We’re excited to introduce Appian Process Mining, the easiest way to analyze, improve, and monitor your business processes. Cut through the noise of large data sets with capabilities that leverage the power of artificial intelligence to provide valuable, actionable insights.
In large processes, activities often occur out of order, multiple times, or get skipped altogether. These deviations from your ideal target process can lead to wasted time, wasted resources, bottlenecks, and compliance violations. It is practically impossible for a human to identify these deviations or make any meaningful determinations from the raw data alone. This is where Appian Process Mining steps in to help.
Appian Process Mining consists of two modules that work hand in hand: Mining Prep and Process Mining.
Mining Prep enables you to extract, transform, and load business-process data using low-code actions—ultimately turning data sets from your IT systems into event logs suitable for analysis with Appian Process Mining. Mining Prep enables you to perform complex data transformations, even if you don’t have in-depth technical knowledge. With Mining Prep, you can:
Spend less time consolidating data and more time discovering insights into your processes!
Process Mining is where you perform all of your analysis and monitor your implemented improvements. When you import process data as event logs, Process Mining automatically creates an easy-to-read model that visualizes how your business processes actually work in practice. The following image shows a discovered model that Process Mining automatically generated from an event log for a purchase process.
Process Mining allows you to:
These insights allow you to adjust and fine-tune your processes to create immediate value. What’s more, with Process Mining you can create a constant feedback loop and continually refine and measure the results of your changes.
Want to learn even more about process mining with Appian? Check out our new Process Mining docs!
With the release of Appian Portals, we’re making Appian a one-stop shop for digital transformation. Using Appian’s low-code app development for your public websites enables you to be more agile where it matters most: connecting effortlessly to the people you do business with.
With Portals, you can use the Appian development environment you already know to create powerful, branded, and information-rich interfaces that satisfy a wide range of business needs – quote requests, customer onboarding, and public records access, to name a few.
Portals is part of Appian Cloud, and includes the built-in security and compliance you expect from an Appian offering. Our low-code tools prevent developers from making the most common security errors. We’ve got your back in other ways, too: you can build your Portals to scale elastically, and we support Google’s reCAPTCHA v3 to combat bot activity.
Learn more about how to work with your data, or enable users to upload and access documents seamlessly.
Combine people, technologies, and data into a single workflow with Appian automation. In this release, we've improved on existing features to enable you to automate faster and more simply.
Robotic process automation (RPA) allows you to delegate the most repetitive and low-level tasks to digital workers, freeing up your human workforce to focus on more complex tasks that require judgment and complex reasoning.
We are happy to announce that the RPA task recorder and new robotic process designer are now out of preview! Developers can use the task recorder and new designer to rapidly develop, test, and execute automations. The new designer now appears for all newly created robotic processes and supports all of the previous designer's capabilities. Existing robotic processes using the previous design interface won't see this change. Additionally, task recorder supports all major browsers and browser interactions.
The RPA 8.0 release is the culmination of the features and enhancements added to the task recorder and new robotic process designer. Some of these features are described below.
New look and feel: The task recorder is now more interactive and features updated iconography and colors. Additionally, the task recorder is now installed when launched, so there is no storage space impact on your production resources.
Internet Explorer 11 and Edge (IE Mode) support: Many legacy applications are designed to only work in Internet Explorer. To help you rapidly develop robotic processes that interact with these kinds of legacy systems, the task recorder now supports two additional web browsers. You can launch the task recorder to capture your interactions within Internet Explorer 11 and Edge (IE Mode).
Customers who upgrade to RPA 8.0 can edit selectors while recording in Internet Explorer 11 or Edge (IE Mode). The task recorder will highlight the elements that match your edited configuration so you can be confident in your changes. Easily configure the most robust selector possible without ever leaving the task recorder.
Firefox support: Additionally, you can now use Firefox to capture your browser interactions. Task recorder now supports the most popular modern browsers, making it easier to automate your most common activities.
Additional interactions available: You can now record additional interactions on web browsers, such as Is element present, Close browser, Right-click on element, and Double-click on element. These new capabilities reduce the amount of time you spend manually updating or creating actions in the robotic process designer after you're finished recording.
Debugging: You can now debug a robotic process in the new designer. Debugging in the new designer is now easier to troubleshoot and follow a workflow as it executes, and as a result your time to test, refine, and launch automations is drastically reduced. Debugging lets you see how a robotic process execution occurs in a real-time test, rather than having to execute the process and see where it encounters exceptions or errors. You don't have to set up all of the other components of the process to start testing if your configurations will work.
