Cloud Pak for Business Automation

We are pleased to announce that IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation version 23.0.1 is available today. The new release includes the following bundled products:

• Business Automation Workflow (BAW) 23.0.1

• FileNet Content Manager (FNCM) 5.5.11

• Operational Decision Manager (ODM) 8.12

• IBM Content Navigator (ICN) 3.0.14

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) 23.0.6

• IBM Process Mining (IPM) 1.14.1

Version 23.0.1 includes the delivery of 60+ new capabilities. A number of these enhancements are detailed in the sections below.

Cloud Pak 3.0

New with this release is the migration to Cloud Pak 3.0 (Bedrock Simplification). Cloud Pak 3.0 provides install improvements, including a better upgrade process, better documentation, and finish security hardening. We have removed the IBM Automation foundation (IAF) layer as an install dependency to allow for the direct distribution of BAI, Zen, and Elasticsearch.

Samples

The availability of provided samples are now easier to locate for the related Cloud Pak for Business Automation capabilities. Learn more in our Knowledge Center documentation, here.

Workflow

The IBM Business Automation Workflow launch, on June 23rd, highlights the following capability improvements:

• Works more efficiently with tasks and workflow instances

• Works more effectively in Workplace for easier user identification

• Manages case instance access more efficiently in Case client

• Finds process instances easier by sorting via start date in Process Inspector in the Admin Console

• Interface enhancements to help speed up date entries

• Builds workflow automations

• Uses Kafka message events to trigger workflow automations

• In the designer, model processes more efficiently and define the input and output data mapping of your process activities by using an intuitive graphical data handling without having to use JavaScript.

• Enhanced and consistent user interface building experience in Case Builder

• Simplified federation process for:

• Business Automation Workflow Runtime

• Workflow Process Service Runtime

• On-premises Business Automation Workflow

To learn more about the specifics of the bundled product IBM Business Automation Workflow, read the Workflow blog announcement here.

Content

There are a number of enhancements including, but not limited to, the following:

• The ability to subscribe to get Content Event and Deletion Event types

• Enhancements to the Content Services GraphQL API

• Ability to edit the dependent objects lists rather than replacing the entire list

• Use of Kubernetes node affinity to assign pods to nodes

• This ability will help manage resources and ensure critical pods have what is needed for optimum performance

• Control ephemeral storage for Content pattern components

Operational Decision Manager

The improvements to Operational Decision Manager (ODM) in the latest release include:

• Rule Designer

• Based on Java 11 and Eclipse 4.24 for a better experience

• Updated rule and decision table editors on all platforms, as well as a new code editor to edit BOM to XOM mappings

• Rule Analysis view for decision services, to detect conflicting, redundant, or missing rules

• Decision Center

• New REST API for defining users, groups, and roles, and deleting decision services

• Ability to use the same branch name in different decision services with shared projects

• Filtering of artifacts by deletion date in the recycle bin

• Removal of decision model service (the recommended replacement is Automation Decision Services)

• Decision Server

• Faster ruleset loading during the first execution

Automation Decision Services

The Automation Decision Services (ADS) component has a number of enhancements available within the v23.0.1 launch:

• Enhanced governance and collaboration in Decision Designer

• It is now possible to merge the changes made on a particular branch into another branch. When changes are ready in a branch, users can indicate that their updates are ready to be merged into another branch. In the process, users can review the changes, see the differences between the two branches, and validate the changes before completing or canceling the merge operation.

• Some branches can be protected to prevent users from publishing unwanted changes or to enforce certain workflows. Protecting a branch is particularly important for the main branches, which can be protected to encourage reviews before changes are merged and deployed. For more flexibility, branches can be protected using generic patterns.

• Support for Amazon SageMaker as a toplevel Machine Learning provider

• Amazon SageMaker connection details can be specified through the ADS user interface

• ADS predictive models can be connected to Amazon SageMaker models running at the specified location.

• The business rule language has been extended to offer advanced manipulation of lists and collections. There are more than 30 new actions that can be performed on lists. Additionally, many of these actions can be chained. Chaining statements can be beneficial because it allows for more concise and readable rules, and avoids creating intermediate lists.

