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6-year anniversary!

Hi there “Process Automation” fans,

Welcome to a new installment of “Process Automation” tips.

Man, six years ago my journey started with this blog site; One if my best decisions ever in life and my whole career! Doors became open, people found me, I found the right people around me, and all this with a little weekly blogging and sharing my thoughts on “AppWorks Tips”; Damn…It’s “Process Automation Tips”! 😉 What a year again my friends with lots of new connections, new opportunities, new events, new thoughts, new insights, and new tips. I lost count of the number of posts…So, let’s do the count first:

  • 2019 - 33 posts (start on May 17th)
  • 2020 - 52 posts
  • 2021 - 53 posts
  • 2022 - 52 posts
  • 2023 - 52 posts
  • 2024 - 52 posts
  • 2025 - 19 posts (incl. this one!)

So, that makes a total of 6 times 52 + 1 extra = 313!
I was not aware of this number which means that next year we will reach 1 post per day for one full year…That’s 365! NICEEEEE 😎 an extra reason to continue the grind…I also noticed a consistent weekly post schedule without any gaps. That’s what I call commitment, dedication, and (above all) enthusiasm for the product stack of OpenText and sometimes beyond it (when needed).

This was ChatGPT’s answer to my curious question Why does 2021 has 53 Friday's? with an “Aha”-moment from my side:

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In the year 2021, there were 53 Fridays.
A typical year has 52 weeks, which accounts for 52 Fridays. 
However, since 2021 had 365 days (52 weeks plus 1 extra day)
and January 1, 2021, fell on a Friday, that additional day was also a Friday. 
This resulted in a total of 53 Fridays for the year.
This occurrence happens when a non-leap year starts on a Friday, 
as was the case in 2021. In leap years, a year can have 53 Fridays 
if it starts on a Thursday.

Post number 1 about “Oracle Virtual Box” is still valid today; I use it daily without many problems serving VMs, trying out new features, and building nice solutions to write about. Do I continue with it? For sure! My backlog still consists of figuring out interesting features I encounter at customer sites, talking to people, and collaborate with teams…You people are my input to write about topics, and you inspire me also to continue doing so.

Let get right into it…

First, a big thank you to my very first sponsor: Cordys in Switzerland. Connect with their CEO Felix at LinkedIn and make sure to say “Hi” on my behalf on this 6-year anniversary and collaboration with “Cordys” as a sponsor.
They do wonderful things in the ECM space, and I’m glad they sponsor the blog site as “Cordys” is the name where the platform has its initial roots! Read about it in last year’s anniversary.

FYI: You can be a sponsor too shining with your logo and link to your company site at the header of “Process Automation Tips”. Check the top of this post or any other post! You can send a mail to antal@bos-ictservices.nl or ask Felix how he benefits the sponsorship. We’re all “techies” looking for opportunities and this is simply one of the easy routes to further collaborate. You can also just ping me to talk about any other sponsorships, product promotions, or whatever you like to talk about (in context of produced content).

Next is a big “thank you” to all the people that connected with me, asked me questions, wanted to meet, and wanted to collaborate. We took wise decisions and brought interesting thoughts to the surface. Helping you is still a key element behind my posts and learning from each other is a golden ticket to success. My own posts have helped me in situations where I needed more information, and I just needed that extra detail to continue my journey.

A free tip for you which I also use; Start ChatGPT with a prompt like this (setting the context) to get answers quickly:

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Focus yourself on the content of appworks-tips.com. 
It's all about the product of OpenText Process Automation. 
Tips are shared, and knowledge is exposed, and I want you to 
behave as an optimized search engine for my questions.

Special thanks:

Email subscribers, a list that continues to grow each month. Slightly slower as it’s beginning, but still going up. You can still join the monthly newsletter to inform yourself about our weekly posts.
OPA colleagues I work (and collaborate) with! We share details, ask questions, and simple help each other with sometimes a look in the past for nostalgic reasons to stand still how the platform evolved as it stands today. It’s also a reminder for me to send out a date-picker for a drink! 🥳
Dutch OPA experts where I discuss new opportunities over a sandwich and mumble if things are still going in the right direction with certain projects…
People from OpenText which I (to be honest) see less often; Normally we have monthly update sessions, but the last one was a couple of months ago; I did join some insider session on AI input, but I can’t remember my last community building session?

Ping me to have a valuable chat! I’m always open to have a chit/chat about OPA related topics.

Why did I start this blog?

That’s always a great question to ask yourself! Six years ago, “AppWorks” passed my career out of nothing. I wasn’t aware of the product as I had only experiences with “Documentum Content Server” and its clients D2 (slowly moving towards “Documentum Smart View”) and xCelerated Composition Platform (xCP) slowly moving towards deprecation (that’s at least what I see).

