Phased rollout

   

This version of the software is currently available only to early adopter SaaS customers as the first step in our phased rollout. Click here to view an earlier version.

21.02 enhancements

Review the BMC Helix Business Workflows 21.02 enhancements for features that will benefit your organization and to understand changes that might impact your users.

Product name changes in BMC Helix Platform applications, Remedy platform, and Remedy ITSM

Consult the following tables for changes to the product and component names starting with version 21.02.

While the product names have changed in 21.02, some instances in the product documentation still refer to the previous product name.

BMC Helix Platform and applications

Version 20.08 and earlierVersion 21.02 and later
BMC Helix Platform

BMC Helix Innovation Studio Open link

BMC Helix Chatbot

BMC Helix Virtual Agent Open link

Remedy Platform and ITSM applications

Version 20.08 and earlierVersion 21.02 and later

Remedy Action Request System (Remedy AR System)

Action Request System (AR System) Open link

Remedy IT Service Management Suite (Remedy ITSM)

BMC Helix ITSM Open link

Remedy with Smart IT

BMC Helix ITSM: Smart IT Open link

Remedy Smart Reporting

BMC Helix ITSM: Smart Reporting Open link

Remedy Single Sign-On

BMC Helix Single Sign-On Open link

BMC Helix Innovation Suite for Service Management applications

Starting with version 21.02, Service Management applications run on a single environment named, BMC Helix Innovation Suite. With the new

BMC Helix Innovation Suite, we bring together the capabilities of Action Request System and BMC Helix Innovation Studio.

As an Action Request System user, use the Action Request System components and clients. Leverage Service Management applications or build a custom application by using Developer Studio.

As a BMC Helix Innovation Studio user, use the Service Management applications or build a custom application by using BMC Helix Innovation Studio. 

BMC Helix Innovation Suite provides the following benefits:

  • A single-tenant common platform for Service Management applications.

  • A shared database between AR System and BMC Helix Innovation Studio.

  • A common Foundation data for applications that run on the BMC Helix Innovation Suite. 

  • The ability to interoperate between AR System and BMC Helix Innovation Studio. For example, you can call a process defined by using BMC Helix Innovation Studio in AR System. The process is called by triggering a filter written in Developer Studio.

Set up BMC Helix Business Workflows from Action Request System

As an administrator or case business analyst, configure the following items in Action Request System instead of BMC Helix Innovation Studio:

  • Foundation data
  • Functional roles
  • Line of business domain tags
  • Mailbox configurations
  • Business time segment

Learn more about assigning functional roles in  Assigning IS Personas to People data Open link . Understand how to configure domain tags in Associating Foundation data with domain tags.

Leverage Foundation data from BMC Helix Innovation Suite

BMC Helix Business Workflows leverages common Foundation data for all the applications deployed on BMC Helix Innovation Suite.  An administrator can onboard Foundation data one at a time or load the data in bulk for all the service management applications. Learn more about Foundation data in  Foundation data model Open link .

By leveraging common Foundation data, an administrator no longer needs to perform the following actions:

  • Foundation data sync from BMC Helix ITSM to BMC Helix Innovation Suite applications.
  • Normalization of the data between applications.

The following entities from Foundation data are no longer used in BMC Helix Business Workflows:

  • Department
  • Business unit (renamed to Support organization)
  • Localized text support for categories, status, label
  • Associations for all entities except for Person

The following image shows the option to view and edit Person data in BMC Helix ITSM:

Configure line-of-business specific parameters

As a case business analyst, configure application-specific parameters for a line of business. You can change the values for the out-of-the-box parameters or add a new value for a specific line of business. Learn more about the line-of-business specific configurations in Defining application configurations for your line of business.

Reporting in BMC Helix Business Workflows

BMC Helix Business Workflows uses the common Foundation data from BMC Helix Innovation Suite to generate reports from BMC Helix ITSM: Smart Reporting. However, there are no changes to the way reports are generated.

View license usage report

As an administrator, view the following license usage reports:

  • Line of Business - Counts: View the total number of lines of business and their status in your setup.
  • Active users: View only the license usage reports for Active users and not for Named users.

Learn more about license usage reports in Viewing the license usage reports.

The following image shows an example of the Line of Business - Counts report:

BMC Helix Business Workflows reports in BMC Helix Dashboards

The following reports are also available from BMC Helix Dashboards:

  • Case statistics
  • Cases by Assigned group
  • Cases by Priority
  • Case details

Users with the Reporting functional role who can view reports in BMC Helix Business Workflows can view these reports in BMC Helix Dashboards. Administrators can also view the License usage by Requester - Summary report to monitor license consumption. Learn more in  BMC Helix Business Workflows dashboards Open link .

Usability improvements

The following table lists the usability improvements:

ImprovementDescriptionVersion 20.08 and earlierVersion 21.02 and later
Enhanced UI for the Settings page

New and improved UI for the Settings pages provides a consistent user experience and uniformity with the rest of the BMC Helix Business Workflows UI.

The following image shows the earlier UI for Settings:

The following image shows the new and improved UI for Settings:

Change assignment

Changing assignment for the records is now possible in fewer clicks, enhancing usability.

As a case business analyst or case agent, change the assignment of cases, tasks, knowledge articles, and templates by selecting the Assigned Group and Assignee.

The following image shows the panel that opened for Change Assignment:

The following image shows the two fields for changing the assignment:

Deprecation of support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 11

Starting with the 21.02 release, BMC will not support the use of Microsoft Internet Explorer version 11 with BMC Helix Business Workflows. For a complete list of BMC products that will no longer support Internet Explorer 11, see the  BMC Customer Support Communities page Open link .

As technology continues to advance, it has become more challenging to resolve browser-specific issues related to Internet Explorer 11. We may attempt to fix some issues related to that version, but some features may not work as expected.

Because of security compromises and performance issues, we recommend that you do not use Internet Explorer 11. Instead, we encourage you to switch to other fully supported browsers.

BMC will still support Internet Explorer 11 on releases of BMC products prior to version 21.02 where Internet Explorer 11 was already supported.

Important

Microsoft still supports Internet Explorer 11 on some operating systems (including Microsoft Windows 8.1 and 10 and Windows Server 2012 and 2016). For more information, see the Microsoft Lifecycle FAQ - Internet Explorer and Edge Open link .

If you have any questions, post them on the  BMC Customer Support Communities page Open link .

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