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Appian Platform sees experience, data fabric improvements
Wed, 22nd Mar 2023
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Appian has released the latest version of the Appian Platform, which includes improvements in total experience, data fabric, automation, and process mining.

The Appian Platform is designed for process automation, and the company’s industrial-strength low-code design underpins these new enhancements.

“Organisations must go beyond applications that provide automation at the task level and begin implementing process orchestrations that unify humans, systems, and digital workers,” says Michael Beckley, Founder and CTO at Appian.

“Appian delivers the end-to-end process control organisations need to design new digital solutions, automate complex processes, and optimise business operations to drive continuous improvement.”

Appian Portals has been improved as part of this release, which expands the benefits of total experience throughout business-to-business and business-to-consumer use cases.

Appian customer AARP built a strong, secure and engaging Appian Portals experience in fewer than four weeks, which will support the Fraud Watch Volunteer program providing support to fraud victims among AARP’s 40 million members.

“We needed a way to accept and process applications from volunteers, and we spent more than 18 months looking for a technology that would enable that while meeting our very strict security requirements,” says Fisnik Shpuza, Director of Workflow Automation at AARP.

“Appian Portals gave us everything we needed. It’s secure, it’s beautiful and looks like an AARP web page, and it connects all the incoming data directly into our process.”

Appian’s latest release simplifies building visually appealing and intuitive web and mobile Portals capable of engaging external users through a seamless total experience with internal employees.

New features include:

  • Start a process from Portals

This feature allows users to start any process automation directly from a Portals interface. Appian customers can initiate end-to-end process automations directly in a Portal, enabling the orchestration of AI services, assigning human tasks or executing robotic process automations.

  • Query Appian’s data fabric from Portals

This function offers a streamlined ability to query and display record data from Appian’s data fabric in Portals without the need for complex integration calls.

  • Portals Header Bar and Pages

Engage Portals users with great experiences. Add a header bar for multi-page navigation to connect with your users in more ways, all with no code.

  • Portals Change Management

This release makes changing and iterating Portals even easier. With the addition of new proactive actions and recommendations, Appian proactively updates portals and notifies developers when objects change.

Appian’s data fabric also unifies data throughout systems without moving the data, which significantly minimises the amount of time and effort required to create powerful applications.

The latest Appian release contains improvements designed to make working with data fabric simpler.

These include:

  • Centralised Record Security

The updates ensure all aspects of users’ records are secure in one place and allow you to quickly specify who can see which records and record views and what actions they can take.

  • No-Code Security Rules

The new capabilities make it possible to specify security rules for Record Views by answering two simple questions:  Who can see the data, and when can they see it?

  • Simplification

Appian’s data fabric features drag-and-drop record type configurations, auto-generation of user record type relationships, database updates with codeless data modelling, the ability to combine data across record types, and more.

Appian notes that IT leaders need to continue to deliver value to the business in the current economy while trying to drive greater operational efficiency, all while having fewer resources at their disposal.

In addition, business leaders are being confronted with increasing regulatory compliance burdens, resulting in the need for end-to-end process control.

They are also being pressured to digitally innovate to stay competitive, which is why the latest version of the Appian Platform has been designed to help IT leaders achieve digital agility while allowing business leaders to easily design, automate, and optimise their operations to foster efficiency and give customers new digital innovations.