What’s new in Avantra 21.11.5

As Product Manager for Avantra it gives me great pleasure to announce that we’ve just released our newest version of Avantra, 21.11.5, packed full of features, fixes and security updates. For Avantra 21.11.5, we’ve especially been focusing on our automation engine and working with a number of our customers to incorporate their feedback and requirements into how Avantra works. Let’s dive into a few of the newest features that are the most exciting. 

As always, our release notes are publicly available here. 

Workflow automation in Avantra 21.11.5

Our new workflow automation engine is a focus for us in our roadmap this year to make it easier for our customers to build more complex automation scenarios. Reducing manual work our customers do day to day, improving consistency between systems and allowing you to focus on creating -  rather than maintaining the status quo. Avantra 21.11.5 brings the next milestone for automation.

The first feature I’d like to delve into is our new “manual” step that can be included within workflows. This step simply pauses the execution of a workflow to allow your team to perform a manual activity, create a checkpoint with the business that all is OK to proceed or simply put a pause in to delay the next part of the workflow. This step can be added to any workflow through the workflow editor and, when executed, the workflow can be resumed from the the execution tab.

With Avantra 21.11.5, customers can also now configure workflows to be started as a notification channel. Avantra already has a powerful notification management system that allows for a high level of flexibility when responding to an alert, status change or other event in Avantra. In Avantra 21.11.5, you can now configure a workflow to be started and also pass IT information about the notification. For example, a check status notification can trigger a workflow to execute an action on that system to respond to the check status.

Imagine a check configured to monitor temporary file storage goes critical when space is used up which sends an alert notification. This might have caused a ticket for a team somewhere to access that system, perform cleanup activities (deleting old temporary files) and closing the ticket. Now Avantra can perform that cleanup activity automatically through a workflow -  instead allowing that team to spend more time on more valuable tasks.

Enhanced SAP kernel upgrade

Our SAP kernel upgrade feature has been generally available for Enterprise edition customers now since our 21.11.0 release and we’ve had some great feedback on it and how it simplifies SAP kernel upgrade procedures across your landscapes. But we’re not stopping there.