Execution monitoring: When you're ready to proceed with a real execution, you'll notice we've also updated the Execution page. When you start a robotic process execution, you can view the status of actions and groups as they are executed. You'll also see when variable values update during the process execution. These updates will make it easier to identify the action status, so developers and operations managers can quickly and easily monitor and troubleshoot a robotic process while it executes.
Add and configure For Each loops more easily: You can now configure loops to iterate through a list of items using a For Each pattern. In this way, the robotic process repeats the specified actions for each item until it reaches the end of the list. Designing loops in a robotic process is now more consistent with how you're used to designing them in other parts of Appian.
Add and reference variables more easily: Robotic process variables now appear in a grid in the configuration pane. You'll find them alongside other configurations for the robotic process, making it easier to reference variables or add new ones as you build and configure actions. If you rename a variable, we also update your action configurations to match, saving you time and making your processes easier to maintain. Your variables are always visible and accessible, making for a more consistent Appian design experience.
Additional actions available: This release also includes the Start process action, which enables you to use more modular design patterns so you can reuse common actions without having to create them from scratch each time.
We've updated our main robotic process templates to use the new robotic process designer. When creating a new robotic process, you'll see actions pre-populated into the new designer to jumpstart your development!
Analysts and stakeholders rely on reports and visualizations to find key information about complex automation implementations. To help these users get key information faster, we've updated some reporting features within RWM 5.6 to reflect recommended design patterns for robotic processes.
We've updated RWM to reflect Appian's recommendation of processing items in a list by calling a robotic process from a process model rather than using queues and queue items. Dashboards for existing processes that use queue items won't change, but charts and graphs for new robotic processes have been simplified to showcase more valuable information such as the overall execution results and duration. Within the Control Center, the Queue tab has been removed if no queues exist.
RWM 5.6 also removes support for external RPA vendors. Learn more in Deprecations.
Low-code development with Appian allows enterprises to easily leverage their data and stand-up applications in days instead of months. This release brings even more power and simplicity to that process with record-level security, auto-generated record views, and even more powerful expressions.
Recently, we've introduced some major features in Appian Records that make it easy to transform, relate, and access your enterprise data when you enable data sync on your record types.
This release, we're excited to introduce another major feature that will now make it easy to secure your enterprise data at a more granular level: record-level security.
Security is integral to the development process, and when it comes to your enterprise data, it's critical that the right people have access to the right data.
However, controlling who can access which rows of data typically requires technical leads and data experts. This is often difficult to maintain and can lead to slow performance as your enterprise grows.
See how easy it is to 1) configure flexible, no-code security rules, 2) test your configurations, and 3) see your security in action.
With record-level security, you can specify who can see which records by configuring security rules on your record type.
Security rules allow you to translate your complex security requirements into plain language so they're easy to configure and maintain. All you have to do is answer two questions: Who is a part of the security rule, and which records should they see?
You can select users found in groups, or for a more dynamic configuration, you can select users found in User or Group fields.
For example, if a support engineer should only see their assigned cases, you can assign users from the assignedEngineer field to your security rule. Now, each engineer will only ever see cases they're assigned to—ensuring your security logic is up-to-date, even when your data changes.
You can even select users who can view related records as members of your security rules!
For example, if a user can view a customer, they should also be able to view that customer's support cases. With this configuration option, you can automatically extend the security rules defined on the Customer record type to the Case record type.
Not only does this option accelerate your configuration, it simplifies maintenance since any changes to the security rules on the Customer record type will be applied to the Case record type.
Once you select your members, you can add security conditions to further specify which records they should view. These configuration options allow you to implement your security in a sustainable and agile way.
Once you create your security rules, you can test and verify them to see how the rules affect different users in your environment.
Without leaving the record type, you can see the number of records visible to a selected user, and even preview the list of records available to them. You can also disable and enable security rules to see how each rule impacts the user and verify that each configuration is correct.
With your security rules configured and verified, all you need to do now is save the record type for your security to be automatically applied anywhere the record type is referenced—that's it! No further action needed.
Now, when two users view the same report, each user will only see the data they're allowed to view. For example, an administrator can see information about all support cases, while a support engineer can only see insights about her assigned cases.
Not only can you leverage User and Group field types in your security rules, you can also use these field types to establish your record type relationships.
