As 2019 draws to a close we thought we’d have our annual look back at some of the highlights of this year’s ESB Agile product releases. In 2018 we changed to a quarterly release cycle, and this has continued to be our release strategy throughout 2019.

Version 19.01 started the year by introducing Global Variables – a way of storing key pieces of configuration logic that could be referenced from within business rules across any process. We also made it even easier to customise the Self-Service portals by providing a web-based UI for this task, rather than having to place files on the file-system of the web server as before.

Our E-mail Template editor gained a preview feature as well as an HTML designer, again emphasising our commitment to making ESB easier to configure and customise for our system administrators.

In April we released version 19.04, which introduced our brand-new wizard based business rule editor. A lot of you have told us that you sometimes find writing and modifying business rules tricky due to the use of numeric identifiers. We’ve listened to your feedback and our new Basic Business Rule editor is the result. It lets you build business rules using a wizard-based interface with dropdown lists and selections – you never need to type in a function name or supply parameters by hand again. Despite the name, it’s not just for basic rules – you can do some quite complex things with it – but there will still be times when you need to make use of the more familiar advanced-style of editor. We’re not resting on our laurels either – the business rule editor continues to receive improvements with every subsequent product release.

We have also seen enhancements to our PIN authentication layer, which adds an additional level of protection by requiring the use of a PIN in addition to the standard username and password. You can now specify the minimum and maximum length of the PIN – up to a maximum of 8 digits. We also tightened up on the use of obvious PIN sequences such as ascending or descending numbers.

Version 19.07 brought further enhancements to our Self-Service product – including the ability to target processes at specific portals – great for customers who operate more than one portal with business-specific branding.

We rounded out 2019 with the release of 19.10, which marked a change in direction for our Manage E-mail Templates module. The module will now be known as the Message Templates module, as we’ll be expanding it to cover different types of messaging. Initially we’ll be adding SMS message templates, and there’ll be more on that in the new year when the 20.01 release comes out.

We continue to migrate our legacy ASP.NET web forms pages over to MVC, also taking the opportunity to refine and improve the user interface and to strengthen our levels of accessibility still further. Many pages within the System Configuration module have already been migrated, along with some key parts of the product such as the work basket. The newer pages provide a more responsive user experience, and by giving us greater control over the mark-up we can ensure we deliver maximum speed and efficiency.

Looking Ahead

The next release of the ESB Agile platform, version 20.01 is due in early January. As always, our focus will be on improving productivity for both our users and system administrators. This year has seen some fantastic growth for the ESB Agile platform, and the feedback we’ve received has been hugely positive, so for us the year 2020 will be about doing more of the same.