So, back to my AppWorks startup; We got a demo from a salesperson of OpenText promoting the product stack. One product blew me away with its configurability, flexibility, and ease of use of connecting with external system…It was a blast in the face how you can create lifecycles and BPMs configurations; In one word great! Was I the only one in the room seeing this innovative platform in that time? I guess so. Others just continued life again, but the engine inside of me was burning and I wanted to get my hands dirty as quick as possible.

In that same week (somewhere around May 1st, 2019) I went through pain, sweat, and tears, but I never forget the euphoria of booting up my own VM with AppWorks (in that time “Process Suite” and now “OpenText Process Automation”)…A rush I’ll never forget! But how to continue?

I wanted more AND I also wanted to work for my own (outside the “rat-race” what they say in books and blogs). I read and listened and came with a solid plan. Learn as much from the platform and share all the knowledge on a blog site (this site!). Make sure you do this sooooo long (it took me 3 years) so people will recognize you and start sharing opportunities with you; That’s what happened end 2022 via one of the people within my network.

I stopped my job and signed a new contract as independent person on a new project. Did my blog help and was it also a little luck…Sure, but new opportunities pass by each quarter now and people start to find you instead of the other way around.

Want to know more about planning, running your own blog, or need more details? Let me know as I’m happy to share it over a cup of coffee. Does it take time? YES; Is it something for the long run? YES; Do I need to plan/schedule? YES; Do I need to commit myself? YES; Do I need to make priorities? YES; Do I have “me-time” left? Well, this depends on how you see the world. You can wake me up on Sunday morning to explore new features of a new release…

That’s the difference; That’s my “me-time”. 💪

Recap from last year…

I do this recap every year; And every year I conclude it was a fascinating year with interesting posts, insights, and knowledge sharing. These are the highlights…

Four releases passed by in 2024-2025:

1️⃣ Release 24.3; More advanced ‘Rule’ events for tasks like ‘onComplete’ or ‘onClaimed’ and the embracing of the community ‘File Connector’ in the platform by default. Also, here the first glimpses of the ‘Aviator’ and generating solutions/apps from a prompt. It’s one of the first shots on AI, but we see it evolving with each release. Or what about the first glimpses of the new development eXperience! Also, evolved over time, but to be honest, I’ve never used in yet in a project. For the rest it was about tracking task comments, the introduction of the ‘BigInteger’ data type for an entity property, and .let’s not forget the improvements to business calendars, which caused a major headache in our project. We nailed it now, and it’s on my backlog to write about it soon.

2️⃣ Release 24.4; Rebranding! with the move to ‘Process Automation’ as a new name for the platform. AI with ‘Aviator’ and the new DEV eXperience gets more mature. We get notification to send out and end-users can subscribe to events; Even administrators can now send centralized system alerts to all users. In this release we can rename a user in case you want this, and we can enable searching for enabled properties that get full text indexed at database level.

3️⃣ Release 25.1; This is the release for multiple actions on one single ‘Rule’ building block. So, you’re more in control what actions happen first. The old rules keep working and the order of actions in only within that rule; Other rules still fire when you meet the condition unordered! We also get custom massages for mandatory fields, and it’s time to move to TomEE 10 support!

4️⃣ Release 25.2; You can read about this one in the post of last week; It’s about enhancements in the multiple actions rule, mail template generation by ‘Aviator’ with an improvement on mail template deployment in runtime, RabbitMQ support (which is on my backlog), and property encryption.

In between all the releases, interesting posts passed by the blog site. What about the challenging choice of subtyping over customizing an entity with interesting database insights how table structures are build up. You find even more about entities on building block inheritance and even the impact of renaming an entity. We explored unbelievable lifecycle implementations where even an empty lifecycle does have a “state” in runtime, and we showed the impact on “anonymous” calls which you want to avoid at your customer.

From an administration perspective, we exposed interesting service call in relation with BPMs and cases (aka entity lifecycles) to further enhance your daily job. We installed a hotfix and exposed more details on PSL data. If the “Web Gateway” is unknown territory, you want to read about it here where we exposed the flow of a service call against the platform A-Z.

From a developer perspective, we exposed the sync of a solution where you can simply inject your craftsmanship into a different organization without the need for a central source control system like SVN or Git. We also showed you how to reuse the messagemap details for a running BPM instance to further enhance the xPath expression for the BPM template. If CSS is your thing, have a look at this tag where we hack the tasks panel to keep focus on the case instead of moving away from it and do more pro-stuff that will blow your mind. That’s the same for expression in rules; We did it a long time ago, but this post is the additional post exposing new insights. The one you don’t want to miss is the worst-case scenarios BPM implementation to full-proof your external API calls.

Let’s also not forget the interesting posts about implementing you own PIM 2.0 artifact with a small table library GridJS. You can find the end-result here.

