On October 20 the CLSA Community hosted Pega's Chief Product Officer Kerim Akgonul as keynote speaker. 

During this session Kerim shared his vision how we can continue to provide amazing experiences for our clients in a continuously changing world! He brings the latest updates around Pega's sophisticated AI and automation technology, about the architectural changes, Cosmos, building highly sophisticated applications using low code and about keeping current (both clients and as professional). 

In the Q&A we touch on how this changes the way we implement, what we should focus on and how to use the different new features. 

Below the recording you can find the questions and answers from that session. More questions and answers will be added so please subscribe to get notified when new are added. 

The handout of the slides is available for download

Don’t have the full 60 minutes to watch the whole session? Check out the following snippets by @BraamCLSA 

https://collaborate.pega.com/discussion/pegas-center-out-business-architecture-kerims-date-clsas

https://collaborate.pega.com/discussion/pega-capabilities-and-architecture-kerims-date-clsas

https://collaborate.pega.com/discussion/low-code-user-experiences-kerims-date-clsas

https://collaborate.pega.com/discussion/highly-sophisticated-applications-using-low-code-kerims-date-clsas

https://collaborate.pega.com/discussion/keep-your-clients-and-yourselves-current-kerims-date-clsas

https://collaborate.pega.com/discussion/kerims-questions-and-answers-kerims-date-clsas

The Q&A from the session

DX API

We have an application in production for internal users which was built using Pega UI. There is a need to expose the same application to external users via DX API. My existing application has screenflows which is a limitation of DX API. If I go DX API route- lI need to rewrite/specialize my UI layer. Is this the right approach as we even need to balance the change where internal users are using the Pega app?

Starting with 8.5 screen flow is available using a few DX API V2 end points available for use in V1 section/harness UI.The React starter Pack and Salesforce Lightning extender include screen flow support and are available on Pega MarketPlace.

DX APIs are very powerful and gives us a 360 degree view but do not find the extensions in order to add more information to the response , to be specific I need to access some custom case attributes and remove some of the OOTB attributes, is there any reason we do not have extension points ? Is there any plan to add extension points to it?

That is a great idea but at this point we don’t have immediate plans to do this. As a work around pass extra case attributes as part of case data. There is also a setting in the property panel for controls and layouts where you can pass additional DX API attributes. Removing attributes isn’t supported. 

If I want to understand the working model of DX-API is there any course to refer and build a sample? 

A DX API course is planned for 1H of 2022. Pega Community already has an extensive set of documentation.  Pega Marketplace starter Packs and SDKs include documentation. There is new community content in progress for Starter Packs and SDKs. 

UI

We have many customers with our Customer Service Application on UI-Kit from past versions (6, 7 & 8). How do we evaluate the complexity of the migration of their CS applications from UI-Kit to Cosmos React or other Front-End technologies? 

The first step would be to wait until Customer Service releases on React (see question below). The complexity of migration for those apps will depend on their customization. The newer the app is the easier the migration should be. Older apps may have a lot of customization.   

The paradigm with Cosmos React is to let Pega deal with most of the UI, the information architecture on the screen, so to a large extent it would mean that existing apps will have to remove their customizations and use the configurations provided via app studio, and focus on the Cases and the information they want to capture in those cases. 

When can we expect Cosmos on the applications, like CS? 

Customer Service, Sales Automation and Smart Resolve are all actively working towards delivering a version on Cosmos and Constellation (React-based).  Our goal is to release in the 8.8 timeframe and be demoing Cosmos solutions at PegaWorld 2022. 

Are there plans to provide React authoring in an "UI Studio"? 

No current plans.  React authoring in the industry is done using tools such as Visual Studio Code and other code editors.  Additionally front-end developers are also comfortable using npm tools, so anything we provide through a ‘UI studio’ will end up adding a learning curve.  Additionally, we primarily want our clients to use capability provided by the design system and its components, and only use custom react components as an exception. 

