Hi there “Process Automation” fans,
Welcome to a new installment of “Process Automation” tips.
We finally reached magic number 365 (this post is 367 to be precise)! Seven (7️⃣) years ago I started my journey…It all started with post #1 about “Oracle Virtual Box” which is still valid today; Every OpenText VM I create is via Oracle Virtual Box and I continue to use it for the future. There are enough blog post ideas in the pipeline to continue this 7-year-grind for a couple of years from now. I daily see projects that trigger innovative ideas, I talk to people triggering ideas, I even trigger latest ideas during the writing of all those posts. Do you know what it is with writing…It structures your brain into digestible parts; You don’t want to know how many times you jump around from back to front writing a post, but in the end it all falls into place because you can try things and update what was done already. That’s also the reason my posts always have a happy end! 😁 The other advantage of writing is building your own knowledge base; You don’t want to know how many times I search in my own blog content for a specific piece of knowledge written down in the past. I hope you found already the search, or maybe you connected your Model Context Protocol (MCP) server already to the resource of “Process Automation Tips”…
Let’s get right into it…
First, an enormous thank you to my sponsor Cordys in Switzerland. It’s the third year in a row sponsoring the blog posts, and I’m proud they shine in the header of the site. Connect with their CEO Felix at LinkedIn and make sure to say “Hi” on my behalf on this anniversary. If you want to shine as well in the header of “Process Automation Tips”. Send me a mail at antal@bos-ictservices.nl or read these details. “Cordys” is the name where the platform has its initial roots (also in the Netherlands; where I live)! I highly recommend reading this book on more history details of the platform; I have a signed hard-cover copy.
Next is a big “thank you” to all the people that reached out to me; sometimes a simple connection, sometimes a question, sometimes a comment, or just sharing thoughts. It’s always a welcome pleasure to connect with another person and collaborate on some eXperience together. That’s also exactly how I started my journey around the platform and the longer you invest time and effort, the better the end-result will eventually be. It’s just a matter of time and people start to recognize your name and connect it to the knowledge you share with the world. It’s amazing where some opportunities pop by during my online existence.
Special thanks:
Email subscribers, a list that continues to grow each month. Sometimes someone drops off, but I still see new people that connect to the newsletter broadcasting the world with OPA insights. Join here to inform yourself via a monthly newsletter.
OPA colleagues I work (and collaborate) with! We share knowledge and eXperiences; we ask questions and find collaborative answers. All highly valuable stuff that brings knowledge forward. The next drink is in the pipeline for this summer; It’s almost a yearly recurring talk with a beer and a snack at a central location from where we all work.
Dutch OPA experts where I discuss new opportunities over a walk, and we’ll talk if things are still going in the right direction for highly specialized projects…
People from OpenText which I (to be honest) see less often; I only see them at big conferences or at customers when they are onsite/online. Trust me, they can tell jokes if you trigger them! 🤣
I quote it every year…Ping me to have a valuable chat! I’m always open to having a chit/chat about OPA related topics.
Why did I start this blog?
I ask myself this question every year, over and over again! I also expect to have a similar answer each year, but reading back some of the anniversary posts, it’s slightly different each time. Or maybe that’s just me ReWriting it in a unique way…Maybe AI now generates this part! Who knows!? ✨ Looking back, it reminds me that writing is just writing. The underlying fundamental for starting this post is that you have something great to do in life that also helps others, structures your own thoughts, and luckily builds a great resource for newbies of the OpenText Process Automation platform. My first question was also: What and where on earth to start with this rather complex platform? Valuable resources were limited, mostly only accessible behind premium (paid) support. The only way to make a change is to pick up the stick myself, connect with the best people, and share that knowledge via myself into the world. So, here we are; 7 years, and 367 posts later.
Did it change something? Well, to me, it did! I learned a lot about writing skills, reading skills, and teaching skills. It also opened doors that were always closed to me. Sometimes I also get requests from people on how I do all this stuff and how/if they can get a job. My answer is pretty solid (and I also give this answer to my kids); Make sure you can do something fewer people can do, and make sure you put your head above ground level. That’s the only way people start to see you (instead of you seeing only others). This will take a while (min. 5 years) before it’ll fly for you, but after that the grass is definitely greener from where you came from. Does it take an effort? Yes, it does! I always compare a great heart surgeon with a regular doctor. Both are fine, but who do you really want to be? The first one takes more risks, has more responsibility, but probably has a greater paycheck; The other is the exact opposite.
