This article contains forward-looking statements based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties. As such, the dates and deliverables represented cannot be guaranteed and should not be viewed as commitments.
This article recaps the Boomi Q4 Product Roadmap webinar and highlights some of the recently delivered product features as well as the upcoming roadmap. Have questions or feedback on what was presented? Drop us a note in the comment sections at the bottom of this post.
We are looking for your feedback! Have ideas on how we can improve future product roadmap webinars? Take our brief survey.
Boomi Enterprise Platform
Our 2023 roadmap mission continues to be focused on:
- Productivity and Time-to-Value: being the fastest and easiest way to get meaningful outcomes done.
- Continue to Innovate: solve incumbent problems using new and innovative approaches,
- Be Open & Neutral: ensuring our platform is easy to deliver within an ecosystem of partners and applications
- Be Market Focused: proactively track market and solicit feedback as a key driver to roadmap decisions
We also had three major announcements this past quarter that you will want to check out.
- Flow Environments: manage how and when you deliver your flows by releasing, deploying and running your flows in development, testing & production environments. To learn more about using Environments see here.
- API Creation: To help you get started with creating API’s, you can now quickly and easily create an API from an existing process, using the new Create API option. This allows you to create an API from a process that begins with a Web Services Server connector.
- Generate Hub models from DCP: Master Data Hub supports a platform API to create Hub models and the DCP Data Catalog service is leveraging that API to offer a new model creation experience. Now business users and IT can collaborate using cataloged data set insights to design canonical models and generate them directly in Master Data Hub.
Below are the service specific roadmaps and recent delivery highlights. Thank you for your continued support and partnership.
Platform
We continue to invest in the user experience for Discover which hosts Boomi’s recipe and accelerator solutions. To enhance the use of this portal we are simplifying the login experience so that it’s less disjointed from the broader platform. In the near future users will be able to access Discover content from within the Boomi Enterprise platform itself. We encourage you to visit Discover and evaluate some of these new recipes for yourself.
Boomi is also engaging with select customers and partners for an Early Access program for Custom Catalog. Custom Catalog provides organizations the ability to manage their own asset portals. This empowers such organizations to deliver a tailored Discover-like experience for their constituents.
Many of our most successful customers are making use of the full Boomi Enterprise platform. We have begun the process of migrating users to access Enterprise platform, Flow, DCP our LMS and Community with one set of credentials. We expect to have all users exercising unified platform authentication by Q2 2023.
Finally, as part of our continuous commitment to provide a secure platform for our customers we will be implementing key management functionality, enabling you to rotate keys as well as bring your own key capabilities. The introduction of this functionality is currently in Early Access.
Recent Delivery Highlights:
- Custom Catalog – Early Access program for use of Custom Catalog.
Integration
For the Integration service, the roadmap is laser focused on two key initiatives: user experience and robust lifecycle management. We want you to be able to get started intuitively, build productively, and then be able to most effectively manage your integrations and automations as you grow.
As it relates to UX and providing an awesome build experience, we’re developing an integration “quick start” or guided path to easily generate an integration process from a few simple inputs. Imagine defining the source and target applications and actions, and having Boomi generate the initial process for you, and even auto-completing the field mappings and transformations. For basic scenarios, that process will essentially be ready to go. For more advanced scenarios you’ve just quickly created a starting point from which you can customize and configure as you would normally. This dramatically reduces the time and learning curve–especially for new users–to get started with a basic application automation use case.
Regarding integration life cycle management and core capabilities, we’re currently developing APIs for component creation, which will be aimed at helping enable you begin your Boomi journey by transitioning legacy integrations into Boomi. Beyond that, as a first step to enhancing version management for teams working in Boomi, we’ll be enabling you to easily see the differences of what changed between versions of processes and components. As many of you know, processes can often have a lot of configuration steps, so determining which steps and values were modified is critical to resolving issues and confirming changes quickly.
Recent Delivery Highlights
- Redesigned Start tab now GA, with clear calls to action and enhancement recently used components
- Process canvas UX enhancements including contextual recommendations for next step and improved styling of paths between steps for visibility.