React-based Cosmos is the prerequisite to many of Pega’s offerings, including Insights and remote case generation in Process Fabric. Seamless opening of requestor sessions in browser tabs is also only possible with React. What are the plans for enabling our development teams on Cosmos React setup? 

Cosmos React setup is fairly simple, it’s a setting on the application rule. Once the application has been enabled for React the experiences in App Studio will generate a React App. There will of course be documentation, and updates to academy modules as formal enablement.

Process AI

Will we be able to train the models used in process AI? In order to have a business determined bias/ historical propensity on these outcomes. 

Yes, model training in Pega is supported today. 

Are there plans to bring more complex Adaptive Models to Pega AI? 

Yes, a Gradient Boosting based ADM option will be available for Early Adopters in 8.7. 

PegaWiki 

Pegawiki is great, but it has little reach. Not many people are aware of it. Why is it not part of community.pega.com? What are the plans for the Wiki, will it remain? 

We are excited about the content getting added to the Community Wiki and want to continue growing the knowledge base with outcome based Design patterns.  Today the Community Wiki is integrated into the overall Community.  We have links from the “Getting Started” navigation bar and the community search results.  Within the Community search results we have added a “Design Pattern” tab that displays the Community Wiki results for your specific search.  Once you click one of these articles you will be brought to the Community Wiki to review the content or refine your search.  Over the next couple of months we have plans to integrate the Community Wiki into more aspects of the Community.   

The application support has shifted into community-based support, however for a lot of new features, use of them was fairly limited and so unless a client is on the cutting edge, they never get utilized.  what is the plan of providing code or use case snippets on Community to show and demonstrate how a new feature is actually used? 

As part of the Community our goal is display functional content and outcome based articles.  We try to answer “How To…” questions to ensure we are providing the appropriate answer for the outcome expected.  If the response requires code or use case snippets those should be included in those articles.  If this is missing and/or you believe this would be helpful please provide feedback to the Tech Documentation team by clicking the “Suggest Edit” link at the bottom of the article and provide your feedback.

Process Fabric

What is the current status of the Process Fabric product, is it production-ready now? 

Yes. Process Fabric Hub is released and is available both through Digital Delivery and through Pega Cloud. It provides the capabilities around Interwoven Worklist, and OOTB provides connectors across all the versions of Pega 8.x. The related connectors for Pega 8.x are made available through Pega Market Place. Related Product Help can be accessed here. 

Additionally, with Pega 8.6, we also provided the ability to configure remote case types  through AppStudio, and made it possible for end users to be able to create and act upon related cases. Related reference from product help can be found here.  

Architecture

Does Pega support a circuit breaker implementation and if so what technologies are being used to support that?

Yes Pega does support a circuit breaker implementation on our service rules. If a user configurable response time threshold is exceeded, service rules can execute a compensating action for subsequent requests. See here for more info: https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/data-management-and-integration/85/defining-resource-and-processing-details-service-rest-rule

Kerim mentioned MongoDB is in the pipeline. What will be its role? Will we be able to save cases to it instead of a database blob? 

MongoDB will be used as the transactional data store for data objects and cases.

DevOps

With the growing importance of DevOps are production rulesets still a worthwhile design option? Or is the expectation now that business users make tweaks way back in Dev and that – with slick-enough DevOps – these changes get to Production soon enough, subject to the quality controls that enforced by the release pipeline? 

There are still some valid reasons for production rulesets for things like reporting and perhaps delegated rules and we don’t want our customers to abuse those rulesets for something that is meant to be a development task or “hacks”. With that being said, yes, our future vision is to have business users be able to make these changes in controlled “dev” experiences and publish them through pipelines that insure quality and governance. We would love to get to the point where this is enough confidence in these pipelines and automated test that producing these “releases” is a non-event and more standard practice.  

Inevitably there are data items that need to be set to different values in each environment and not be at risk of “resetting” to the values packaged in Dev. What is the recommendation to keep data instances “safe” with the use of DevOps? 

We have made some enhancements in this area with Configuration sets in which you can control the data or rule being used based on production levels. That way, these can safely migrate through the systems and the appropriate ones are being honoured at runtime.