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3 Features Developers Will Appreciate in the Appian 22.4 Release

Alex Stark, Sr. Product Marketing Manager – Developer Marketing
November 17, 2022

The 22.4 release ends the year on a high note with faster Appian Portal deployment (via the Appian Designer), a stylish rebrand of the Appian Process Modeler (to keep your workflow looking good), and a time-saving automation upgrade (of the RPA agent launch process).

With the last release of 2022, we want to say a special thank you to our dedicated Community of developers and engineers. Your expertise, feedback, and dedication to Appian are what keep us improving and expanding with every feature.


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Appian 22.4 release highlights.

1. Portal deployment from within Appian Designer helps you get out the front door at super speed.

From the University of Wollongong Australia to LIUNA!, Appian Portals has opened the door for major brands with external-facing web experiences.

Appian Portals allows you to:

  • Connect your external end users to your apps without authentication
  • Quickly build external websites connected to your apps using low-code
  • Deploy quickly with confidence thanks to built-in security and compliance

Since its release in Appian 22.2, Appian Portals has now been upgraded with a fully unified deployment experience. We removed the manual deployment steps, which could increase the risk of human error and cause more time and work effort for you or your deployment manager. Now, you can build a portal with deployment managed through the existing DevOps pipeline, including external, manual, and direct methods. 

With Portals now managed entirely within the Appian Designer, a successful deployment of any object associated with a portal will automatically result in a published portal. This upgrade centralizes your work to one space in the Designer and makes deployment intuitive and quicker for developers and their teams. 

Get some extra inspiration for building your next portal with the Top 4 Traits of Powerful Portals.


2. The Appian Process Modeler gets a stylish rebrand. 

The Appian Process Modeler is a powerful tool for workflow optimization, and for making you look like the genius developer who painted an easy-to-digest visual story from a complicated workflow.

Every painter deserves a great studio to create their best work. We heard your call for a more modern design experience for developers and have delivered with a restyling of the Process Modeler. You’ll still find the same powerful and functional versatility, but with a new state-of-the-art look. This rebrand aligns with the recently updated Appian Designer rebrand announced in Appian 22.2, and contributes a more consistent, intuitive, and beautiful user experience across the Appian platform. 

Specific styling improvements include:

  • New smart service and badge icons.
  • New intermediate event/MNI decorators.
  • Canvas, node, and connector restyling.
  • Unified styling with the Appian Designer. 

With a more modern look and feel, the Process Modeler makes it easier than ever for you to create your best work. 

 

3. New remote Appian RPA agent sign-in and launch saves you even more time in your automation work.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) saves employees from having to work innumerable hours on repetitive and boring tasks, including your work as a developer. Automation makes tasks so much easier that it makes you wonder why you don’t just automate everything! The answer, of course, is that security and scalability are essential considerations of any automation practice. 

The RPA upgrade in 22.4 now allows you to utilize Appian to run robotic processes using a basic, non-administrative user account, by signing into your virtual machine (VM) user session directly from the RPA console. You can manually trigger Appian to sign into a VM as any designated user, be it basic or administrator, without needing to keep specific VM user sessions open or active. Simply enable the option and designate Appian with the credentials to sign into the resource and launch the agent as the designated user.

This upgrade also means that in case agents go down (such as for software restarts on the VM), they can be restarted easily and directly from the console, saving you time from having to manually log in and start them. 

 


Want more from Appian?


Read the documentation and release notes for Appian 22.4. 

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