• The previous version introduced the ability to refactor business rules and decision tables when the data definition has been changed. In this release, the refactoring has been extended to support additional artifacts and more advanced use cases.

• It is now possible to specify that imported data models (e.g. from OpenAPI definitions) should preserve original types and attributes, instead of automatically verbalizing them.

• A default Git server can be specified to automatically create a Git repository when a new ADS project is created. Before, the configuration was performed through a command line interface. In this release, the admin console allows administrators to specify or update the default Git server interactively.

• Microsoft Azure Repos is now a supported Git provider.

Automation Document Processing

The June 2023 release includes the following Document Processing improvements:

• Better data extraction results

• Improved data extraction accuracy

• Improved table extraction

• Improved, and more intuitive, Designer interface

• The detection of values is improved during annotation for non-text fields like bar code and checkbox

• More information available in the table when uploading samples

• Intelligently split samples between Training Set and Test Set to improve the accuracy

• Integrate document processing tasks into a workflow

• Export an ontology with an API

• [Technology preview] Better recognition of documents through optical character recognition (OCR)

• [Technology preview] Extended language support for extraction

Robotic Process Automation

IBM RPA 23.0.6 highlights include:

• Trigger bots from the RPA server using APIs or the Control Center UI

• Use RPA bots as Watson Orchestrate skills

• Use bots to automate TN5250 Terminals

• Automatic handling of GridView controls in SAP

• Connect to new Microsoft Outlook email API

• Access and search through shared mailboxes

• Self-service installation keys simplifies the installation of the IBM RPA client software

• RPA SaaS has FIPS 140-2 compliance enabled by default. Platform administrators using RPA on-premise or OCP can choose to enable FIPS 140-2 compliance when they create a new tenant.

See RPA release notes for further details.

IBM Process Mining

The latest version of IBM Process Mining, version 1.14.1, highlights:

• AWS Marketplace Launch, Visit IBM Process Mining on the AWS Marketplace

• Better integration between task mining and process mining

• Allowing users to switch between task and process mining with a single login, improves the overall usability.

• More control over naming conventions provides straightforward and efficient analysis

• Working time flexibility

• Working time can be calculated using your own data. Tailoring to business needs, improves the accuracy of cost evaluations.

• Enhanced admin

• System administrators can now easily see and retrieve precise statistics about license consumptions and change permissions and authorizations.

• Seamless integration with ETL tools

• Users can effortlessly pull in data from cloud storage, like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets, to kick-start and consistently update their process analysis. This enable smoother and continuous data ingestion.

• Usability improvements and enhancements

• Several usability enhancements are included within this release, i.e. a more intuitive user interface and simplified navigation.

• These improvements will make it easier for users to explore and interpret their process data, leading to faster, more informed decisions.

Discover more about the IBM Process Mining release here.

Business Automation Insights

The Cloud Pak for Business Automation Insights enhancements are as follows:

• Enhanced event processing

• Processing Application now supports stateful processing for improved handling of custom events.

• Easy to configure, customizable and enables customers to custom compute in addition to what is provided OOTB.

• Configuration allows customers to address the Elasticsearch field mapping explosion

• Chart configuration improvements

• Set the display format for durations in charts, i.e. show hours, minutes etc. instead of milliseconds

• Change the value of legends, icon of legends or hide legends

• Display total value inside a donut chart

• View workflow status and evaluate workload via built-in dashboards

For more information on What’s New in v23.0.1, visit our Knowledge Center documentation linked here. The following sections are included in the linked resource to provide an overview of where new features were added in the latest launch:

• Supported operating environments

• Upgrade

• Install

• Samples

• Security and compliance

• Workflow

• Decisions

• Content

• Document Processing

• Insights

Stay up to date with previous announcements, links available below:

• IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation V22.0.2

• IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation V22.0.1

• IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation V21.0.3 (December Announcement)

• IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation V21.0.3 (October Announcement)