InfoQ Homepage Business Process Management Content on InfoQ
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Microsoft Introduces Power Virtual Agents, a No-Code Solution to Building AI Bots
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced the general availability (GA) of Power Virtual Agents, a service designed to democratize building conversational chatbots using a no-code graphical user interface. The service is part of the Microsoft Power Platform, which includes Power Apps, Power BI and Power Automate and democratizes access to building artificial intelligence-powered bots.
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Microsoft Rebrands Flow Service to Power Automate, Adds Robotic Process Automation Capabilities
At the recent Ignite conference, Microsoft announced changes to its cloud-based automation service, Microsoft Flow. The service has been re-branded to Power Automate, which better aligns to other Power Platform services. Microsoft has also expanded on the capabilities of the Microsoft Flow service by providing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) capabilities, in preview.
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Democratizing Portal Development, Microsoft Announces Power Apps Portals General Availability
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced the general availability of Power Apps portals, a solution that allows organizations to publish customer, partner and community portals to internal and external users using a low-code, configuration-driven, responsive web experience.
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IoT Visual Programming Environment Node-RED Hits 1.0
At the end of a two-year development cycle, Node-RED has finally reached version 1.0, bringing plenty of changes. Among the major new features in Node-RED 1.0 are a new asynchronous message passing model, new completion API, and message cloning by default. Additionally, the visual editor got a revamp.
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AWS Step Functions Gains Callback Patterns to Resume Paused Workflows
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced that AWS Step Functions supports callback patterns to "automate workflows for applications with human activities and custom integrations with third-party services". Workflow executions can now be paused until applications return a token via the Step Functions API, which obsoletes the previously required polling or other workarounds.
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Microsoft Releases PowerApps Portals Preview, a Low-Code Customer Portal Solution
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced PowerApps Portals in preview, a low-code solution for building responsive customer portals. PowerApps Portals is the successor of Dynamics 365 Portals, which generally required developers to use complex web templates. Using PowerApps Portals, people familiar with Microsoft PowerApps can transition those skills into building customer-facing portals.
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High Scalability Workflow Engine Zeebe is Production Ready
Zeebe is a workflow engine designed to meet the scalability requirements of high-performance applications running on cloud-native and event-driven architectures, and to support workflows that span multiple microservices in low latency, high-throughput scenarios. Zeebe 0.20.0 has just been released as a free community edition and is considered production ready.
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Democratizing AI for Business Applications, Microsoft Release AI Builder Preview
At the recent Business Applications Summit in Atlanta, Microsoft announced a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) service for the Power Platform called AI Builder. The new service brings AI capabilities to low code application and workflow services: Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow which run on top of the Common Data Service (CDS), an enterprise-grade datastore.
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Event Streams and Workflow Engines – Kafka and Zeebe
In a recent joint meeting in Amsterdam, Kai Waehner described features of Apache Kafka, a distributed streaming platform, and how it fits in an Event-Driven Architecture. Bernd Rücker described how workflow engines can handle complex business processes, and discussed how Zeebe, a new highly scalable workflow engine, can be used with Kafka.
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Experiences Moving from Microservices to Workflows at Jet.com
The Order Management System (OMS) at Jet was originally developed using a collection of microservices orchestrating tasks. As the company grew, the challenges with this architecture also grew until they decided to build a new workflow-based platform. In a blog post, James Novino at Jet describes the challenges with their old system and an overview of the new platform.
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The Future of Work Is Female
Jobs currently performed by the majority of women, where it’s more about adaptability, improvisation, emotional intelligence, and implicit knowledge, will predominate in the future, according to Agnieszka Walorska. Artificial intelligence and robotics will automate highly specialized jobs mostly performed by men.
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Connecting Business Challenges and Emerging Technologies
Caragh O'Carroll spoke about three emerging technologies at Women in Tech Dublin 2018: Blockchain, robotic process automation, and artificial intelligence and machine learning. She explored how these technologies provide solutions to the challenges that businesses are facing.
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Intelligent Automation on Pace for Explosive Growth, But Organizational Challenges Prevalent
In a recent KPMG study, the professional services organization published a report on the growth of Intelligent Automation. The report suggests that overall spend will reach $232 billion by 2025, compared to $12.4 billion which is spent today. But, this expected growth comes with many challenges, including tool maturity, skilled labor and organizational change management.
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Complex Event Flows in Distributed Systems: Bernd Rücker Discusses Workflow Engines at QCon NY
At QCon New York, Bernd Rücker presented “Complex Event Flows in Distributed Systems”, and cautioned that although event-driven architectures can be extremely powerful, it can also be easy to create complex and highly-coupled peer-to-peer event chains. He proposed that lightweight, open source workflow engine solutions provide many advantages for the business, developers and ops.
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How Blockchain is Reinventing Business Process Management
In a recent Hyperledger post, Jesse Chenard discusses how blockchain is poised to reinvent traditional Business Process Management platforms. A challenge with existing BPM platforms is that data is usually stored in organizational silos and challenges exist in exchanging counterparty transactions. A blockchain solution can provide auditing across boundaries, without leaking sensitive information.