Have a product or technical question? Want to share a tip? Check out the Integration Product Forum.
API Management
The API Management team is focusing on three areas to make it easier for users to adopt APIs for accelerating business outcomes.
The first area is developer productivity and API governance. We have recently added the ability to use OAS 3.0 definitions to create new API Services and Proxies more quickly, and will soon support publishing OAS 3.0 APIs and adding query parameters for REST APIs. We are also making significant improvements to the API creation process to make it easier to create APIs from integration processes. If you are interested please enroll in the research program via this link – https://boomi.to/researchpanel
The second area is security, scalability, and monitoring. We have recently made significant enhancements in this area, including the Metrics API and the Policy Adapter. Enabling our customers to meet their business needs with the best performance and reliability possible is important to us. We are also planning to remove the Authentication Broker this year, as the API Gateway offers a better option for our customers. To help with this transition, we have released the broker elimination utility and added multi-mode authentication on the shared web server. We will continue to provide documentation and migration guides to assist customers in moving away from using the Authentication Broker.
The third area is openness and platform extensibility. We want to make it easy for developers and partners who need to interact with APIM platform assets to build custom solutions. To do this, we are investing in providing GraphQL-based APIs and SDKs to allow developers to more easily access and engage with the platform. This “API first” approach is critical to the future evolution of the APIM platform and will provide technological flexibility and agility for future architectural decisions. We have already released the metrics API, and the next API in line is the Developer Portal API, which will be available through an Early Access program. Later, we plan to release a new Metadata API that will allow developers access to important metadata on the platform.
Recent Delivery Highlights:
- API Creation: To help you get started with creating API’s, you can now quickly and easily create an API from an existing process, using the new Create API option. This allows you to create an API from a process that begins with a Web Services Server connector.
Have a product or technical question? Want to share a tip? Check out the API Management Product Forum.
Atom Runtime
The runtime team is focused this year on optimizing for scale, as well as maintaining a strong security posture. As your trusted technology partner, we want to ensure that our customers have a scalable, and secure runtime environment to meet their current and future needs.
On the scale side this quarter, we will be adding a new process execution mode, called bridge mode. This mode will provide performance benefits similar to those of low latency, with the added benefit of also providing process logs. Bridge mode will be made available to a select group of customers first, and then will be rolled out to the rest of our customer base shortly thereafter. Related to scale, but focused on stability, we will be adding additional support to our local work directory property to allow for the copying of connector jars. This builds on similar changes delivered last quarter. We expect this to continue to enhance the experience specifically on Windows implementations.
Specific to security, we will be rolling out Java 11.0.17.8.1, and expect to release one Java patch a quarter. Likewise, we are patching two third party libraries used by the runtime, ActiveMQ, and Common-compress which are used by our installers. Similar to the Java patches, we expect to make updates to our third party libraries every quarter.
Recent Delivery Highlights:
- Ability to scale down Molecules utilizing Atom Queues
- Local work directory property with support to copy container jars and plugins to local storage and off of the shared file system
Have a product or technical question? Want to share a tip? Check out the Atom, Molecule, Cloud Runtime Product Forum.
B2B/EDI
Acceleration against the roadmap is ramping up as well as deliveries against the non-roadmap backlog. The non-roadmap backlog deliveries are up 123% versus 1 year ago and we are now working on 4X the roadmap items concurrently, which is setting the team up for some significant deliveries over the coming months.
The Trading Partner API work for organization and communication channels is wrapping up with the October release. We released the first phase of our ODETTE support. We have added support for the standard to the B2B/EDI framework and added the first batch of documents / profiles to support that work flow. The OFTP2 connector is being worked on and is now accelerating as well.
Additional areas of focus and active work are around the second phase of ODETTE, AS2 attachments (multiple EDI document attachments will be delivered in October and binary attachment development is slated to begin). We are adding work in/around HL7 in the healthcare space to enhance our ability to support the standard, and we are starting some similar efforts with other standards we support such as EDIFACT, RosettaNet and etc.