Finally, a great series of posts about NodeRed where we explored and played with a new era of service chaining. Give it a shot to try it out…If I can do it, you can do it too!

Ohwww, almost forgotten; Let’s also not forget the usage of Gmail as mail provider for the OPA platform AND the retrieval of a SAMLartID for further communication with other OpenText products like xECM/OTCS!

Promises turned into actions

Let’s double-check the promises from last year:

Last year there was a fabulous success on a given training (via OpenText) at one of my customers. A great eXperience for the trainees (all six of them), and for me as the trainer as well. Most of them even got their official OpenText certification for the platform and implement solutions at their customers. Next week I give another workshop to another 6-8 people eager to learn the tips & tricks from experts in the field.

If you want a great workshop on the “Process Automation” platform for your employee or customer, let me know; You’ll be amazed what low-code can do you!

New opportunities also continue to pass-by…Amazing! I also see it comes in waves…Per quarter!? What is it with those quarters that we are all so focused on!? Well, it doesn’t matter; For me, it’s important that customers start to find me instead of the other way around…Interesting to see how doors went open this last year when people start to recognize me and want to have a quick chit/chat, trustful relations are created, and interesting thoughts are shared. Even old colleagues cross my path again (by accident) during walks, weekend shopping with the family, or just finding each other on social platform like LinkedIn. Also, where you deliver excellent work, fruit will fall off, which makes a close loop to rejoin old projects for building even better and smart features in additional solutions.

Let’s have a look at interesting “Forum posts” for this year as more Q/A is going on at forums.opentext.com. It got my attention, and this is the list of contributions from my side:

Here are some helpful comments I shared to also promote this blog site:

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The forum itself is also an interesting thing! Let me know in the comments below what you experience from it. As sometimes I see things picked up directly, but sometimes things just stay as they are. Sometimes people from OpenText jump on it, sometimes nobody jumps on it. Sometimes you get a notification on things you didn’t subscribe to, and sometimes you don’t get a notification when you did subscribe. So, when was your last helpful situation on the form?

What I also never understood that you can quickly find “My posts” and you can (un)subscribe to posts, but getting an overview of your comments is only available under your profile!?

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I’m also quite sure that my engagement goes back long before Feb 14, 2022…Again, a different story! 😉

Or are all customers simply paying for extra “Premium” support on top of a licensed product including the expectation to work with a lot less issues in the first place? Again, let me know…I wonder what’s going on in those areas as I see the strangest constructions going on where the notion of “fairness” often feels absent. Let me know what you expect in terms of support from a licensed product? Should support be a payable privilege or should it be open and free for all via a forum to not figure out a problem again and again (sharing knowledge of customers can help other customers too); AND what can you even expect when you pay for “Premium”…Let’s not jump into the void here, but I guess you know what I’m talking about! 🙃

AND will we also move to “Process Automation” as tag for posts as currently everything is still under the “AppWorks” tag!?

Time to continue…

Google Analytics

Numbers, numbers…Who doesn’t like numbers!? 🤗

FYI: It’s a view since “Google GA4” on March 1st, 2022

Audience

The numbers of sessions and events are always great to start with:

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That’s a 2x increase again compared with last year! 😍

Let’s look at the page views:

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Far above 100K page views (that’s 40K views only this year)! NICEEEEE…

Where are all those people coming from?

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The list is the same as last year, but just a little scrambled.

The browser they use?

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The “Yandex Browser” with a Russian background (last year) is from the list, but we now have “Androids Webview” as new browser.

The OS?

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Screen resolution?

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Acquisition

How did the users get on my site?

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Behavior

The top 10 pages visited?

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The same top ten pages still have a leading place on the chart.

For what did you search?

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No “Process Automation” yet in this list…That’s a matter of time! Interesting to see a new entry on “Notepad++ with XSLT…”, which relates to this post. Was it that interesting? Let me know in the comments…

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Great to see those numbers! I get all fired up again moving into the seventh year of figuring out new features and searching for the edges of the OPA platform. 🤠

The future

What do I see in my “crystal ball” on what is crossing our path?

AppWorks Hosting; To be honest; My call for action - pinging, emailing, or calling - didn’t seem to help. Maybe I’m doing things wrongly, or I’m just not that perfect in selling stuff; I conclude to not further invest my time in it via this landing page. I will remove it! Next one…

Booklets; Still free for you to download and I still do see people signing up for it! You’re the best, here are the links for the others that want to follow:

Notes:

  • The booklets still use “AppWorks” in the headers to keep a little history intact.
  • An administration booklet was in the pipeline, but I moved it out of scope.

Workshops; My own workshop is ready for consumption and the first track will start next week with 6-8 attendees. We’ll explore great stuff, build great stuff, and we’ll provide an answer for each of your questions. So, be prepared and join the party for another session. You can bring your own device and use your own environment! Because of the modular structure, you can even decide (as a group) what path to follow in terms of fundamentals, entity modelling, lifecycle craftsmanship, and/or BPM craftsmanship.

