Announced in February 2008, Process Commander V5.4 offers dozens of new capabilities for developers, application users, and system administrators, and resolves issues found in earlier versions.This announcement page summarizes V5.4 enhancements in three areas:

• System administration
• Security
• Performance

To learn about V5.4 features in other areas, see What's New in Process Commander 5.4.

System administration

These facilities support system administrators and others who operate Process Commander systems:

• During import of a ZIP archive, you can select individual rules or other instances to be imported. See How to Rename a Class
• The Organization, Division, and Organization Unit forms each have a Chart tab that allows additions and changes to the organization structure. Similarly, new tabs on the RuleSet, Access Role, Privilege, and Access Group forms provide fast access to these related rules.

• New Rule Management tools let you rename and delete classes, rename and delete RuleSets, or refactor a class while importing a ZIP archive. See How to Refactor RuleSets on Import.
• A new tool compares the rules present in two distinct installations, listing differences. How to compare the rules in two Process Commander systems
• Through privileges, you can control which problem assignments and problem flows appear in reports for administrators. See How to report on problem flows by organization level.
• An administrator or developer can fix assignments in error directly How to fix assignments that are deleted or do not match work objects.
• The optional Autonomic Event Services product provides an enhanced dashboard to give administrators near-real-time insights into the status and alerts in a multinode clustered system.
• Version 5.4 uses Adobe Flash rather than Scalable Vector Graphics displays. No SVG viewer is required to use any V5.4 feature.

Security

Application rules belong to the Security category. In V5.4, application rules assume a central role in providing users with access to RuleSets, and in linking applications to use cases, actors, and the business objectives of the application.

• Authorizing Users for Applications using Application Rules
• How to create an Application rule
• How Process Commander assembles a RuleSet list in a user profile
• How to manage passwords for an Application rule
• How to upgrade your system to use Application rules
• How to provide user access to applications using access groups
• How Process Commander assembles an Application RuleSet List
• How to design user access to applications across an organizational structure
• How users process work from multiple applications
• How to configure production RuleSets and work pools
• Troubleshooting: Unable to create Application Definition "unable to locate prerequisite" error from the application migration wizard
• Troubleshooting: Unable to create Application Definition, Normal RuleSet may not be below Pega RuleSet error from the application migration wizard

Performance

Version 5.4 includes performance enhancements that require no changes to your applications. Additional tactics for improved performance include:

• Faster Searches — Two new methods provide high-performance alternatives to use of the Obj-List method for searching instances. See Comparing the Obj-List-View, Obj-Browse and Obj-Filter methods.
• Reduced network traffic. — A new rule type (Rule-File-Bundle) and new data compression techniques reduce the size and number of HTTP messages needed to present a portal window. JavaScript and CSS files needed together are sent as a "bundle".
• An optional feature lets you reduce the number of work history details that are created automatically during flow execution. See How to control history instances written to the audit trail
• The Pega-RULES agent automatically prunes files and directories containing static content that are more than three days old.
• V5.4 preprocesses and compresses the source code text of JavaScript files before sending them to a browser. By eliminating comments and spaces, this reduces network traffic and workstation memory demand.
• The Usage Daemon uses less processing and requires less space for the hourly Log-Usage snapshots.
• Work object forms based on V5.4 standard rules can require less workstation memory than earlier forms; certain JavaScript code is not included by default.

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