Moving to business automations capabilities

To take advantage of new features that are available only in container environments, consider moving to the business automations capabilities.

By moving to business automations capabilities, you have access to a set of low-code designers where you can:
  • Publish your workflows as reusable automation services and easily call other automation services from your workflows.
  • Build low-code user interfaces that integrate tasks, data, and automations.
  • Develop your workflow automations iteratively by testing in the integrated playback runtime environment during development.
  • Test, install, and run your workflow automations and automation services in the Liberty-based Workflow Server.

Preparing to move

Moving your applications to business automations capabilities requires significant effort. To ease your transition, you can update to your current process applications before you move them.

  • For process apps and toolkits
    • Switch from the desktop Process Designer to the web Process Designer. As part of this switch, you must convert deprecated artifacts in the desktop Process Designer to artifacts that are editable in the web Process Designer. See Deprecated and removed features of IBM® Business Automation Workflow External link opens a new window or tab.
    • Replace the deprecated APIs that you used in your applications.
    • Upgrade to the latest version of the system toolkits. Switch to container compatible versions of the system toolkits, if available. See System toolkits External link opens a new window or tab.
    • Refactor applications to externalize custom J2EE or Java™ applications as separate services that run in their own container.
  • For case solutions
    • Remove all deprecated features.
    • Remove Case Forms.
    • Ensure that all custom Content Platform Engine (CPE) event handlers will work in Content Platform Engine in a container environment.
    • Ensure that all custom IBM Content Navigator plug-ins work in IBM Content Navigator in a container environment.

      For detailed steps for the Content Platform Engine and IBM Content Navigator, see Moving an existing P8 domain to containers External link opens a new window or tab.

  • For projects

    If the target environment for existing projects is Traditional, convert it to Traditional or Container. After the conversion and cleanup of any artifacts with issues, you can continue to run you projects as usual in your runtime environment. See Converting the target environment of projects External link opens a new window or tab.

For new projects, always choose Traditional or Container as the target environment.