Release! These are the new features of the new low-code digitization platform X4 BPMS

“With the current release, we continue to consistently drive the digital future in companies,” say Patrick Toball, Development Manager and Gerhard Lier, Innovation Manager, both at SoftProject GmbH. “The new developments pay direct attention to customer needs and are aligned with the highest current and future digitization and quality levels on the market. With the new features, companies in all industries can now digitize and automate their business processes even faster and easier without programming.” In addition, he said, the digitization platform is specifically designed both to efficiently connect people and systems and to tap into new business models and new technologies such as the internet of things, big data or machine learning and artificial intelligence.

As of now, X4 BPMS supports Keycloak as a new standard. The open-source software offers central user management that allows administrators to assign different roles, access rights and permissions for applications and systems to users from the network — all across systems and centrally using a clear administration console. The work is further simplified by role-based access control: Users are assigned to specific roles that determine which applications and systems they are allowed to access, to what extent, for how long, and so on. The stored rights apply across multiple applications. The effort of giving a user separate access rights to an application or system is eliminated. This saves time, speeds up logon procedures and avoids the maintenance of redundant user data. Since users are always precisely authenticated for their tasks, resources can be optimally planned and efficiently coordinated, for example in joint projects such as the creation of digital business processes or web apps.

Another highlight of the new release is the enhanced X4 Case Management. Process owners, business analysts and business users can use it to design business processes on a graphical interface and model, map and execute them according to their wishes directly at the business process level — including business logics and without having to call in a technician or software developer.

X4 Case Management is based on selectable drawing elements and prefabricated process modules with functions for specific tasks and activities, which can be inserted into processes simply by dragging and dropping. Even employees, customers or suppliers can be integrated into processes via human task modules for accelerated and efficient workflows without programming and without media breaks.

In addition, the intuitively usable software makes it possible to edit and define the business status and business data. Business data are the characteristics that distinguish a process — such as release, ordering, and support processes, but also processes in human resources or order processing, etc. In an invoicing process, for example, specialized data includes the invoice number, the invoice amount or the currency, but also information about the invoicing party, such as the address or the VAT ID.

Once the specialized data has been defined, it can be reused. Inheritance to subordinate processes (subprocesses) is also automatic as of release 7.0.

The new release also highlights the improved, structured and separate display of the individual process models that describe operations. The optimized overview significantly simplifies the editing and assignment of the individual models.

New in version 7.0 of X4 BPMS is a data grid that allows data to be displayed easily and flexibly in tabular form. This is based on the more than 200 standard adapters that can be used to connect all systems, control and manage data even more precisely, and thus design digital business processes efficiently.

The X4 BPMS collects the data and forwards it to the data grid. This makes it possible to quickly create clear tables from data from different sources. It does not matter if the data is from a CRM, ERP, web store, from the cloud or from machine sensors. A large repertoire of standard functions — such as sorting, filtering, paging, multiple selection or an individual column configuration — make editing flexible and easy. With the constantly evolving low-code approach, it’s so easy that in the future any user will be able to tabulate data in an X4 Web App and make it available to colleagues or employees.

Even sophisticated and attractive web applications can be designed using the low-code approach without programming and without knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, or CSS. The creation is speeded up by layout options as well as by the included color scheme, which can be adapted to the corporate design of the respective company at any time. By involving customers, partners or service providers directly in the processes via the web applications, processes are not only made more efficient and significantly simplified, but the bond with all those involved in the process is also strengthened.

The web apps are responsive and are displayed perfectly on both PCs and mobile devices. Login and logout pages are also easy to design, and intuitive controls further reduce user effort. Even explanatory videos, boxes, buttons, or links for sharing one’s own website or a partner website can be easily integrated and precisely placed. The new options improve internal and external communication and eliminate the need to hire a developer, designer, or agency.

With the new release, SoftProject provides its customers a free BPMN Designer for modeling business processes. With this, employees from the specialist departments, who are not IT experts but often know best what is important in business processes, can be involved in digitization projects at an early stage. Thanks to the low-code approach, they can model processes themselves and transfer their specialist know-how directly into processes as early as the process recording stage without any loss of knowledge. The development department then takes over the realization or digitization of the processes in the next step. This procedure avoids errors and ensures seamless processing — from process recording through process development to process automation.

Another innovation are optimized development tools that guarantee the creation of automated processes of the highest quality. One example is the new Problems View, which ensures rapid troubleshooting. Thanks to the improved debugger, processes can be tested live and step by step with real data. It does not matter how deeply nested the processes are. All results of the executed processes, including direct navigation to the source of the problem in question, are clearly displayed. This is therefore particularly helpful for models with closely interconnected sub-processes, complex interfaces or unclear applications, which usually require extensive, time-consuming testing with a conventional debugger.

The new X4 Apps deliver digital solutions even faster and simplify the deployment of processes in an X4 runtime environment, as well as the establishment of DevOps pipelines. For this purpose, X4 Apps combine related X4 projects into one X4 App. The processes and services contained therein can be automatically deployed as a small, easily deployable package as individual artifacts on an X4 server or, in the future, as microservices in various runtime environments. The advantage: With a continuous deployment pipeline, the path from development to deployment can be automated. Even minor changes can be quickly transferred to the productive X4 environment with DevOps pipelines based on X4 Apps. X4 Apps ensures that projects become even more efficient through structure and reuse, and that users always maintain an overview. In addition, the possibility of reuse saves time and resources.

Moreover, container virtualization has been further developed in X4 BPMS, making it easier to use in Docker containers. To this end, the size of the X4 BPMS Docker image has been reduced. Small Docker images promote efficient deployment of X4 apps and reduce resource requirements such as disk space. In addition, a faster startup of the X4 server instances after a deployment is possible.