What's new in IBM Business Process Manager V8.6.0 cumulative fix 2018.03

IBM BPM Platform Configuration

Specify an alternative port number for an SMTP server

In IBM Process Designer, you can now change the port number for an SMTP mail server by adding or updating the new mail-smtp-port setting in the 100Custom.xml file. For more information, see Specifying a port number for an SMTP server.

Control how EPV variables are cached

A new cache named EpvVarValueCache has been added to help you store exposed process value (EPV) variables. You can control the cache by adding or updating the enable-epv-var-value-cache and default-epv-var-value-cache-size settings in the 100Custom.xml file. Use the enable-epv-var-value-cache setting to enable or disable EpvVarValueCache. Use the default-epv-var-value-cache-size to specify the size of EpvVarValueCache. For more information, see Table 4 in Cache and cache-related settings.

Control caching of environment variable values

A new cache named EnvVarValueCache has been added to help you store environment variable values. You can control the cache by adding or updating the enable-env-var-value-cache and default-env-var-value-cache-size settings in the 100Custom.xml file. Use the enable-env-var-value-cache setting to enable or disable EnvVarValueCache. Use the default-env-var-value-cache-size to specify the size of EnvVarValueCache. For more information, see Table 4 in Cache and cache-related settings.

Swing profiles between product installations

If you run many Linux servers, you can configure your environment to use a common set of profiles that you associate with multiple installations. Because the profiles are decoupled from a specific installation, you can associate the profiles with different application server installations or swing the profiles, which means "to dynamically change profiles to a new service level of a product release." For more information, see Swinging profiles between product installations.

Modeling Enhancements in the web Process Designer

Model decision tables

You can now model decisions by using decision tables. For more information, see Using decision tables in the web Process Designer. You can also export those definitions for more advanced scenarios by using IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) Rule Designer, see Exporting rules and decision tables for use in Rule Designer.

Create new Advanced Integration services in the web Process Designer

You can now also author Advanced Integration services without using the desktop Process Designer. For more information, see Building an Advanced Integration Service.

Automatically create processes instead of BPDs

When you import a BPMN archive into the web Process Designer, processes rather than business process definitions (BPDs) are created. Also, the newly created processes now automatically open in the web Process Designer. For more information, see Importing and exporting BPMN models.

Specify a team for process application administrators in Process Designer

Process application administrators can perform actions on instances or tasks throughout a specific process application. You can now specify a team for process application administrators (referred to as the Portal Admin Team in the desktop Process Designer) in the web Process Designer by using the Process App Settings editor. For more information, see Editing process application settings.

Developer Usability in the web Process Designer

Create and use tag groups in the web Process Designer

In the web Process Designer, you can now create and use tag groups to quickly sort and organize library items for your process applications and toolkits. For more information, see Tagging library items.

Display process variables and tag groups in a visualization window

When you author a process in the web Process Designer, you can now launch a visualization diagram for the process in a separate browser window and then select local input, output, and private variables to display. You can also select and display tag groups for services that are defined for the process. For more information, see Visualizing process data.

Find a toolkit snapshot easily

With the addition of the toolkit filtering capability in Process Designer, you can easily find a toolkit snapshot to create a dependency on it or change the dependency to a different version.

Business UI

Use stable URLs for client-side human services exposed as URL

You can now call a dynamically selected version of a client-side human service by using name-based parameters in its URL. Unlike the original ID-based parameters, name-based parameters ensure that the URL remains unchanged after updates to the service or process application. For more information, see Calling a dynamically selected service version.

Monitor and maintain the performance of the Process Portal index

You can now use the index performance indicators new to the Process Admin Console Performance Dashboard to monitor and maintain the performance of the Process Portal index. These indicators provide information, such as the number of updated indexes and the index table rows that you can clean up. To avoid performance issues that might occur if there's a large amount of unused index data, run the new indexTablesCleanup command to delete this unused data. For more information, see Discovering and managing database performance issues by using the Performance Dashboard and Cleaning up index tables.

See only the next task in IBM Process Portal

To have Process Portal display only the task that follows the one that you just completed, instead of the full Work task list, you can choose to show the Next Task dashboard. For more information, see Dashboards in Process Portal.

Process Analytics

Experience additional monitoring events for service integrations

Service integration monitoring events now include events for service tasks, decision tasks, and content integration tasks. For more information, see Service integration monitoring events.

ECM Integration

Launch a process instance from an existing document on an external ECM server

You can now use a document start event to launch a process instance from an existing document on an external ECM server. This approach is useful when you need to perform certain operations that are associated with the document, such as having a team review it. The enhanced Start Process and Exposed Processes REST APIs further support this capability. For more information, see Document start event.

Documentation

Access the documentation

The mechanism that opens topics from IBM BPM changed. In previous releases, the IBM BPM Help application opened topics in the local file system or the online documentation, depending on where the topic was available. In V8.6.0 Cumulative Fix 2018.03, the IBM BPM Help application was removed. Now, when you click a link in IBM BPM, the topic opens in the online documentation. You can configure the help system so that topics open in the documentation that you downloaded locally. For more information, see Accessing the IBM BPM documentation offline.

IBM Process Federation Server

Access Process Federation Server REST APIs by using Swagger

With the Liberty API Discovery feature, you can now access the Swagger interface for the Process Federation Server REST APIs from an HTML page and interact with those APIs. For more information, see Accessing the Process Federation Server REST APIs with Swagger.

Experience finer monitoring capabilities on running Process Federation Server instances

• Use new MBeans to monitor Elasticsearch and retrievers. For more information, see Monitoring and administering retrievers with MBeans.
• With the new configuration attributes in the Process Federation Server.xml configuration file, you can now enable or disable scheduled maintenance operations on the Process Federation Server indexers. For more information, see the new attributes descriptions for the ibmPfs_bpdIndexer element and the ibmPfs_bpelIndexer element.

Supported Configurations