Now, when you add your relationships, you can choose User or Group type fields as your common fields. This means you could connect an Employee record type and an Employee Contact record type by the shared username field.
We've also made it easier to manage record field references throughout your applications by adding impact analysis on your record fields.
Now, whenever you go to remove a field, change a field type, or change the source of your record type, you'll see a list of objects that will be impacted by your changes. Since the impact analysis is prompted before you make your changes, you can easily avoid invalidating field references throughout your applications.
But don't worry, if you choose to continue with your data modeling changes (like deleting a field, or changing a field type), we'll warn you about any invalid field references in your objects using design guidance so you can quickly identify and resolve any errors.
For example, if an interface contains a reference to a changed or deleted field, you'll see a warning icon in the object header. By clicking this icon, you can find all references to the invalid field within the object.
Speaking of your record fields, we've made some enhancements to custom record fields created with the Aggregate Related Record Fields template. Now, you can 1) group by aggregate custom record fields, and 2) experience better error handling when they don't have permission to the related record type referenced in the custom record field calculation.
While you've always been able to use aggregate custom record fields in your measures in charts and queries, you now also have the option to use them as groupings. This means that you can use aggregate custom record fields to create even more advanced reports.
For example, Appian Developers can have many certification levels depending on the courses they complete, but you may only want to know the latest certification level for each user in your organization.
You could create a custom record field using the Aggregate Related Record Fields template to get each user's latest certification, then use the custom field as the grouping in a chart to show the count of users by their latest certification level.
As you reference more of your aggregate custom record fields throughout your applications, we want to ensure your records are secure. That's why we check that users have permission to both the base record type and the related record type referenced in the custom field before they can view the aggregate data.
To provide a more seamless user experience, we've improved the error handling for when users don't have permission to view the referenced related record type. Now, those users will only see null values returned from the custom record field and can continue viewing any data they do have access to.
In addition to no-code security and other record field enhancements, we've continued to make enhancements to data sync so you can access and update more of your data from Appian.
This release, you can now sync up to 50,000 rows of data at a time when you use an immediate sync to update record types that use a database table as the source. This means you can use Appian to update more of your enterprise data, then immediately see those changes reflected in your record type. You'll also notice new troubleshooting enhancements, as well as more reliable syncs.
Finally you'll appreciate our latest performance improvement to querying your related record data. This release, we've made queries faster for analytics dashboards that use related records joined using a common text field. You will notice load times up to twice as fast, and the largest performance benefits will show for queries that aggregate data or query data across multiple relationships.
Now that you're up-to-date on our low-code data features, we're excited to show you more ways you can expose relevant data to your users. Check out our latest improvements like auto-generated record views, a new area chart component, and our new style options for the file upload component.
We already save you time by auto-generating a Summary view for a record type. With this release, save even more by auto-generating all record views. The best part? You can effortlessly pull data from related record types into the generated views.
Simply tell us the data you want to include and whether you want to use existing objects. We'll create the necessary interface and configure the new interface as a view on the record type.
Speaking of record views, you now have the flexibility to rename all your record views, including the Summary view.
Choose the default name, or personalize the name with an expression that leverages existing expression rules, constants, and more. Get the name that you need in the language that you need. Learn more about defining your Summary view.
Have you ever deleted a record field and broke your entire record list, only to manually reconfigure it all again? Well, now you don't have to! Simply click the Reset List button to regenerate your record list with the latest fields in your record type.
As you generate and build your interfaces, you'll also notice a new area chart component.
With the addition of this chart, you can now easily show trends over time and part-to-whole relationships. With different layering options, you can use area charts to answer various questions about your business.
For example, use a stacked area chart to show the total number of cases closed each month, and also see how many of them were closed on time or overdue. Or, use a percent-to-total area chart to see which regions received the most cases over the year.
In addition to adding a new component, we've enhanced one of our most popular components, the read-only grid, with a new drag and drop feature for columns in design mode.
Now, you can reorganize lists of data using a performant and familiar design experience—just drag and drop your columns where you need them.
The record picker is another popular component that we've enhanced this release with a new parameter option called Show record links. This parameter lets you specify whether or not the selected records display links to their summary views.
By setting this parameter to false, you can hide record links on your reference data, like in the “Choose a Case Priority” example above. By default, all selected records will display links to their summary views, as shown in the “Choose a Customer“ example above.
Our next component enhancement in this release gives you new styling options in the File Upload component.
Now, you can display the file upload button to end users as a label, an icon, or both. You can even customize the placeholder text to fit your specifications, and choose whether or not to display the “Scanning for virus” message whenever a user uploads a file.
