DEVOPSdigest

Bonitasoft announced the launch of its new open-source digital process automation platform, Bonita, where the new Bonitasoft Customer Service Center will be managed and continuously improved.

The new version of the platform offers an expanded set of innovative features to fully support Bonitasoft’s low-code approach: to provide an open, extensible process automation platform that separates coding tools from modeling tools so both developers and citizen developers / business users can use the open-source Bonita platform in ways appropriate to their specific needs.

For example, Bonita applications are now composed of a set of extensions (connectors, REST API extensions, themes, actor filters) that can all be built externally to the platform, using the Bonita Software Development Kit (SDK) and managed in each application using Maven.

For developers, this means that they can use the Bonita SDK with their preferred tooling to build and import any extension. Testing for each extension individually is now possible, making Bonita projects more robust. And as the extensions are no longer bound to a specific Bonita project, they can be easily reused, adding to developer efficiency.

On the side for citizen developers, they are now free to use the drag-and-drop, BPMN-based modeling and design tools to model and add business elements to processes with no worry about interfering with the developers’ work as the coding and technical development is done outside Bonita Studio.

“The Bonita process automation platform is ideal for cross-functional, multidisciplinary, agile ‘fusion teams’ with different levels of technical skills,” said Miguel Valdes Faura, Bonitasoft CEO and Co-Founder. “Business folks, like the project managers on the Customer Service Center (CSC) team, are able to model, work on business data, build business rules, design user interfaces, and more in Bonita Studio while the developers use Bonita software development kits to independently create integrations and extensions, on their preferred tooling.”

Bonitasoft’s new Customer Service Center was developed in-house on the Bonita Cloud digital automation platform. The Customer Service Center is the main communication hub between Bonitasoft and several very different types of end users of the Bonita digital automation platform. Developers, system architects, business users and others needed a central place to quickly find resources such as Bonita updates, downloads, access to licenses, technical support, questions about “how to do” something, request for training or additional services, access to documentation, release notes, videos, and “what’s new.”

Development of the cloud-based Customer Service Center using PaaS infrastructure presented some typical technical challenges. But as the Bonita platform offers wide extensibility, the Customer Service Center automation project team succeeded by leveraging technologies such as containers, custom and native Bonita connectors, REST API extensions, SDKs, and Java Functions. Its implementation leverages full containerization (using Docker) and orchestration (via Kubernetes) supported by Bonita Cloud.

“Our ‘one-stop’ Customer Service Center is a simple, practical tool for Bonita developers and business users,” says Shamil Hassanaly, CCO at Bonitasoft. “They deserve an easy-to-use, ‘fully loaded’ place to find what they need when they need it.”

Further, the new Bonita release offers a solid set of customizable Bonita user applications for its different types of end users: internal application users like employees; external application users like customers; process and applications administrators; and platform administrators:

- The Bonita Applications Directory, which shows the list of all the Bonita applications a logged-in user can access and use

- The Bonita User Application, accelerates development with a starting point for customized interfaces for any type of end user

- The Bonita Administrator Application with all the resources process and applications administrators need to manage deployed applications

- A Super Administrator application, with all the resources platform administrators need to manage the Bonita platform