Product overview

BMC Helix Innovation Suite is a powerful, industry-leading service management platform that fuels your IT transformation with intelligent, people-centric user experiences that helps you work smarter.

BMC Helix Innovation Suite is delivered as part of the BMC Helix ITSM solution in the cloud or as a hybrid or on-premises solution.

BMC Helix Innovation Suite consolidates the capabilities of Action Request System and BMC Helix Innovation Studio. This single-tenant environment leverages modern architecture and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies.

Advantages of BMC Helix Innovation Suite

Foundation data is common to all applications, BMC Helix ITSM applications and BMC Helix Innovation Studio. BMC Helix Innovation Studio applications can directly use common Foundation data without the Foundation sync utility. For more information, see Loading Foundation data by using Data Management.
The BMC Helix Innovation Suite uses a common database for AR System, BMC Helix Innovation Studio, and BMC Digital Workplace.
BMC Helix Innovation Suite offers interoperability between AR System and BMC Helix Innovation Studio. For example, you can call a process, defined by using Innovation Studio in AR System with a filter written by using Developer Studio.
For more information, see How to automate notification for issue assignment on BMC Helix Innovation Suite.
Artificial intelligence (AI) powered services such as BMC Helix Virtual Agent are available for the on-premises users.

The following video (3.25) provides an overview of BMC Helix Innovation Suite and its key capabilities:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3K7wInkeiB8

Tip

To view all videos for the product, go to the YouTube playlist.Subscribe to BMCdocsSubscribe to BMC Helix ServiceOps

User roles

BMC Helix Innovation Suite includes the following roles:

The following video (03:40) gives an overview of how different roles interact with BMC Helix Innovation Suite:

https://youtu.be/LjEIoEea7Jg

The following table describes the different user roles, their tasks, and related documentation for reference:

User roles	Tasks	Reference
Administrator	Manage access and permissions for all users. Create new applications by defining a new data model with role or license restrictions, and field-level or client-level security features. Define the organization's work processes and business rules. Allocate servers and database resources. Build applications and create deployment packages to deploy applications in development, test, or production environments. Define a new package of component, libraries, abstractions, and related configurations and code. Create and deploy codeless applications. Define those features of an application or library that are open to customization, while minimizing opportunities for consumer customization to interfere with the correct functioning of the application. Create new components from platform services. Integrate the application or platform with other applications, systems, and processes to meet the organization's requirements. Perform maintenance activities for BMC Helix Innovation Suite. (On-premises) Deploy BMC Helix Innovation Suite.	Setting-up-and-going-live Securing-BMC-Helix-Innovation-Suite Administering Enabling-services Troubleshooting
Developer	Create new components for external services by importing supporting library files to the development environment. Create and modify service management applications that reflect a set of work processes and business rules. Localize an application for use in other languages or countries. Integrate external applications with BMC Helix Innovation Suite. Write custom plug-ins for clients that use the AR System C API, Java API, or Java plug-in API.	Developing-applications-by-using-BMC-Helix-Innovation-Studio Developing-Progressive-Web-Applications Developing-applications-by-using-Developer-Studio Developing-an-API-program Integrating Troubleshooting
Application business analyst	Deliver tailored applications and process automation that improve the quality of services delivered to stakeholders. Provide improvements in business processes. Modify application definitions within an application for which you have access. Customize applications without programming skills or tools training.	Developing-codeless-applications Tailoring-applications-and-automating-processes
Security administrator	Implement security policy, standards, guidelines and procedures to ensure ongoing maintenance of security. Manage user accesses for single sign-on, which includes managing server configuration, authentication mechanisms, and multiple realms.	Securing-BMC-Helix-Innovation-Suite
End user	Raise incident and service requests. Analyze or consume a customized or out-of-the-box service management application.	Getting-started Using

BMC Helix Innovation Suite business value

BMC Helix Innovation Suite provides a framework for non-programmers to leverage modern architectural and AI/ML technologies, and helps develop, build, deploy, and use applications on cloud (SaaS) and on-premises. You can align to ITIL best practices quickly and cost-effectively along with expert services.

The following table describes how you can use the BMC Helix Innovation Suite to address your business needs.

