Moving your processes from on-premises Business Automation Workflow to Cloud Pak for Business Automation

You can move your processes from your on-premises IBM Business Automation Workflow to Cloud Pak for Business Automation by moving your development projects to the containerized IBM Workflow Authoring environment and installing and running your projects on the Workflow Runtime environment.

About this task

Before you move to any Cloud Pak for Business Automation capability, it is important to understand what you need, what options you have, and your license entitlements. Complete the following steps in the specified sequence.

Sequence of steps to move from on-premises Business Automation Workflow to Cloud Pak for Business Automation: 1) Assess your readiness, 2) Choose your path, 3) Prepare to move, 4) Deploy your projects, 5) Move your development projects, 6) Modernize your workflows
Tip: Hover over the step name in the list for more details.

1. Assessing your readiness

At the start of your transformation journey, assess your current readiness to adopt Cloud Pak for Business Automation.

About this task

Deploying products in a container environment can be faster and easier than in a non-premises installation. Also, updating software in a container environment can be easier and less disruptive. And you can take advantage of new features to modernize your business automation. But there are also reasons to maintain an on-premises environment. Consider the relevant factors when deciding whether to use containers.

If you have the following requirements, you might want to choose a container deployment environment:
  • Dynamic scalability to adjust to workload
  • Zero downtime support for patching
  • Ability to not only quickly patch or upgrade but quickly rollback to previous versions
  • Better resource usage and management
  • Better resiliency for your applications
  • Lower cost for application isolation
If you have any of the following requirements, you might want to choose or maintain an on-premises installation:
  • You can use deprecated capabilities or artifacts.
  • Your applications contain advanced content that is developed in IBM Integration Designer.
  • You use IBM Business Monitor.
  • You use custom applications that use EJBs.

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2. Choosing your path

Depending on the version of Business Automation Workflow that you're moving from, you can take different paths.

About this task

Image showing paths to move from Business Automation Workflow and Business Process Manager to IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation

IBM Business Automation Workflow V20.0.0.2 or later versions
Import your projects from Workflow Center into IBM Business Automation Studio in the Workflow Authoring environment. After you import your projects, critical errors help you identify artifacts that are incompatible with the containerized runtime environment. After you fix these errors, you can continue to work in the authoring environment and when you're ready, you can deploy your artifacts to the Cloud Pak for Business Automation container runtime environment. For more information, see Converting project artifacts.
If you want to move in phases, keep your authoring environment in the on-premises IBM Workflow Center and deploy your applications to the Cloud Pak for Business Automation containerized runtime environment. To deploy projects from the on-premises Business Automation Workflow to run in Cloud Pak for Business Automation, you must use Cloud Pak for Business Automation V21.0.2 or a later version.

Before you deploy your projects, make sure that they are compatible with the container runtime environment. For more information, see Preparing to move.

IBM Business Automation Workflow versions earlier than V20.0.0.2
Import your projects from Workflow Center into Workflow Authoring. After you import your projects, critical errors help you identify artifacts that are incompatible with the containerized runtime environment. After you fix these errors, you can continue to work in the authoring environment and when you're ready, you can deploy your artifacts to the Cloud Pak for Business Automation container runtime environment. For more information, see Converting project artifacts.

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3. Preparing to move

To deploy your projects to a containerized environment, prepare your projects so that they are compatible with the container runtime environment.

About this task

Moving your applications to containers is a significant effort. To ease your transition, you can make changes to the applications that are running in the on-premises environment before you move them to the container runtime environment. To prepare your project for a container runtime environment and reduce the incompatibilities and critical validation errors, you can take the following steps in advance:

  • For process apps and toolkits
    • The target runtime environment for existing process apps, toolkits, and case solutions might be traditional (on-premises). You need to convert the target environment before you can install these projects to a workflow server in a container. Consider completing your move in stages. You can convert the target installation environment of your projects (and contained artifacts) to Traditional or Container and continue to run them in the traditional runtime environment. Then, when you're ready, you can switch them over to run in the container environment. See Converting the target environment of projects.
    • 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.
    • 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 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.

After you move your applications to run in a container environment, you might still have applications that are running in an on-premises environment and you might need to support both streams. You can use branches to manage both streams. For example, you can create a branch for your on-premises application before you convert your projects and keep the current branch for the application that is running in the container environment. By separating the on-premises and container branches, you can make fixes and enhancements to either branch as required.

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4. Deploying your projects to the container runtime

Deploy your projects from the on-premises Workflow Center to the Cloud Pak for Business Automation containerized runtime environment. Your authoring environment remains on premises.

About this task

Convert your projects so that they are compatible with the container runtime environment and set up the connection between Workflow Center and the containerized Workflow Server.

Procedure

  1. Make sure that your projects are compatible with the container runtime environment. For more information, see 3. Preparing to move.
  2. Change the target environment of your projects to the Traditional or Container environment. For more information, see Converting the target environment of projects.
  3. Exchange the security certificates between Workflow Center and Workflow Server.
  4. Install your snapshot as usual from Workflow Center to the containerized Workflow Server.

5. Moving your development projects

Move your development projects to Cloud Pak for Business Automation by importing them into IBM Business Automation Studio.

About this task

Your projects must be compatible with the Cloud Pak for Business Automation container runtime environment, where you will eventually deploy them. You can either prepare your projects first in the on-premises IBM Process Designer, or you can import your process apps and case solutions into IBM Business Automation Studio, fix any critical errors and continue to develop them in Workflow Designer.

Important: Import the toolkits first and then the process applications. To preserve the toolkit versioning order from your current Workflow Center, import them in the correct order. The last imported toolkit is the tip in the new IBM Business Automation Studio.
When you import a project from an on-premises Process Designer, you might see errors, which means that you must modify your projects to enable your project to be installed and run in the Cloud Pak for Business Automation environment. You can do the conversion in either of the following places:
  • In Cloud Pak for Business Automation by exporting the project from the on-premises Process Designer and importing the project into IBM Business Automation Studio. When you open the project, you can convert, manually fix, or delete artifacts in the Project Conversion tab. For more information, see Converting project artifacts.
  • In the on-premises Process Designer before you export the project and import it into Cloud Pak for Business Automation. For more information, see Converting the target environment of projects.

To migrate your development projects, complete the following steps:

  1. Export your project as .twx file from the on-premises Workflow Center.
  2. Import the file into Business Automation Studio. See Importing projects.
Now, you can continue to develop and test your projects in Process Designer and install them to run on a production server.

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6. Modernizing your workflows

After you move to the Cloud Pak for Business Automation, you can start taking advantage of the capabilities.

About this task

You have access to all the Cloud Pak for Business Automation components, including all the foundation components such as process and task mining, Robotic Process Automation, Kafka event framework, identity and access management, logging, and metering services. For more information, see Cloud Pak foundational services.

By moving to IBM Workflow Authoring, you have access to the low-code designers that are integrated with IBM Business Automation Studio. Using Business Automation Studio as a single place to design business automations you can take advantage of the following capabilities:
  • Author your workflows in a containerized environment.
  • 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.
  • Use decision services to capture and automate repeatable decisions.
  • Use document processing to combine your business knowledge with powerful machine learning to process and store documents and unlock the data they contain.

You can increase productivity by using IBM Automation Workstream Services for a no-code solution to streamline, automate, and accelerate activities in your daily work.

Through the IBM Cloud Pak for automation framework, you can seamlessly access services from other Cloud Paks.

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