It’s also interesting to see what it does with people when you help them further. Once you have done a fantastic job, they will always remember you (which is trust) and eventually want to do more business with you. If you continue to do that long enough, it’s just a matter of time that people start to recognize you as the expert in the field and ping you for new opportunities.
So, don’t sit still…Act, be great at something, share it with the world, and the rest will eventually come. This mindset is the total opposite of what regular people normally think; people first want to get something and will then move the needle. Turn it around; first move the needle and greatness will eventually come. It will give an unimaginable fulfillment in life where helping others is definitely #1.
Recap from last year…
Recapping a year (even a day) is always a good thing to do. It gives insight into what you’ve done and lets you rethink if it was good and how you can improve for the next year. Let’s jump through the highlights of 2025-2026…
We got four releases:
1️⃣ Release 25.3; There is Bitbucket (on-prem) support for OPA as Source Control Management (SCM) for your workspace. We get data encrypted entity properties, we get long-lived BPM execution notifications in runtime, we get page redirection in rule logic for building a routing mechanism based on conditions. AND as cherry on the cake, we get platform support for the popular ‘REST Gateway connector’ to communicate REST with our SOAP-minded platform from the outside world; that’s where the real value starts for all those JS-scripting-guys!
2️⃣ Release 25.4; We get rule enhancements on mandatory fields and trigger a BPM when a form closes/cancels. This release also introduces the attachment of documents (from xECM) to your running dynamic workflow…So, you can create a “quick review” workflow with attachments. The platform itself also moves from Java 17 support to version 21 (LTS)!
3️⃣ Release 26.1; Case-insensitive filtering and sorting with PostgreSQL; It’s a hot topic with interesting insights on how OpenText did the implementation. The preferences framework is introduced where each user can have its own solution settings (next to the regular global solution setting via the application configuration entity for a project). The usage of the dynamic workflow inside a lifecycle seems to be a thing I don’t understand because it was better to start a dynamic workflow instance from a ‘Rule’ BB.
4️⃣ Release 26.2; You don’t see it yet, as it’s in the planning for next week! However, this is already a quick sneak-peek. Greatness will pass by with custom AI (or better Bring Your Own AI) where we can connect our own local Ollama instance (incl. MCP power if you want) to the OPA platform. Another great “preview” feature is the movement of the CARS instance into database tables…we’re not yet ready, but the first steps are made!
Between those releases we kept writing new posts…What about the post on Business calendars and all the relevant services to calculate a date based on your own configured business working days and public holidays within your country. Great stuff where valuable lessons got eXposed. If “dynamic security” is your thing, have a look at this post where we explain how to make advanced expressions in security conditions. It’s beyond what the eye can see…
All of a sudden we got a request in our project on how to separate the administrator role across multiple people. Everyone (even OpenText) told it’s impossible, but we nailed it with a great example. Then we eXposed all the details on the receiveEmail for your email service container including a best-practice on how to properly make it all work without a devastating endless loop on your service container!
When you implement lifecycles, you sometimes want to create a conditional route; Well, if so, read this post on routing states. If you want to know about the holy grail (and endless struggle) on getting a ‘UserDN’ value, read this.
Logging is one thing, but solidly making it readable is another thing; not after reading this post where we make the Application_Server.xml log more readable in the timestamp! In that same period, we also did another dive on the underrated JMS functionality over RabbitMQ.
Owh, and don’t forget we crafted garbage bin functionality, build a custom search component, AND we did a series of posts on hardening our VM security wise over certificates, reverse proxy, and reporting!
Promises turned into actions
Let’s double-check the promises from last year…
People slowly start to find/recognize me with a fascinating new project for the government here in the Netherlands. We got the opportunity to gain more knowledge about a fantastic dynamic workflow implementation and saw quotes passing by that sometimes blew my mind (not always positive!). Well, it’s what it is! If the customer is happy, I’m happy, and sometimes it’s wise to just not say something, fix it yourself eventually and communicate that the sun is still shining bright.