But perhaps you don't want to create your interfaces from scratch? You don't have to. We're committed to providing you with interface examples in every release.
Check out the new Dual Picklist pattern, Order Summary template, and Message Inbox template in Interface Designer for inspiration for your next interface.
With new Display Name options in the site object, you can now configure the name of your site as that displays to your end users.
For example, instead of displaying the prefix in your site name, like “ARC Customer Management,” you can set a static value of “Customer Management.”
Or maybe your needs are more complex than that. With the new expression option, you can configure site names that are unique for each user. You can even localize the site name for your users around the world.
When you're not building powerful UIs, you're probably creating expression rules to query and access your enterprise data.
To help you query data more easily, we've enhanced the query editor so you can now query records. Additionally, we've added more areas of the product where you can use expressions to dynamically populate data.
It's easy to query your record fields and related record fields using the a!queryRecordType() function, and now, it's even easier to configure your queries when you use the query editor. That's right, starting this release, you can now use the query editor to query your records.
Using the query editor, you can select the record fields and related record fields to query, apply filters, and sort and limit your data as needed-—all without using a single line of code. Then, with just the click of a button, you'll get a fully configured instance of a!queryRecordType() to return the data you need.
While you're configuring your queries, you may notice a new operator available in a!queryLogicalExpression: “AND_ALL”.
This new operator will allow you to more easily filter your one-to-many related data by ensuring that a single related record satisfies all filter conditions in order to be returned by a query.
For example, in the expression above, the query will only return customers that have at least one active order costing over $100.
If you want to create more complex queries, like return any customers that have at least one active order and another order costing over $100, you can use the “AND” operator. Learn more about the operators available in a!queryLogicalExpression.
We know your conditional logic can be large and complex, often requiring nested if() or choose() statements. But not anymore! Now, you can use a single function to check a value against multiple conditions: a!match()
This new function drastically simplifies the configuration and maintenance of your conditional logic. Simply specify the value to evaluate, and provide a series of conditions that should match. If no match is found, you can specify a default value to return instead.
You've long had an easy way to find the members of a given group with a!groupMembers. Now with the new a!groupsForUser function, you can do the inverse and quickly retrieve a list of groups for a specific user. Filter the list by group type or by whether a user has Administrator permissions for the group or is just a member.
Use this function in an interface or process model to let your end-users review and manage groups for an individual user.
Great news—you can now execute stored procedures in any of the Appian-supported databases from your application, without using a plug-in.
Want to execute just once, so you don't accidentally overwrite or modify data? Use the a!executeStoredProcedureOnSave() function in an interface or web API. Want the stored procedure to query data from anywhere in your expressions? It's time for the a!executeStoredProcedureForQuery() function. You say you want to call a stored procedure from a process model? The Execute Stored Procedure smart service and related function does the trick.
You can even execute your stored procedures using data source connected systems and benefit from that added security.
In Appian, you can build powerful applications that reference a lot of complex data. This release, we've made it easier to work with that data by increasing the number of autocomplete values we suggest in expressions.
Before, we'd show you 20 suggestions for process variables, data type fields, and rule inputs. Now, you'll see up to 100. Select what you need when you need it, and save your working memory for the big stuff.
Not only is it easier to build beautiful UIs, we've also made improvements to Appian Designer so you have the flexibility and power to build apps at top speed.
Whether you're new to a site or jumping in to troubleshoot after time away, it helps to have a diagram to quickly understand a site and its pages. Now, Appian generates that diagram for you dynamically in the site object page.
More than just a visual representation, this diagram is interactive. Simply click a node in the diagram to move instantly to the underlying object's configuration and get down to work faster.
In this release, you'll enjoy smoother navigation with your browser's back button, because we've added unique URLs for each view (Objects, Monitoring, and Deployments) within an application and for the tabs within those views. Share the URLs for faster collaboration with your fellow developers—and easily bookmark them for yourself.
Unused process variables can slow down your understanding and maintenance of process models. That's why we now show you design guidance when a process model contains a variable that it doesn't reference.
We make it easy to remove those unused variables so you can focus on the data you're actually using. And, if an a!startProcess or a!startProcessLink function in an interface uses a variable you just removed, we'll highlight that as an invalid process parameter for you, too.
Your enterprise-class environments have to support a lot of users, so we're enabling more bulk user updates. You can now use the Update User Profile smart service to edit Nickname and Custom Fields 1-10 in user profiles.
