Published Release Notes

CyberArk password vault support added for Pega database

With the CyberArk password vault, you can store your systems' passwords in a secure, central location and retrieve them from that location instead of directly entering credentials into the systems. This support is available only for IBM WebSphere environments.

For more information, see Pega Platform deployment guides.

Changes to URL format for Pega Web Mashup

The format of Pega Web Mashup URLs now supports multiple mashups on a single web page. The new URL format prevents a mashup from sharing cookies with another mashup.

If you want to include multiple mashups on a single web page and one of the mashups was created before 8.3, you must regenerate the mashup to reflect the new URL format.

For more information, see <link to help topic>.

Ability to import and export Intelligent Virtual Assistant or Email Bot training data

You can now copy Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) or Pega Email Bot™ training data between Pega Platform™ application environments by performing an export and import action. Importing and exporting training data between Pega Platform application environments results in greater accuracy of entity detection. Entities are detected by the system in a chat conversation, including attachments, to help respond to the user correctly, and consist of proper nouns that fall into a commonly understood category such as a person, organization, or a ZIP code. The ability to copy training data also makes it easier to maintain IVA or Email Bot, and build its artificial intelligence.

For more information, see Copying training data to another environment and Copy training data and model to another IVA or Email Bot environment.

Support for multiple work queues in the Email Manager portal

Pega Email Bot™ now provides multiple work queues in the Email Manager portal. With this functionality, operators, such as customer service representatives, can now triage cases more efficiently by selecting different work queues. Operators have access to work queues only for the current Pega Platform™ application.

For more information, see Email Manager portal.

Use Page-Change-Class method to change a Page class

With the release of Pega Platform™ 8.3, using the Property-Set method to change the Page class shows a guardrail warning. Use the Page-Change-Class method to change the Page class instead.

For more information about the Page-Change-Class method, see Changing the class of a page and Page-Change-Class method.

Support added for multiple mashups

You can now include multiple mashups on a single webpage or browser, even if the mashups have different application and authentication requirements. Use mashups to embed a Pega Platform™ application as a gadget on your website. For example, you can embed Web Chatbot and Self-Service Advisor on the same website.

For more information about mashups, see Configuring the Mashup channel.

Automatic model training when mapping entities to case properties in Email Bot

You can now initiate automatic feedback to entity models in Pega Email Bot™, during manual mapping of email content to a case property.

To enable automatic feedback, you set the Work-Channel-Triage.pyIsRuntimeFeedback rule to true in Pega Platform™. By default this feature is disabled. Enabling this feature ensures that the email bot is more responsive by automatically copying detected entities, such as names, locations, dates, and ZIP codes, to case type properties of a case type.

For more information, see Email triage, Email channel NLP model and Enabling the NLP model training for the email channel.

Automatic management of run-time context for background processing

Management of system run-time context is now automatic. You no longer need to manually modify the AsyncProcessor requestor type context to make a queue processor or job scheduler work after importing or upgrading an application. Additionally, you do not need to manually modify the AsyncProcessor requestor type context to make new queue processors and job schedulers work.

For more information, see System general landing page and Automating the runtime context management of background processes.

Upgrade impact

After upgrade, you manage the runtime context of your background processing in System Runtime Context instead of in the deprecated AsyncProcessor requestor type.

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

Select the Include in background processing option in the Advanced section of the application rule form for all applications that use background processing (such as Job Schedulers and Queue Processing). When this option is enabled, the system automatically includes the rulesets (for the application and its components) in System Runtime Context used for resolving and running Queue Processors and Job Schedulers. Also, when the option is enabled, the application is placed on the System Runtime Context list during application rule saves (such as during application import and migration).

Improved performance for work ID generation

Work IDs are now generated in batches and managed with dynamic system settings. Batch-based ID generation improves performance and scalability, which reduces the time that it takes to migrate data to a Pega Platform™ application.

For more information, see Default dynamic system settings data instances.

Upgrade impact

In a multi-node environment, the new ID generation method can assign IDs that are not as sequential as in the previous method.

For example, in a 2-node cluster, the IDs could come in from each node in batches of 1000, resulting in successive Work objects having IDs that differ by 1000 (such as 1, 1001, 2,1002, 3, 1003). As more Work objects are created the gaps can get filled. However, there might still be gaps left in the generated IDs.  For example, if a node crashes or shuts down, some IDs would be missing, or if a node has given out 600 IDs from a batch of 1000 IDs, then 400 IDs would remain unused. In most situations, this should not be an issue. 

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

If you must have nearly sequential IDs or cannot accept gaps in IDs (and do not need the performance improvement), then you can change the dynamic system setting to disable the new ID generation method. 

The dynamic system setting for this feature is idGenerator/defaultBatchSize. The feature is enabled by default with a defaultBatchSize of 1000. To disable the feature, set the value to 1.

Redirectguests mashup configuration has been removed

The authentication/redirectguests server configuration and data-pega-redirectguests attribute have been removed and are no longer required when you configure a mashup. This prevents you from needing to maintain multiple nodes to support some use cases that require the configuration value to be true and other uses cases that require the configuration value to be false.

For more information, see Configuring the Mashup channel.