Bonita 2021.1 is available from today, bringing unified development tools between the open source and commercial editions of the Bonita Platform for the business and IT teams who are responsible for delivering enterprise automation projects.
Major platform release offers an unprecedented number of open source features
Bonitasoft today announced a significant milestone in the democratization of process automation technologies. To meet the growing need for seamless collaboration and governance between business and IT for process automation projects everywhere, Bonitasoft has open-sourced an unprecedented number of features in this major product release.
Process automation continues to present growing challenges for enterprises, and for the business and IT teams who are responsible for delivering automation projects. To meet the demands of mission-critical projects in today’s digital enterprise, full cooperation and IT-business teamwork all the way down and through the organization is more important than ever. However, the trend to low code solutions to allow more independence for “citizen developers” can take collaboration in the wrong direction, adding governance and maintainability issues. Establishing the rules and policies of corporate and project governance is a mutual responsibility, as is the implementation of “corporate guardrails” via technology in automation projects of all sizes.
With the Bonita 2021.1 release, Bonitasoft has unified development tools between open source and commercial editions of Bonita Platform to allow process automation teams and organizations to adopt and use open source technology that adapts to their individual project governance needs.
Bonita 2021 includes more visual programming and coding tools, on the same platform
Bonitasoft offers an alternative to separating professional developer from citizen developer work, by including both visual programming and coding on the same platform. True collaboration from project conception to production, monitoring, and continuous improvement is now possible for process automation teams. This unique approach to low-code in a DPA platform allows professional developers to externalize the code and give them the freedom to continue to use their existing tools while ensuring a smooth collaboration and project governance with citizen developers that will leverage visual programming capabilities of Bonita.
A full support and services package tuned for success
Together with this major platform release, Bonitasoft also announces today brand-new “turn-key” services packages that are specifically intended to help speed up project implementation and production upgrades for process automation teams. These packages are built on top of the commercial edition of the platform, which already includes additional capabilities to secure, scale, monitor and continuously improve process automation projects. Bonita Enterprise - on premise or on the Cloud - is the ideal choice to get started rapidly with a first process automation implementation and to upgrade painlessly to the latest version of the solution.
Democratizing Digital Process Automation
We want to boost process automatization adoption through the democratization of DPA, as we did 12 years ago with the democratization of BPM, and at the same time, greatly simplify upgrades and downgrades between the Community and commercial Enterprise editions of Bonita. We were founded as a company on a commitment to open source, and we want anyone to be able to build an automation project on the Bonita platform.
Miguel Valdés Faura, Bonitasoft founder and CEO
Bonita for business "citizen developers" and automation project governance
Bonita’s visual programming capabilities include process modeling using the BPMN2 standard, a graphical editor with guidance and auto-completion, a shared repository, and multiple options to define and enforce business rules, including ones intended to support project governance. Wizards and guidance windows help the business user with some technical configurations, including connectors to Salesforce CRM, UIPath RPA, SAP, multiple databases including Oracle, and more.
Bonita for developers
For developers, Bonita offers extensive coding capabilities through archetypes (coding patterns or templates) so they can fully extend the automation project by integrating Bonita with other enterprise information systems using REST and custom connectors, by customizing user interfaces, and more. This separation allows developers to code extensions outside of Bonita so development teams everywhere are free to use any development tools they already use, and are comfortable and efficient with, instead of limiting them only to the tools provided natively with Bonita.
In addition to the new Software Development Kits that allow developers to create and test extension points, Bonita users can now reuse and extend Bonita Portal in their applications. This end user interface has been split into two unique Bonita applications (User App, Admin App) that can be used as is or customized with the natively provided UIDesigner.
Bonita for partners
Aurelio Daniel Pérez González, Software Engineer at Atos, a partner that has begun using Bonita 2021.1, highlights its simplicity and the peace of mind it brings: "Everything about the new version is focused on simplicity. Starting with the licensing levels, including more functionality by default, making it clear and concise to customers what they can get and at what price - for example, the Bonita Continuous Delivery module is already included, helping continuous integration in the world of processes - which facilitates the management of projects between customer and partner.
"For us as a partner, the Expert Corner allows unlimited access to Bonitasoft's technical experts, which brings an additional degree of peace of mind knowing that we have the company's support when we need it," he adds. "And finally, in the latest version, the biggest benefit is that at the development level the functionality for developers is the same in Enterprise and Community, and compatible in both runtime environments, which gives the customer enormous peace of mind that in the future any license change is not going to prevent them from running the work done over the last few years."