Also, old customers start to find me again which splits the work over multiple projects which is a dream come true from an entrepreneurial perspective. It’s great to be back on board, and we’ll make the best out of it again.
I see also totally new opportunities passing by; just out of nowhere!?…Not always with a positive outcome, but at least they know where to find me!
Next are the forum questions at OpenText…Incredibly important for helping others and promoting some posts of “Process Automation Tips”!
Well, it’s not that busy (just 20 questions since May 2025)…Weird and strange!? I also have a feeling not everyone knows where to find the forums. These were my contributions:
✅ Promoting the file connector on a question about the polling functionality.
✅ Then there was a topic from myself about advanced filtering with ‘toMany’ relative entities…Also, interesting stuff on searching the edges on the possibilities of the platform.
✅ This post about BPM UI gets a nice answer from me; However, never got an answer back if it helped.
✅ Another answer was given about the upgrade on imported/linked entities! Again, valuable details if you need to connect with external systems.
✅ Next is the recurring question on “Calling External REST API” with a solid answer (incl. authentication over OTDS).
✅ A similar question about “Calling Content Server API” with an easy to guess answer!
✅ The next one is about “Customize Results Panel”. Well, we’ve been there, and we’ve done that…That’s the power of posting online about topics we see in the field.
✅ Another great question about dynamic security over roles. You can make security as complex as you like, but don’t overengineer things as complexity comes with a penalty in the long-run.
✅ “Expose a BPM as REST API”…There is a solution!
✅ AND again, a similar question about accessing business process APIs outside OPA environment with a similar answer…It’s almost on repeating mode.
✅ Finally, a fascinating question about multiple E-mail connectors in the same organization…Well, the answer is not mine, but I put that “receiver” trick on my back-log to try out!
✅ WAIT…one other interesting question on the impact of changing a property datatype. It’s one question to further invest…It’s also interesting to see where this question comes from! Yes, it’s my ECM comrade from France! When the time is ready, the answer will be eXposed! 👋
…
“Bootcamp/workshop/training”; Well, give me a call, email me, ping me, stop me, hold me…whatever you want, I’m open to it; Material is ready for consumption including me, in person to move your skills to a new level. Trust me…I’ll be good. Online/onsite…You name it; There is nothing we can’t arrange to make it an eXperience of a lifetime. Whether it’s entity building, lifecycle building, BPM building, or workflow building, it will pass the chain of knowledge. Even administration tasks like installing, monitoring, and reverse engineering. All the tools to solve your complex problems we’ll discuss. The course is modular, which makes it flexible to follow with guidance from the best expertise and practical examples directly from the battlefield of the ECM market.
Let’s continue and dive into some numbers…
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:
That’s a 2x increase again compared with last year…#WTF! 😍
Let’s look at the page views:
WHAT…280K page views so far!! Great…
Where are all those people coming from?
China took a boost this year and Singapore is a new one; Spain and Poland dropped off from the top 7!
The browser they use?
Chrome is still in the lead…as expected!
The OS?
The majority is still on a Windows machine.
Screen resolution?
Fascinating as that’s a 4K screen resolution that’s peaking here; I don’t know if that many people use a 4K screen already!? Maybe all the people in China? 🤳
Acquisition
How did the users get on my site?
Behavior
The top 10 pages visited?
That’s a 2x increase on # of pageviews over all that time since last year!
What did you search for?
Still no “Process Automation” yet in this list…However, it starts to come as further down the list I start to see it already!
…
Great to see those numbers! I get all fired up again moving into the eighth year of figuring out new features and searching for the edges of the OPA platform. 🤠
The future
After seven years of blogging and working for (> 10 years) with the platform in the ECM/low-code space, I can tell it’s a very, very niche market where you can earn your credibility by doing and showing what you’re capable of. However, knowing the correct people is as important for a steady future…That’s what I’ll always keep in mind where trust is key!
This is still my list of topics to work on/with (next to the regular blogging articles):
Booklets; I see that people still download them which is a great sign! So, thank you and share those links if you like:
📢 “10 steps to learn practical AppWorks fundamentals”
📢 “10 steps to learn practical AppWorks “prototyping” (by example)”
The booklets still use “AppWorks” in the headers to keep a little history intact.
Workshops; Last year was an enormous success on my own crafted workshops; two workshops of one week passed the pipeline where knowledge was shared and skills were raised to a next level. Those people now work in several big projects implementing OPA solutions. If you also want a workshop onsite/online, just let me know and we’ll arrange a timeslot on valuable lessons. Because of the modularity, you can even decide (as a group) what path to follow in terms of fundamentals, entity modeling, lifecycle craftsmanship, and/or BPM craftsmanship. It’s even possible to provide the workshop in your own environment, with your own device; send me a mail at antal@bos-ictservices.nl
Community; Building a community is a hard and complex task to do; It’s also not something you do quickly on your own. That’s at least what I eXperienced. My blogs are a great starting point, but a “community” requires more than just a blogsite (with commenting on posts). In the past, I got some requests from people that also wanted to join the blogging (and they are welcome as it’s technically possible). However, they never joined the party (which is also fine). Community building is a joined adventure with multiple people who can collaborate on a central platform.
I know OpenText has its forum, but it only has 4 questions since 2026!? Strange, but I do know most customers collaborate behind paid walls over (premium)support. This is sometimes also very frustrating as developers should help developers instead of raising tickets at OpenText independently not knowing from each other asking the same questions! It’s good for OpenText, but bad for community building. Things should be more open and transparent to continue building something great on top of it; In the end it’s “us (as developers)” sitting at the customers implementing something solid and great.
I did a quick research on StackOverflow on these tags:
📌 TAG [cordys-opentext]
📌 TAG [opentext]
📌 TAG [business-process-management]
Conclusion: also very, very minimal, and small! Maybe there are not that many struggles? Maybe there are not that many customers? Maybe they just want to keep it all in-house? Let me know in the comments as I’m happy to help build something great here.
Sponsorship; I found my first sponsor three years ago, but there is room enough 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:
👉 “New testing tools”; “Testing”…It’s an underrated topic in the OPA space; We definitely do better with tools like “Playwright”, “Robot Framework”, “k6”, and “Gatling”.
👉 “Unfamiliar packages exposed”; Watching the ‘Application Deployed’ artifact, there are more packages where even I don’t know what they are!?
👉 “Weird WCP properties”; In high-pressure sessions, we see the most exotic (undocumented) settings passing by. Time to review some of them…
👉 “Migration”; With CARS (over LDAP) moving to a database implementation and projects starting over (because of a previous implementation mess) in another organization/instance, we need to dive into some migration plan!
👉 “PDF generation”; If you like and understand “Apache FOP”, “iText”, “BiRT”, and/or SmartDocuments, you also like what’s coming in the scope of PDF generation…
👉 “Dynamic workflow findings”; It went into preview/beta mode in release 22.2; We’re now four years later and some projects later with all lessons learned.
👉 “Instance role security with xECM”; WHAT? Yes, it’s a thing you can apparently do since the later versions of the platform to make your business workspace as secure as your entity case instance.
Greatness is coming my friends…You’ll never stop learning!
Quote for this year
It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you continue doing it! That’s a valuable lesson for all. I can tell you that “Process Automation Tips” is still up and running for this main reason. I know what brought me this far; I also had my moments to stop, but those are the exact moments to grab yourself by the balls and continue…Those are also the best moments of learning about life and the “why” behind it. I will continue my journey on this blogsite as I just love to do it, lots of details are yet unspoken, and new features will still pass every quarter of the platform release.
Finally, some last lessons listening and reading to others:
1️⃣ Don’t start building a bridge if you intend to stop at the last 10 feet.
2️⃣ When you slip in a curved road, don’t look at the wall; look at where you want to go to.
3️⃣ Don’t execute the bare minimum, execute so much that failure is impossible.
4️⃣ You’ll become what you’ll repeatedly do.
5️⃣ If you want to have something, imagine yourself that you already have it and act to it to get it.
That’s it for now; A recap of the seventh year under the “Anniversary” tag. It’s a “DONE” again. I always end with this “DONE” as it tells me to put an end to it; I know it’s ready for publication (after a review), and I can continue something new to write about. So, let’s finalize it for now. It was a wonderful year again, with lots of new learnings and eXperiences. We’ll continue to do so…So, let’s recap again next year in 2027 for year eight of “Process Automation Tips”. Cheers! 🍺
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