Our second Drummond AS2 interoperability certification for 2022 is now underway.
Have a product or technical question? Want to share a tip? Check out the B2B, Trading Partners, EDI Product Forum.
Connectivity
Connectivity efforts are focused on two main areas—Connectors, which focuses on the development and maintenance of our broad connector ecosystem, and Connectivity Services, which focuses on our SDK and connector developer tooling and enablement.
Recent Delivery Highlights:
This quarter, in an off-cycle December release there was a soft launch of 130 new connectors built using our OpenAPI framework. These connectors are available on the Boomi Enterprise platform in the Tech Preview category, as well as on the open source BitBucket repository at: https://boomi.to/oss. You can now connect to several popular application ecosystems including AWS, GCP family, Hubspot, Eventbrite, DocuSign, Xero, and several others. Also, in the last quarter we have released various connector updates and enhancements. The long awaited JMS V2 connector has been released, supporting ActiveMQ, OracleAQ, and SonicMQ. Additionally there have been updates to the Disk V2 and Kafka connectors for singleton Listener mode. Our Technology Partners have also released various updates to their connectors, as part of our Boomi TPP program. These connectors are built utilizing the Boomi SDK and supported by our Technology partners. You can find additional details for all the connectors updated over the quarter in the release notes and the individual help documents for each connector.
Connectivity Roadmap:
We are continuing to invest in automations and technologies that will accelerate the rate at which we can develop and enhance connectors. Recently, we have fully automated the engineering and security reviews, required for Production release. These tools are the foundation to streamlining our Open Source process for 3rd party connector contributions to the Boomi Enterprise Platform.
Connector Update
In Progress
We are currently enhancing the Netsuite connector to support version 2022.2, keeping up with Netsuite’s biannual release. Additionally, we are preparing to release updates to the Coupa connector in support of the deprecated Inventory_Transations API Endpoint. We are actively working on updating the Snowflake Connector to support the latest driver and to tune the performance eliminating some excessive metadata calls. These are just a few of the connectors we have in development. The team is continuously working with our partners and your ideas to improve the Boomi connector experience.
Up Next
We have been working internally and with our customers to gather feedback on the REST Client connector that is in Tech Preview. Our Engineering partners are taking that feedback and working to enhance the Connector for a GA release. Thank you to everyone who participated or responded to our survey. Your feedback will be directly used to enhance the connector and ensure we are ready for GA.
We also have various application and database connectors in our ‘up next’ queue. The Shopify connector will be updated to support the latest APIs and our Oracle Database connector will be receiving some enhancements and updates that have been suggested by our customers.
Lastly, we have heard a lot from our customers around Database V2 and improvements that are needed to ensure the connector is at parity and better than our previous DB connector. We will be looking to address those concerns and update the connector in the coming quarters.
Planned
Over the next several releases, we will be taking a look at all the open enhancement requests, and defects and ensuring we are addressing the customer voice in our releases. Some of the planned releases we have in store are Snowflake, Database V2, FTP V2, Oracle Fusion, SFTP V2, MongoDB, SAP S/4 OData, SAP JCo. Many of the features that will be included come straight from the idea submissions in the Product Feedback Forum. This is the best way to get your idea included in the Boomi Roadmap.
OSS
As we continue to build out our portfolio of Boomi connectors, we are making active efforts to ensure that the code is public. All Boomi OSS connectors are available at https://boomi.to/oss for feature development, utilizing our SDK tools.
Connectivity Services
In Connectivity Services we continue our focus on developer tooling and enabling connector development.
In Progress
We are enhancing our open API connector to support adding local file specs. We are also enhancing the REST Client technology connector to bring it to parity with our HTTP client connector
Up Next
We plan to continue enhancing our REST Client connector to provide a better URL builder experience, as well as add support for profile objects. Additionally, we are also focusing on making our connector deployment APIs publicly available. This will enable any connector developer to programmatically deploy their connector and also integrate connector deployment into their own CI/CD environment
Planned
As part of our partner development enablement efforts, we will be opening up our automated CI/CD process for partner connector submissions. This will enable development partners to have a more efficient and automated process for connector submission, opening the door to a more efficient OSS process for any 3rd party submission on the Boomi Enterprise Platform. As part of this effort, partners will have the ability to brand their connectors with customized icons and badging.
