Bonitasoft announced the
launch of its new open-source digital process automation platform, Bonita,
where the new Bonitasoft Customer Service Center will be managed and
continuously improved.
The new version of the platform offers an expanded set
of innovative features to fully support Bonitasoft's unique low-code approach:
to provide an open, extensible process automation platform that separates
coding tools from modeling tools so both developers and citizen developers
/ business users can use the open-source Bonita platform in ways appropriate to
their specific needs.
For example, Bonita applications are now composed of a
set of extensions (connectors, REST API extensions, themes, actor filters) that
can all be built externally to the platform, using the Bonita Software
Development Kit (SDK) and managed in each application using Maven.
For developers, this means that they can use the
Bonita SDK with their preferred tooling to build and import any extension.
Testing for each extension individually is now possible, making Bonita projects
more robust. And as the extensions are no longer bound to a specific Bonita
project, they can be easily reused, adding to developer efficiency.
On the side for citizen developers, they are now
free to use the drag-and-drop, BPMN-based modeling and design tools to model
and add business elements to processes with no worry about interfering with the
developers' work as the coding and technical development is done outside Bonita
Studio.
"The Bonita process automation platform is ideal for cross-functional,
multidisciplinary, agile ‘fusion teams' with different levels of technical
skills," said Miguel Valdes Faura, Bonitasoft CEO and co-founder. "Business
folks, like the project managers on the Customer Service Center (CSC) team, are
able to model, work on business data, build business rules, design user
interfaces, and more in Bonita Studio while the developers use Bonita software
development kits to independently create integrations and extensions, on their
preferred tooling."
Bonitasoft's new Customer Service Center was developed
in-house on the Bonita Cloud digital automation platform. The Customer Service
Center is the main communication hub between Bonitasoft and several very
different types of end users of the Bonita digital automation platform.
Developers, system architects, business users and others needed a central place
to quickly find resources such as Bonita updates, downloads, access to
licenses, technical support, questions about "how to do" something, request for
training or additional services, access to documentation, release notes,
videos, and "what's new."
Development of the cloud-based Customer Service Center
using PaaS infrastructure presented some
typical technical challenges. But as the Bonita platform offers wide
extensibility, the Customer Service Center automation project team succeeded by
leveraging technologies such as containers, custom and native Bonita
connectors, REST API extensions, SDKs, and Java Functions. Its implementation
leverages full containerization (using Docker) and orchestration (via
Kubernetes) supported by Bonita Cloud.
"Our ‘one-stop' Customer Service Center is a simple,
practical tool for Bonita developers and business users," says Shamil
Hassanaly, Chief Customer Officer at Bonitasoft. "They deserve an easy-to-use,
‘fully loaded' place to find what they need when they need it."
Further, the new Bonita release offers a solid set of
customizable Bonita user applications for its different types of end users:
internal application users like employees; external application users like
customers; process and applications administrators; and platform administrators:
- The
Bonita Applications Directory, which shows the list of all the Bonita
applications a logged-in user can access and use
- The
Bonita User Application, accelerates development with a starting point for
customized interfaces for any type of end user
- The
Bonita Administrator Application with all the resources process and
applications administrators need to manage deployed applications
- A
Super Administrator application, with all the resources platform administrators
need to manage the Bonita platform
The Bonita Community open-source edition includes all
capabilities required to develop and deploy process automation projects and can
be downloaded here.