Published Release Notes

Touch response supported on mobile devices

When displayed on a mobile device, all active elements of the Pega^® Platform user interface now respond to touch by changing their appearance. No additional configuration is available or necessary.

Support for conversational user channels

You can now communicate with users and customers of a Pega^® Platform application by using Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant acting as a conversational user channel. You can now use Facebook Messenger, Alexa voice commands, standard email, or mobile texting (SMS) to interact with Pega Platform, for example, to open a case or display a menu of available options. In addition, in the Facebook channel configuration, you define text analyzer rules for advanced text analysis, based on artificial intelligence, so that the system provides the best response to users.

For more information, see Intelligent Virtual Assistant.

Email Wizard support discontinued

Pega Platform™ no longer includes the Email Wizard. This wizard helped set up an email service for sending and receiving email in Pega Platform. The wizard generated an email account, an email listener, and an email service rule.

After an upgrade to Pega Platform 8.4 and later, existing clients must create new email accounts and email channels in App Studio. When you configure a new email channel, you add your email accounts so that customers can send and receive email by using the Pega Email Bot. Configuration of an email channel automatically generates an email listener and service email rules.

For more information, see Creating an email account and Building an Email channel.

Searching for Pulse messages available in spaces

Pega Platform™ now supports searching for Pulse messages within a space. For greater accuracy of the results, you can search by applying different filters, such as keywords, message authors, and a time range for posting of the messages. The results return private and public posts, comments, and attachments that match the search filters. When the result is a comment, Pulse displays the whole message thread for full context.

For more information, see Search for Pulse messages in spaces (8.5), Searching for Pulse messages in spaces.

Integrate your application with external Kafka clusters

Configure your application to use an external Kafka cluster for managing real-time data. By having an external Stream service provider, you can perform such maintenance tasks as an upgrade or hotfix deployment faster because external nodes do not require restarting.

For more information, see Externally managed Stream service.

Relevant records to define reusable assets

Relevant records describe the collection of rules that refine the behavior, presentation, and definition of a case or data type. They are commonly used to designate records from an inherited class as important or reusable in a child class.

Use relevant records to define information displayed in certain Pega 7 Platform application screens and fields. The Pega 7 Platform provides a number of items marked as relevant records, and you can further manage relevant records for your own case and data types.

For more information, see Relevant records.

Functionality of the pyInvokeRESTConnector rule and the pxDeferenceEndpoint rule moved to core engine

The functionality of the pyInvokeRESTConnector rule and the pxDeferenceEndpoint rule has been moved into the core engine code of the Pega 7 Platform. This change provides more consistent behavior, reduces maintenance, and reduces the risk of regression issues. As a result, you can no longer customize these rules, and upgrading the Pega 7 Platform requires special considerations if you previously customized these rules.

For more information, see Upgrading with customized pyInvokeRESTConnector and pxDeferenceEndpoint rules.

Schema not found error when importing a Rule-Admin-Product file

If you import a Rule-Admin-Product file (RAP) file that includes a schema that has a view, grammar parsing changes can mean that the Pega 7 Platform is unable to find the schema.

To enable the Pega 7 Platform to find the schema:

1. Review the error message that indicates that the schema was not found and identify the following items:
   • The name of the schema that is causing the error
   • The table name in the format: wrong_schema_name.table_name...
   • The DDL that the Pega 7 Platform is trying to apply
2. Use the table name to identify the correct schema name in your system. This schema is usually your data schema, but might also be an external database.
3. Download the DDL.
4. Correct the schema name and save the DDL.
5. Manually apply the DDL.

Text analytics models migration

Pega Platform™ now supports the exporting and importing of text analytics models. For example, you can export a model to a production system so that it can gather feedback data. You can then update the model with the collected feedback data to increase the model's accuracy.

Upgrade impact

In versions of Pega Platform earlier than 8.3, the training data for text models was stored in the database. In Pega Platform version 8.3 and later, the training data for text models is stored in Pega Repository. You cannot build new models without setting the repository. After the repository is set, all text models are automatically upgraded and will work normally.

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

After a successful upgrade, set the repository in Prediction Studio before building or updating any Natural Language Processing (NLP) models.  In Prediction Studio, click Settings > Text Model Data Repository.

For more information, see:

• Increase the accuracy of text analytics models by adding feedback data (8.3)
• Exporting text analytics models
• Importing text analytics models

More flexibility when working with revisions and change requests

Pega Platform™ 8.5 provides several enhancements to the business change management process. Revision managers can now work on any revision, including revisions created by other revision managers, as well as create change requests that consist only of a new rule, with no updates to existing rules. Strategy designers and revisions managers can also run simulations on a revision package as part of the change management process.

For more information, see Increase the flexibility of your business change management process with improvements to revision management (8.5).