Have a product or technical question? Want to share a tip? Check out the Custom Connector Development Product Forum.
Master Data Hub
Our current focus is on an improved data stewardship search experience. Phase 1 of this initiative will be centered on golden record query performance and responsiveness.
We are also working on providing more golden record statistics and business context on the deployed model page – displaying metadata such as profiling results, tags, business glossary and data dictionary – curated and surfaced from Data Catalog & Prep (DCP).
Up next, we’ll be working on improving our consolidation and synchronization capabilities with a new golden record merging experience. We are also looking to strengthen our security capabilities by providing privilege assignment and authentication options directly at the repository level.
In addition to this, we will also augmenting our stewardship capabilities for quarantined record management including:
- Bulk actions for quarantined records matching an applied filter
- Export options for broader quarantined record analysis
Lastly, we are planning improvements to our stewardship and security capabilities with features like golden record unmerging, data masking for sensitive field data and adding/removing collection items (aka repeatable field groups) in the native UI.
Recent Delivery Highlights:
- Master Data Hub supports a platform API to create Hub models and the DCP Data Catalog service is leveraging that API to offer a new model creation experience. Now business users and IT can collaborate using cataloged data set insights to design canonical models and generate them directly in Master Data Hub.
Have a product or technical question? Want to share a tip? Check out the Master Data Hub Product Forum.
Flow
Flow is excited to share a few key features from the quarter. We delivered a new environments feature allowing a user to manage and progress a set of flow changes through stages of a standard development cycle. We released a components manager that allows a user to add a custom component to enable reusable, shareable components across page layouts. Lastly, we released an enhanced page builder giving you easier access to component and configuration panels, easier usage of page conditions and the ability to preview your page.
In the coming months, Flow will be focusing on some key areas that enhance the user experience.
With improvements to our Runtime, we will be launching UI enhancements and performance improvements. We are also working on out-of-the-box components to save development time from building custom components.
Focusing on platform cohesion, we will be implementing an Auto Arranger feature similar to Integration that allows a user to layout the map elements in Flow in an organized view with one click. Additionally, we will be making enhancements to our Flow Home page reflecting a cohesive view to our Boomi Enterprise platform’s page where you can have quick access to editing of Flows, see active flow builders within a Flow so you can have the most relevant and essential information.
In an effort to promote collaboration in Flow, we will be enabling real-time collaboration for Flow developers. Users will have a shared cursor view to know when and where others are working in Flow. This will remove overwriting errors as well.
Recent Delivery Highlights:
- New environments feature: manage how and when you deliver your flows by releasing, deploying and running your flows in development, testing & production environments. To learn more about using Environments see here.
- New, enhanced drag-and-drop three panel page builder: see using the page builder to learn more.
- New component manager: build a custom component in the components Page, add it to the page builder and drag it onto the page just like a standard component. To learn more, see Components here.
Have a product or technical question? Want to share a tip? Check out the Flow Product Forum.
Data Catalog & Preparation
Our current focus is on improving our data catalog capabilities by surfacing a DCP Information Panel directly within Master Data Hub for golden records associated with a deployed model and enabling an additional authentication method for Snowflake connectivity. We’re also working on a unified login experience that will allow you to navigate from the Boomi Enterprise platform to your Data Catalog & Preparation instance.
Up next, we are starting phase 1 of an initiative to catalog all Boomi assets focusing on Integration Processes along with the shapes and profiles they contain. We’ll also be working on some data catalog security enhancements such as transferring data set ownership before full user deactivation and enabling notifications when data sets change allowing you to assess its relative impact in your environment.
