Published Release Notes

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 resiliency and observability of email infrastructure

Pega Platform now has several enhancements to improve the resiliency and observability of its email infrastructure. With the following enhancements, you can improve service quality and reduce maintenance costs:

• Pega Predictive Diagnostic Cloud alerts notify you of connection timeouts and help you troubleshoot more quickly.
• Default values for email settings ensure that your email configuration is optimal and follows best practices.
• Email listeners automatically retry test connectivity upon start-up if the connection fails or authentication fails.
• Improved logging provides meaningful messages and log categorization to support debugging.

For more information, see List of events and notifications in PDC.

More specialized data fields

Pega Platform™ now provides more prescriptive and specialized options to reuse data, which replace data relationships. Now, to reuse information across your application, you can create a field that references a case type, a data object, data embedded in a case, or a data page. As a result, you do not need detailed knowledge about how your system stores data to successfully reuse information in your business processes.

For more information, see:

• Creating fields for capturing data
• Embedding data in a case
• Referencing a data page

New passivation and activation activities

Two new activities have been implemented, pyPrePassivation and pyPostActivation, which are run every time operator passivation occurs, regardless of the node quiesce state. These activities save and restore the requestor state during passivation and activation. In order for the pyPrePassivation or pyPostActivation activity to be run as expected, you must implement the activity by using the correct Applies To class (@baseclass).

The previous activities that were run during the quiesce process, pyPreQuiescePassivation and pyPostQuiesceActivation, have been deprecated.

For more information, see the Pega 7.2.1 High Availability Administration Guide.

Editable list of build-on application features

Pega Platform™ now provides you with an option to edit the list of features in your application stack. Now you can define the order of the features to generate application documentation that lists the features by their priorities instead of the time of creation. For example, you can reorder the features when you want to communicate to your stakeholders which elements are top priorities.

For more information, see Learning about feature order.

Cosmos React-UI supports custom authentication

Pega Platform™ now supports custom authentication in applications that use Cosmos React-UI. Depending on the needs of your users and the functionality of your application, you might need to write custom authentication schemes to meet specific requirements. 

Clients that use custom authentication in their applications can now take advantage of the Cosmos React-UI.

For more information, see Securing Cosmos React-UI applications.

Simplified support for external log management systems

Simplified support for external log management systems such as ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) makes it easier to implement an external log management system. An external log management system can improve access to system log files that help diagnose and debug issues by eliminating the need to download log files from each node in the cluster.

For information about configuring ELK, see Configuring ELK for log management.

For information about using Kibana to view log files, see Pega logs in Kibana.

Support for the WebChat conversational user channel

You can now embed standard chat capability on any website by creating the WebChat channel interface as the Pega^® Intelligent Virtual Assistant. Users can communicate with a Pega Platform application, for example, to open a case to report a problem or to display a menu of commands to ask for assistance. The WebChat channel does not require any additional accounts or third-party installations, and you have full control over the end-to-end communication.

For more information, see Configuring the WebChat channel.

Ability to annotate case attachments

Pega^® Platform application users can now add annotations to images that are attached to cases. For example, users can draw around an area of an image to highlight a faulty element of the device. Users can annotate all images, except for signature images or attachments that are stored in Pega Cloud or other external data stores. The annotated case attachments replace the original ones.

For more information, see Case attachment annotations.

Authentication service for basic credentials

A new type of authentication service is available for authenticating operators by using basic credentials (user ID and password). The default Pega Platform™ login is now an instance of this type of authentication service. All basic credentials authentication services include mobile authentication with the OAuth 2.0 protocol and Proof Key for Code Exchange (PKCE). You no longer have to create a custom authentication service to support mobile applications.

For more information, see Configuring a basic authentication service.