive Coaches toolkit are suitable for use on both desktop and mobile devices. If you add the toolkit as a dependency in your process application and you flag your client-side human service or coach view as intended for use on multiple devices, the controls in the Responsive Coaches toolkit appear in the coach palette and default coach content from the Responsive Coaches toolkit, such as the OK button, is used.

Enable users to complete business tasks on multiple device types

To enable users to complete business tasks on multiple device types, you can use IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation to develop applications that are based on client-side human services that you modeled in IBM BPM. The applications that you develop can be deployed to multiple device types.

You can export only IBM BPM client-side human services that are exposed as dashboards, startable services, or URLs and are configured for use on multiple devices as MobileFirst projects.

Enable mobile applications to access IBM BPM process applications

You can use IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation adapters to enable mobile applications to access IBM BPM process applications.

Generic and application-specific adapters are deployed to the MobileFirst server and enable mobile applications to invoke REST APIs on IBM BPM servers. Download the generic and application-specific adapters from the Process Apps page or Toolkits page in the Process Center application.

Update process applications for seamless use in IBM BPM V8.5.6

Typically, when you import process applications that use coach validation features from IBM BPM versions earlier than V8.5.6, you can continue using the process applications seamlessly, without additional configuration changes. However, when you update the imported process applications to use the latest version of Coaches toolkit and System Data toolkit dependencies, you must update any reference to the CoachValidation and CoachValidationError classes to those defined in the System Data toolkit V8.5.6. To do that, you can use the validation error feature that is provided in Process Designer to locate the unresolved references. The CoachValidation and CoachValidationError classes were moved from the Coaches toolkit to the System Data toolkit.

Create relationships between process instances

You can create relationships between process instances so that IBM Process Portal users can view all the information for their cases and processes.

SOAP 1.2 protocol support

When your business process works with outbound or inbound web services, you can use the SOAP 1.2 protocol. SOAP 1.2 is the latest version of this web services protocol for exchanging information.

More efficiently use SAP Solution Manager Integration

You can now generate guided workflows interactively by using SAP Transaction coach views that you can build by dragging SAP components from specified SAP transactions.

Furthermore, within a process application, business process definitions (BPDs) that have SAP information can be associated with business scenarios. You can define and manage the business scenarios that a BPD belongs to in the custom properties of the BPD.

You can import SAP business scenarios into IBM BPM as smart folders. The smart folders are directly created from the imported SAP business scenarios and no longer require tagging. By using the configurable import and export functions, you can specify which processes or tasks that contain SAP transactions are to be excluded from the import or export.

Basic Case Management Feature

Use an external Enterprise Content Management server

You can use a new or existing external Enterprise Content Management server for the applications you develop with the Case Type editor. Your applications can be integrated with IBM Content Foundation products on IBM FileNet® Content Manager.

Process Federation Server

Enjoy centralized access to task information

Process Federation Server is a new IBM BPM server that is based on WebSphere Application Server Liberty Network Deployment. It provides centralized access to task information that is anywhere in the federated IBM BPM environment.

The federated environment can include any of the following IBM BPM server environments:

v Multiple IBM BPM cells

v Multiple IBM BPM deployment environments

v Multiple IBM BPM releases

Transition from previous versions of IBM BPM more easily

When you transition from one IBM BPM version to another, it can take several months until all your processes run on the new version. Because you can include previous versions of IBM BPM in your federated environment, you can gradually phase out process applications that are still running on the previous versions while new versions of the process applications run on the latest version of IBM BPM.

See federated BPEL- and BPD-related task information together

In previous versions of IBM BPM, it wasn't easy to combine BPEL- and BPD-related task information into one list of tasks for process participants. Process Federation Server aggregates both BPD and BPEL-related work from all the IBM BPM systems, including systems that run previous versions of IBM BPM.

Process Admin Console

Use a faster and improved Process Inspector

Not only has the performance and accessibility of Process Inspector improved, the user interface is visually and functionally improved as well. For example,

v When you scroll to the bottom of the list of displayed results, additional results automatically load.

v You can filter activities and tasks by state in the details area and you can modify due dates.

v You can search for process instances by severity type and last modified time. After you create a search, you can bookmark it to rerun the search.

v You can manage ad hoc activities and managing process instances without tasks.

v You can manage instance relationships, which are new for IBM Business Process Manager V8.5.6.

Create alert definitions to monitor process instances and tasks

You can now create alert definitions that trigger alerts when the number of process instances or tasks go beyond a specified threshold. For example, you can create an alert definition that triggers when the number of instances reaches a number that impacts performance. You can use APIs to create an application or another service or implementation to capture and display these alerts. For example, you can create a dashboard to display alerts in the Process Admin Console.

Emergency repair system

Investigate and repair your system

The emergency repair system provides alternative means for administrative investigation and repair of database-backed resources such as process instances. By using the emergency repair system, you can investigate and repair your system in the following rare scenarios:

v Application cluster members go down and cannot be started again

v The database server and databases are available and work properly

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