In the April 2022 release of the BusinessOptix platform we have made a number of enhancements to Author and to process model outputs. We've also resolved a number of issues.

Author

Author has been enhanced to make it simpler to add new steps to a process model, provide you more control on which properties on the step you can view and making it easier to find comments on a model.

Quick Step

Quick Step makes it simpler for an author to add steps to a process model. Whether you are trying to add steps during a process requirements workshop or you are refining an existing process map, you can quickly add a new activity, gateway or event to your process.

When you select a step in the process short cut icons will appear above the selected step. When you click on the short cut the selected step type will be added to your process map.

Step Property Trays

As a process analyst your organization may be using the BusinessOptix platform to capture many facets of the business process, such as process metrics, risk and compliance or your planned business transformation. When you are making changes you're likely more focused on one or two aspects of the process model.

To help you focus on the changes you need to make you now have more control over which property trays are visible.  There are a couple of enhancements to the property tray functionality to assist you.

First is that if there are property trays on a step that aren't relevant to you then you can now hide. For example if you aren't editing risk and control information on activities, you can decide not to show it. In the top right of the property tray the 3 bar icon can be clicked and will show you the tray titles and which ones are selected. The trays listed are the ones that are applicable to the step you are viewing, the trays selected are the ones that you have selected for the type of model you are editing.

And the second enhancement is that when you need to  view process information between property trays you can now have multiple property trays open at the same time. when you are creating a process transformation and you want to compare your as is (current state) process performance metrics to your to be (future state) process metrics it can be useful to view both at the same time.

Clicking on each tray title will show or hide each tray. The trays no longer automatically close. If you need a little more space to edit the process or step description, then close the other trays that are open and it will expand to fill the space. 

Comments

In BusinessOptix Author we've made it easier to access comments made by the process owners and other stakeholders in the process. When a process model, swim lane or any of the activities, decisions and events in the business process have an unresolved comment then an icon is displayed next to the component in the models table of contents. If you are scrolling around the process map a comment icon is also visible above each step. Like all step markers the comment marker can be turned off by selecting the View toolbar and then selecting Show/Hide - Show Comments.

Additional Changes Related to Author

In the bottom right hand corner of a diagram we've added a set of zoom control buttons. You can now zoom in, zoom out and reset the zoom level to 100%. Remember that you can also use your keyboard to zoom in with CTRL + and zoom out with CTRL -. Or if you are using a mouse with a scroll wheel press CTRL whilst spinning the scroll wheel.

We've extended the access control for master data. Only an author in the Master Data Authors group can create a new master data model. This access control is only automatically applied to newly created libraries. Customer support can enable the same access controls on an existing library.

Some changes to model component ordering led to Author scrolling back to the top of the table of contents. This has been corrected.

A library update is required to fully-enable all these features.

Output

The comment icons that are available in Author are also now visible to your process stakeholders in process model output. Clicking on the comment icon, will open the comments box for the step they have selected. Process output participants can also hide the icon by selecting the Filter button and unticking Show Comments.

In process model output there is now an option to view a table of the systems. We have also removed the duplication of model executive summary and other properties.

When an author adds internal anchor links between the content of a document model, they were not working in model output. This has been corrected.

For Outputs with a large number of images, such as screenshots, when you opened the Document view it could take a while to allow the user to scroll. Images will now load as you scroll through the document, improving the experience for users.

Dashboards and Data Sources

Component based data sources for rich text columns were returning the plain text version of the content. This has been corrected to return the HTML of the content.

In dashboards when page level filters are selected and the user exports to Excel a long filename was created. This has been changed.

Model Management

Models could be named with spaces at the end. Model creation, copying and moving will now remove an additional spaces at the end of the name.

Workflows 

When a model had a long path name the workflow failed. This has been corrected.

Other Changes

When an author is first drafting a new process they may do much of the work in the My Work folder. The author may choose to share a link to the model with another user. We've enhanced access control to prevent anybody other than the user discovering other models in the same folder.

The OpenAPI documentation previously released has been extended to include more of the BusinessOptix platform API. A user interface for this technical documentation is available. Please review BusinessOptix library API/URLs for more details.

For users who have logged into a BusinessOptix library and then try and access a library they don't have access to we've provided more guidance on requesting access. If they chose to request access from the library administrator the notification email will include the users existing user identifier.