Community; I must admit that true community building is a job on itself. This blog-site helps, the forums of OpenText help, connecting at LinkedIn helps, monthly update calls from OpenText help, events from OpenText help, but I still haven’t seen that “Stack Overflow”-style community I’d love to be part of; You know…Just “techies” with each-other talking about OpenText stuff. What needs to happen to make this possible? In the past (when EMC/Documentum), I can remember there were “Developer World” events called DevCon (EMC Developer Conference)! Great “techies” events, but it passed away for whatever reason I never understood. Let me know as I’m open to talk about such initiatives and I will for sure join such initiative to bring it further.

If you also have a background in Documentum since 2006 (like me), you can also remember “Momentum”…Those were the days! I never forget my Monaco-Momentum adventure (incl. the empty minibar and the price at the end)! You can still find some information here; http://developer.emc.com/developer/devcon2006/ (not available!) was your spot as developer in that time…Yes, I’m moving away from the topic, but it’s interesting looking back sometimes…Just because we can! 😎

Sponsorship; I found the first sponsor, but there is more room in the top bar of this blog site. Have a review, do a recap, and ReThink if your company wants to shine with a logo and link as supporter for the “Process Automation Tips” blog site. Read more here or just send me a mail.

Backlog topics (preview) for new posts

A quick list of the biggest topics on my Kanban board:

  • “Business Calendars”; Finally, I had a chance to play with it during a valid Q/A session, and now I also see the benefits of using it where I was a little sceptic in the first place. Trust me, they are valid AND you want them in your solution.
  • “RabbitMQ”; Support since 25.2 so let’s make a nice topic out of it with installation, configuration, and gluing it all together with the OPA JMS connector.
  • “Splitting administration roles”; A valid point raised by a determined administration team. Can we split administration functions over several users? I have no clue, but I guess we can…
  • “Java Mission Control with JMX”; Again, from and for the maintenance team…Getting insights on your JVM with numbers and graphs.
  • “Alerting system”; Build into the platform, but never used it in any of my projects. It’s time to figure out if we can alert smartly.
  • “Embedding a legacy organization”; A recurring question when transitioning to a new platform or organization; How to embed old legacy data? #SPOILER_ALERT You have multiple options!
  • “Implementing a garbage bin”; Deleting is one thing, but as we are all so Windows-minded, it’s about time to introduce a garbage-bin for our case management solutions…correct?
  • “Make a connection with OpenText cloud platform via docstore connector”; This is an ongoing secret that needs input from OpenText but takes time to figure out…It’s not a simple click and go configuration. All services must align without any intervention in the complete chain. hat was at least my experience during the first attempt.
  • “More entity insights”; We’ll build endless creation loop BPMs to see when things start to fail, we’ll figure out the impact on relation changes once your solution is in production, and we’ll find the location of our valuable entity definitions/blueprints.

How is that for a fascinating list of backlog items? I am eager to start with it.

Quote for this year

“Prepare for winter!”; At the moment, my life feels like an unbroken boulevard of green lights, with white smoke at the end of a long pipeline of opportunities. I know this won’t always be the case, even though there is currently sufficient work on relevant projects in the world of low-code and ECM opportunities. How do I prepare, so I don’t fall into the trap of failure once opportunities stop coming my way? Simple: keep one year of savings as “treasure” in a separate account, so you can pay yourself during that time. Next, make sure you continuously learn new things and stay up-to-date with the tools in your toolbox. Then, communicate and collaborate with the world as new opportunities are built on trust. Finally, read and listen to how others grow in life, and learn to mimic their decisions; You can do this through events, books, and podcasts. The only person who can stop your success is you—so be prepared, be smart, and follow the spirit of this year’s quot.

That’s it; The recap of the year as sixth episode under the “Anniversary” tag. I give it a “DONE”. This past year was another wonderful experience; filled with details and features to explore. Looking back, it’s wild to see how far this journey has come. Sharing OpenText Process Automation insights started as a simple idea, but it’s grown into something far more meaningful—not just for those of you tuning in (your messages and encouragement still blow me away), but also for me personally. It clears my thoughts, sharpens my skills, and keeps the flame alive. Six years in, and it still doesn’t feel like “work”. When your weekend is interrupted by a question from the battlefield and your first instinct is excitement rather than annoyance, that’s when you know you’re exactly where you should be. Curiosity still fuels the engine, and believe me, the list of topics to dig into just keeps growing. So, here’s to six years of tech tips, trials, and triumphs. Let’s keep the momentum going. Got a question? An idea? Or just want to geek out over a use case? You know where to find me. Cheers to year seven—and beyond! 🍻

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