Published Release Notes

Usability improvements in the Email Manager and Case Manager portals

Pega Email Bot™ customer service representatives (CSRs) working in the Email Manager, Case Manager, or Case Worker portals can now quickly reply to one recipient or to all recipients. CSRs can also view the sentiment analysis of an email (positive, negative, or neutral) for each received email, displaying the sentiment pattern for the entire email thread in a triage case. The email bot improvements add value for CSRs working in the portals and help them save time when responding to user requests.

For more information, see Understanding the email triage process and Replying to customers by email for an email bot.

Default Create stage in a case life cycle

Pega Platform™ now adds a default Create stage to a case life cycle every time you create a new case type, both in App Studio and Dev Studio. The default Create stage includes a view that users interact with to provide initial data before case processing begins. Consequently, you can now easily locate the view to make any necessary changes. In the background, the Create stage makes a case type independent from the starting process, which removes relevant advanced configurations and makes application development faster.

For more information, see Capture initial data faster with the default Create stage (8.5), The Create stage.

New database tables for email bots

Pega Email Bot™ now uses two new database tables that make the system more reliable and improve system performance. The pc_work_triage table stores complete information about email triage cases for the email bot. The pr_index_tracktriageactions table stores information about captured actions in triage cases.

Upgrade impact

During an upgrade to Pega Platform™ 8.5, a dedicated job scheduler automatically migrates resolved and open triage cases to these email bot tables in the background. If you expose additional properties as database columns or expose additional custom columns in the pc_work table, you must prepare your application for this automated migration. For more information, see Migrating triage cases to new tables.

What steps are required to update the application to be compatible with this change?

If the pc_work table in your application has no additional properties or custom columns, there is nothing to do; if it does, prior to an upgrade to Pega Platform 8.5, you must extend the pyPopulateColumnNamesExtension data transform to any exposed additional columns in legacy tables with this information.

For more information, see Database schema for email bot tables.

Optimized data schema upgrade

Several improvements have been made to optimize the speed of the data schema upgrade to help you experience minimal downtime during upgrade to Pega Platform 8.5™. The data schema upgrade process optimizations include the following improvements:

• Optimized database index creation during upgrade
• Optimized synchronization process to detect duplicate rules during the application import process
• A new upgrade setting for Pega Cloud® Services operators that reduces the time to upgrade clients that run large Pega applications, such as the CRM Suite

For more information, see Limit upgrade downtime with data schema upgrade improvements (8.5).

Conversation flow and smart shapes for the Digital Messaging chatbots

When creating Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) for Digital Messaging, chatbot developers can now use new conversation smart shapes in a dedicated flow, making the design process simpler, more robust, and intuitive. With the new smart shapes, the chatbot displays text messages or asks questions to users in one of several ways. In addition, developers do not have to create additional rules, switch tabs, or perform manual validation. You can associate the conversation flow that you create for your IVA with a business case, use the flow on its own, or reuse it in another conversation flow, improving the overall chatbot design process.

For more information, see Adding a stand-alone conversation process for a conversational channel, Adding a case type conversation process for a conversational channel, Editing the conversation smart shapes and Flow shapes.

Ability to forward emails in triage cases

When working on customer emails in the Email Manager or Case Manager portal, customer service representatives (CSRs) can now forward emails to additional stakeholders, for example, third-party vendors or sellers. As a result, CSRs that work with Pega Email Bot™ save time, improve responsiveness to customer inquiries, and make email triaging more efficient. The email bot keeps each forwarded email conversation in a separate email thread from the customer conversation, making the system more consistent and secure.

For more information, see Communicate with stakeholders on a customer query by forwarding emails and Forwarding emails to other stakeholders for an email bot.

Improved processing of correspondence details

When you send correspondence, the system now does not update the pxSendDateTime property on the pxCorrSummary work page that belongs to pyWorkPage. In previous versions of Pega Platform™, after sending correspondence, the update of the pxSendDateTime property could cause errors when working with an application at run time. To prevent such issues, Pega Platform now includes a pyEnableCorrSummary when rule that, by default, is set to false. If your business scenario requires updating the pxCorrSummary work page, set the when rule value to true.

For more information, see:

• Notifying participants about events
• Approval by email
• Sending automatic emails from cases

Support for picklists with parameterized data pages in App Studio in Cosmos React UI

You can now use data pages with parameters to populate a property of the picklist type with filtered results in App Studio. For example, in a survey case type, you can use a parameterized data page to configure cascading drop-down controls in which the values in a secondary drop-down list are based on the value that the user selects in the primary drop-down list. With dynamically-sourced picklists, you get greater flexibility in configuring picklists, and users see more accurate values.

For more information, see link Dropdown control Properties — General tab.

Outbound email templates for email bots

Pega Email Bot™ now provides built-in templates for outbound email and an option to create your own, custom templates. You can use this feature to standardize branding for your applications and the company through your communication channels. For example, customer service representatives (CSRs), who use the Email Manager or Case Manager portals, can apply these templates to strengthen your brand's presence in every email that they send or that the email bot automatically sends as an acknowledgment for a user email.

You select an outbound email template when you configure the Email channel. The system provides you with three built-in outbound email templates that you can select or modify to fit the requirements of your organization.

For more information, see Creating an Email channel and Creating outbound email templates.

Questionnaires available in App Studio

App Studio now supports authoring questionnaires, which in previous releases of Pega Platform™ were known as surveys. You can create questionnaires, add question pages, and populate the pages with questions of different types so that you can collect the exact data that your business processes require. For more efficient data management and reuse, data objects from a data model now store answers to questions, instead of autogenerated properties. For example, when a customer provides a date of birth in a questionnaire, and your application stores the date as a data object, you can conveniently reuse that data object in related cases. For greater flexibility, both standard Pega Platform and Cosmos React applications support questionnaires, however, some question types are unavailable in Cosmos React.

For more information, see:

• Create questionnaires in a low-code way in App Studio (8.6)
• Creating a questionnaire