With the general availability today of IBM Business Automation Workflow (BAW) 20.0.0.2, we have made some exciting enhancements to BAW on containers, which were first introduced in June, 2020. The full list of BAW enhancements can be found in What’s New, but below are the highlights of this release of BAW on containers.
Evaluating and Installing
More options for evaluating BAW on containers by supporting Managed Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Service (ROKS).
Additional database support: in addition to Db2, we now support Oracle and PostgreSQL for the underlying databases.
In BAW 20.0.0.1 we had the demo pattern, which installs everything you need including the database and LDAP, as well as the enterprise config, which allowed complete freedom of choice with over 1500 points of variability. With BAW 20.0.0.2 we add the enterprise pattern, which reduces the number of inputs by over 90%, but allows you to leverage other enterprise patterns such as Decisions or Content Services. This will greatly simplify the installation experience.
Easing Migration from Traditional
You can now migrate directly from IBM Case Manager 5.3.3 to BAW on containers.
The SQL Integration Services capabilities are back in the system toolkit.
The Team Performance and Process Performance dashboards are available in Process Portal dashboard and they now support federated environments.
New Capabilities
The Intelligent Task prioritization feature introduced with 20.0.0.1 is now available for BAW on containers.
These next two enhancements are available in BAW on containers, but also BAW traditional.
Along with exposing your process as a web service you can now expose services within your process as a RESTful API with an OpenAPI definition. This makes it much simpler for external clients to reuse elements of your application. Furthermore, if you have Cloud Pak for Automation, these can be registered as Automation Services within Studio.
With the Web Process Designer you can now run and debug instances on a remote BAW Server (container or traditional) from Workflow Center.
Authoring with the IBM Cloud Pak for Automation
Workflow Center (WC) capabilities, called “Workflow Authoring,” are now part of part of Business Automation Studio with IBM Cloud Pak for Automation v20.0.3. With workflow authoring, developers of all skill levels can now create richer workflows leveraging automation services from other Cloud Pak for Automation capabilities.
Note that this is not a chargeable component. It is only available in a container form factor, and is only able to deploy projects to BAW on containers. Customers can create new projects or import projects from WC into Workflow Authoring in Studio if those projects are designated as “traditional or container” and without validation errors. It is the same experience as Workflow Center today. The only limitations compared to WC is the heritage Process Center views aren’t available (remote Process Center, Governance, and Documentation).
BAW Workflow Center continues to be based on traditional (WAS-ND) technology. It continues to be production chargeable. It is able to deploy projects to both BAW traditional and BAW on container runtimes. It supports all project types and existing capabilities, including heritage Process Center views.