While updating, take advantage of new settings to help with localization:
Once you've made your updates, retrieve these fields with the user() function in expressions.
In this release, we've improved the icon picker so that you can quickly and easily find icons without interrupting your workflow. The larger picker and enhanced search helps you find the icons you need faster than ever.
Now, you don't have to remember or look up the exact name to find icons in the picker! Just enter a related term and search will find the icons for you.
You've used our new design features to develop more productive applications. Now it's time to get all that work into your users' hands. With this release, we continue our efforts to make your deployments as efficient and effective as possible.
You can now add an import customization file directly to any package during development. This helps you keep everything you need for deployment together, ready to go whenever you want to deploy. Even better? In the package view, we will now let you know if that import customization file could use an update as you add or remove objects.
As with anything in a package, you can decide whether you want to include, update, or remove the file during direct deployment.
At Appian, we celebrate human creativity—except when it introduces errors into apps. This release, we've added a new category to the existing set of robust checks in the inspection step of our direct deployment. The new Deployment Errors analysis shows you errors that would prevent individual objects from deploying, such as a reference to a deleted object or to an invalid record field. Learn more about package inspection.
We know lots of teams have appreciated the ability to turn on and off integration trace logging from the Admin Console. Now administrators can also turn on and off trace logging for web APIs.
Self-managed Appian environments can now be deployed with Kubernetes, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's standard for deploying and running applications. This lets you run Appian in Amazon's EKS, Azure's AKS, Google's GKE, OpenShift, or similar platforms. Installing and configuring Appian to your self-managed needs has never been easier!
In this optional deployment model, each Appian component runs as a Kubernetes "Pod" coordinated by the Appian Kubernetes Operator, which reduces the operational and administrative burden of managing an Appian instance and giving you options for control, coordination, and resiliency.
If you are not familiar with Kubernetes and wish to continue with your current deployment model, that's fine too as Appian is fully supported in either configuration.
As one of the first cloud service offerings to be provisionally authorized at Impact Level 5 (IL5), Appian Government Cloud is speeding up the time to go live for US Department of Defense (DoD) customers. This is the highest level of authorization for unclassified information we can achieve at the DoD.
DoD customers have always seen tremendous impact from their Appian implementations. However, their time to go live has been significantly delayed by the lengthy security authorization process that every DoD project must go through. These customers can now focus more on their mission, knowing that Appian has done the heavy lifting by pre-authorizing a significant portion of the system.
Enhanced Data Pipeline queries will now execute on the read-only replica in the Appian Cloud database cluster instead of executing on the primary node. This frees up the primary database node to service requests from your Appian applications and eliminates resource contention between Appian application requests and EDP queries.
The function below has a newer, improved version in this release. Existing, old versions in your applications will continue to function normally, but will be renamed on upgrade to indicate that they are older versions. As always, make sure you are using the right version of the docs for your version of Appian. See Function and Component Versions for more information.
The a!barChartField() function has been evolved in this release. The new version of this function corrects existing behavior in stacked bar charts. Now, the values in the stacked bars will display in the order of the items in the legend.
The features below are deprecated and will be removed in a future release of Appian. Do not begin using deprecated features, and transition away from any prior usage of now deprecated features. Where applicable, supported alternatives are described for each deprecation.
The basic and full application builders in Appian Designer have been deprecated and will be removed in a future release of Appian. Instead, allow Appian to generate your groups and folders, then create a record type and auto-generate your record actions and record views. To auto-generate activity history and document management on a record type, create a Quick App and edit it in Appian Designer.
Applications that were generated by one of these builders will be unaffected, and the resulting objects will continue to work as designed.
This deprecation only applies to the builder options in Appian Designer. Quick Apps Designer is still a supported way for business users to create and edit applications in Appian.
To focus on RWM's position as a part of Appian's overall automation capabilities, we're removing the ability to configure external vendors. New installations of RWM can only be used with Appian RPA, starting with version 5.6.
RWM is part of Appian's automation workflow to help you manage requests and implementations. All new Appian licenses include both Appian RPA and RWM so you can manage automations across your automation enterprise.
Customers who already use other automation vendors won't be affected, even if you upgrade to this new version. If you have already configured RWM to use UiPath, Blue Prism, or Automation Anywhere, you can continue to use those vendors with any version of RWM. However, new RWM installations (for version 5.6 and higher) will only be able to control and manage Appian RPA automations.