Business need	Reference
Automate many business processes without learning a programming language or using complex development tools.	Using-BMC-Helix-Innovation-Suite-to-enable-business-process-automation
Create codeless applications in a few clicks with minimal dependency on developers or development environment, and to promote codeless applications from a development to test or production environments.	Empowering-developers-and-non-developers-to-develop-applications-in-BMC-Helix-Innovation-Suite
Automate the manual tasks, such as data categorization and task assignment, by using machine learning in their applications.	Leveraging-cognitive-and-conversation-capabilities-by-using-your-own-cognitive-provider
Build an application with the the chatbot framework.	Leveraging-conversation-capabilities-in-your-application
Create interactive dashboards for Service Management applications.	Create interactive dashboards for your applications by using BMC Helix Dashboards
Integrate third-party products	Calling-third-party-REST-APIs-in-an-application
Use email to to perform queries, submissions, or modifications to entries	Using-Email-Engine-to-enable-email-driven-business-processes
Drive approval for a business process	Using-Approval-Server-to-automate-the-approval-driven-business-processes

Interoperability on BMC Helix Innovation Suite

With BMC Helix Innovation Suite, an administrator or application business analyst can interoperate between AR System and BMC Helix Innovation Studio . This capability helps simplify application development.

The following diagram shows the interoperability between AR System and BMC Helix Innovation Studio on BMC Helix Innovation Suite:

Advantages

You can build an application that uses a filter developed in Developer Studio to trigger a process designed in BMC Helix Innovation Studio.
You can build an application that leverages data from AR System forms, including BMC Helix ITSM application form data and Foundation data.
You can embed a progressive view in a BMC Helix Innovation Studio application.

For more information, see Altering-a-notification-process-on-BMC-Helix-Innovation-Suite.

Common Foundation data for BMC Helix ITSM applications and BMC Helix Innovation Studio applications

As an administrator, you can use a common shared Foundation data structure of Person, Organization, Location, Categorization, and Geography for multiple applications such as BMC Helix Business Workflows and BMC Helix Virtual Agent built on BMC Helix Innovation Studio along with current applications.

The common unified Foundation data provides the following benefits:

A single data source for all the applications on the BMC Helix Innovation Suite.
BMC Helix Innovation Studioapplications can directly use common Foundation data without the Foundation sync utility.
No need to normalize data between applications.

For more information, see Setting-up-and-modifying-Foundation-data-by-using-Application-Administration-Console.

Product documentation

This documentation helps new and experienced users implement or use BMC Helix Innovation Suite. Based on your requirement, the following sections of the documentation are recommended:

User assistance

A number of channels are available through which the developer community can get support.

You can log on to BMC Developer community to get support from other developers by using Developer portal. Experts from BMC can help you out with your queries.
You can look at Developer portal to collaborate with like-minded developers. You can co-create, innovate, and create applications.

If you are a developer, you can review the Comparison-between-Developer-Studio-and-BMC-Helix-Innovation-Studio-capabilities constructs.

Within BMC Helix Innovation Studio, you can use tool-tips to get in-place assistance for populating fields, or you can use the guided tours created for key use cases by using the Self-help widget.

Recommended skills set

For an administrator

An administrator can create codeless applications with minimal programming knowledge.

For a developer

The following video gives you information on developing applications:

https://youtu.be/N8ew_BwdbPY

For a developer to be able to work smoothly with BMC Helix Innovation Studio and codes, the following skills set is recommended.

Maven
- http://maven.apache.org/
Angular
Server side application development
Prerequisites:
- (required) Oracle University Java SE 8 Fundamentals (required)
- (recommended) Oracle University Java SE 8 Programming
- Read Building RESTful Web Services with JAX-RS tutorial
- http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/ou_product_category.getPage?p_cat_id=267
- http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/tutorial/doc/giepu.html
Client side application development
Prerequisites:
- (required) Oracle University JavaScript and HTML5: Develop Web Applications
- (required) Read online tutorial of JSON
- http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getpage?page_id=609&get_params=dc:D84842,clang:EN
- https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_json_intro.asp

Recommended training

Before you start creating applications, BMC recommends the following trainings: