Summary

On May 13, 2009, Pegasystems Product Management hosted a live webinar for customers and partners interested in Process Commander V5.5 features.

This article presents selected information from that event.

Details

Presentation

The Webinar presentation is available in PDF format as What is new in PRPC and SmartBPM 5.5?
(2.6 MB)

Chat session transcript

Below are questions and Product Management responses from the webinar chat session. Both questions and answers are edited for clarity and accuracy.

#	Area / Question	Response
1	Composite portals Will the new panels be incorporated into the Smart Investigate 5.5 or will they only be for new harness rules developed at our site?	Many frameworks teams are moving to V5.5 and composite portals in 2Q09. As of today, SmartInvestigate has not committed to this direction.
2	Composite portals Are these customized portals still related to/assigned to an access group?	Yes
3	Composite portals Is multiple-open-work-objects based on multiple Threads?	Yes
4	Personal Edition Do you plan release a personal version of this version?	Yes. The Personal Edition 5.4 — examples and instructional material are being revised to reflect 5.5, including some new features. This should be available soon.
5	Application Profile Will sizing reflect our methodology - especially with respect to the overlap between the Elaboration and Construction phase?	Yes. The sizing is based on version 2 of the methodology.
6	Platforms Is V5.5 supported on WebSphere 7.0? If not, when do you expect to support WebSphere 7.0?	WAS 7 was not tested as part of the 5.5 GA Release, so it was not listed in the Platform Support Guide when V5.5 was released.  Since March 2009, WAS 7 was tested successfully and now appears in the latest  Platform Support Guide.
7	Direct Capture of Objectives Is DCO useful for existing applications or is it intended for new projects?	DCO is useful for both  new and existing applications.  refer to the PDN for a full list of features
8	Locking Does V5.5 have any improvements or changes to work object locking features?	No. Unchanged from V5.4.
9	Direct Capture Does the project sizing feature of DCO generate a project plan and resource loading view?	No. It provides estimates for project sizing used for budget planning.
10	SmartLayout feature In a V5.5 system, can you check out a section rule that was created in a v5.4 system, add a SmartLayout and save it (check in)?	Yes.
11	Upgrades Is V5.5 backward compatible with V5.3, V5.4?	Yes, we have made great efforts to ensure backwards capabilities with applications built in previous releases.
12	Performance Are there any enhancements from a non-functional perspective? For example, does it take less time now to have Process Commander load faster in the JVM?	Work has been done to streamline HTML generation as well as make better use of memory via page passivation and caches.
13	User Interface In V5.4, we can copy/paste individual layout cells. In V5.5, can we copy and paste entire layouts?	No. Please send us descriptions of your needs and wants in this area.
14	Activities How many levels of nested looping are supported?	There is no stated limit.
15	Training on V5.5 Is there any way I can learn and practice Process Commander V5.5 in my own system?	A Personal Edition V5.5 is expected to be available in the next few months. Education Services courses based on V5.5 are scheduled for June 2009.
16	Performance In V5.5 is there a way to cause a Process Commander system to populate its rule cache earlier than when users first execute the rule?	There are several different caches. For the rules assembly cache, if the rules are mostly stable, you can "prime" that cache at startup based on a snapshot of rules from a previous run (in V5.3 and later). See Working with the Rules Assembly Cache.
17	User Interface Can the TreeGrid control work with embedded data classes?	Yes. The TreeGrid control works from a clipboard structure. So if you can create a clipboard structure of the data you want to show, it works.
18	User Interface Does the Rich Text Editor <> button insert fields from the application? Can it show a list of available property names or does the developer still need to know the names?	You can select the property name using SmartPrompt in a modal window.
19	Correspondence Correspondence rules do not identify properties which are not in Data-Party class but in one of the inherited classes when using pyWorkParty, even though we define this in the Pages & Classes tab. Is this still true in V5.5?	Yes. This is not changed in V5.5.
20	User Interface The XML Parse rule in V5.5 has an an Upgrade button to support transition to the new format. Can a similar Upgrade button support the transition to the new UI features such as SmartLayouts?	Your suggestion will be considered for a future release.
21	On the XML rule and the XML Parse rule, when a developer changes the tree structure will Process Commander change the model and parsing automatically?	Yes.
22	Integration Is the the purpose of the SOAP connector fire-and-forget feature to implement asynchronous calls?	Yes, and it also handles locking conditions and retries.  You no longer have to code for this.
23	PDF files Which version of Adobe is supported in V5.5?	Version 8
24	PDF files So, I could use Adobe 8 and create a PDF template, then have the Process Commander PDF forms feature merge the template, now filled with data, with static PDF's?	Yes
25	Lucene search When V5.5 is initially installed, is Lucene indexing of Data- objects and work objects disabled by default?	Yes. Rule indexing is initially enabled, Data- and Work- indexing are not enabled.
27	Flows Can BPEL be imported into Process Commander and rendered as a flow for implementation?	Yes.V5.5 can import BPEL and can also generate BPEL from existing flows.
28	Flows Are the Router and Notify shapes not included in Visio stencil v5.5 +?	No. These two shapes still are available as in earlier versions. However, in V5.5, you don't have to expose them as shapes in in the flow diagram.
29	Flows If the Router shapes are not shown in the flow diagram, how will a business user know that the work object is routed (at a particular assignment)?	You can obtain Router and Notify information can from the generated documentation, or interactively by right-clicking the assignment shape on the Diagram tab.
30	Reporting Can the secondary (alternate) database be read by some other (non-Process Commander) application?	The alternate database is intended to reduce the performance impact of reporting. Since it is a copy of all or part of the live PegaRULES database, it can be accessed (read-only) by external systems, but that is not the purpose.
31	Flows An imported BPEL file shows as a flow rule that uses standard Process Commander Visio shapes?	Yes.
32	Rule Management With the RuleSet maintenance wizard, are we able to rename only a few, specific RuleSet Version of a RuleSet, leaving other Versions unchanged?	No. The Tools > Rule Management > Copy/Move a RuleSet facility works on all the versions of a RuleSet.
33	Rule Management With the RuleSet maintenance wizard, when you select merge, does it mean you keep the highest rule version?	You determine what takes precedence during merge.
34	Rule Management With the RuleSet maintenance wizard, when doing a Compress, can the target version number be set to something other than 01-01-01?	Yes. You can designate the target version.
35	Rule Management With the RuleSet maintenance wizard, when performing a RuleSet copy, can we select which rules to copy?,	No. All rules in a RuleSet (or RuleSet version) are copied.
36	Rule Management With the RuleSet maintenance wizard how does the Compress operation differ from the Skim tool?	There are two tools, but under the covers they share common plumbing.
37	Refactor Rules While moving the rules to the top layers using refactoring will the rules present in the current class be deleted?	They are not deleted. Rather, their Availability is set to No.
38	Security When a flow action or harness rule is configured on the Security tab to record each use, where is the audit data stored?	The system records each use of the flow action form or of a work object that uses the harness rule (even read-only) in an instances of the Log-DataAccessAudit class.
39	Security When a flow action or harness rule is configured on the Security tab to record each use, is there way to report/inform/alert?	You can create reports to review the the Log-DataAccessAudit instances. No alert facility is built-in.
40	System Operations Like other tools, the Purge / Archive process also stores archived ZIP files in ServiceExport directory.  Will such files be removed immediately, like the other files in that directory?	No.
41	Rule Management In V5.5, we can use Compress instead of Skim to consolidate multiple existing RuleSet Versions to one new RuleSet Version?	Yes.
42	User Interface When building harness, section, or flow action rules with the new UI features, are Copy and Paste operations available?	Yes, in most but not all places.