Lastly, we are planning to start the next phase of an initiative to catalog all Boomi assets with a focus on API Management metadata along with lineage capabilities for Integration Processes including the shapes and profiles they contain.
Additional planned items include:
- supporting AWS Direct Connect to connect to data sources where needed.
- starting phase 1 of a platform connectivity initiative to support data discovery options for connectors in Boomi Integration.
Recent Delivery Highlights:
- New model creation experience off of any cataloged data set to generate a model directly in Master Data Hub
- New experience for visibility into Audit Logs exclusive to DCP categorized into different event types such as Access & Permissions, object actions, authentication and usage.
Have a product or technical question? Want to share a tip? Check out the Data Catalog and Preparation Product Forum.
Wrap Up
Thank you for your continued support and we look forward to seeing you at our next roadmap webinar. Check out the schedule below and visit our Product Roadmap Webinar Series website to register for upcoming events as well as access previously recorded sessions.
Upcoming Roadmap Webinar Schedule
- Q2: April 13,2023 @ 5pm ET
- Q3: July 13,2023 @ 11am ET
- Q4: October 12, 2023 @ 5:00pm ET
We are looking for your feedback! Have ideas on how we can improve future product roadmap webinars? Take our brief survey.
Webinar Q&A
Thanks so much for your questions! While we weren’t able to respond to them during the webinar, we wanted to answer them here.
| Question | Answer | Assigned to |
|---|---|---|
| Are there plans to better handle non UTF-8 characters such as emojis? | We’re working to shore up the handling of emojis and other non-UTF-8 characters in places like component and runtime names and descriptions (saved assets in the application). We’ll look into the handling of data being processed as well. | Adam |
| Will the API Management developer portal support role-based access control and API visibility? | We are using an API-based approach for the majority of our Developer Portal, making it easy to integrate with third-party technology. We’ve included a sample implementation using React to show what can be created by customers, as well as a Flow recipe for more control over the Developer Portal experience. | Calvin |
| Will we receive copies of slides? | The recordings (linked above) are available in the Boomiverse community, but we will not be distributing the slides themselves. | Adam |
| Are there plans to provide Molecule Quick Start for Microsoft Azure VMs? | Providing a VM-based Azure Molecule quick start is in our plans, as we want to have parity across all of the major cloud providers, however it is not targeted for calendar 2023 at this time. | Joel |
| Are there plans to reduce the Atom runtime’s dependency on the shared file storage? | This is something that remains a high priority for us, but not targeted for calendar 2023 at this time. | Joel |
| How will Boomi communicate its position on cybersecurity (CVE) vulnerabilities to proactively inform customers? | Boomi deploys vendor infrastructure security patches at least monthly regardless of patch severity. Application vulnerabilities are remediated and are automatically deployed during the next release for the specific product. If a notification is necessary that information will be posted to either Boomi’s Community page and/or Release Notes. | Sean |
| Can you share more details and timeline for the Coupa connector updates? | This update is planned for the February release. | Jennifer |
| Is it currently possible (or plans) to capture API metrics to external tools such as Splunk? | This is something we are exploring that remains a high priority for us, but not targeted for calendar 2023 at this time. | Calvin |
| Where can we go to register for product feedback and research opportunities? | Thanks for your interest! You can register at https://boomi.to/researchpanel. | Adam |
| Are there plans to allow more frequent process scheduling than every 1 minute? | There are no plans to change the schedule processing time at this time. However as we continue to make changes to our Runtime architecture, we expect to re-evaluate this setting. | Adam / Joel |
| What are the current plans for the releasing the JMS V2 connector? | The JMS V2 connector was released in November, as part of an off-cycle release. You can find documentation in our help guide at: https://help.boomi.com/bundle/connectors/page/JMS_V2_connector.html | Jennifer |
| Why was Boomi not included in the recent Gartner report and magic quadrant for data integration tools? | Boomi would actually qualify for a number of different reports (for example master data management) however we want to focus primarily on iPaaS where our core capabilities and customer value are best represented. Although there is certainly functional overlap between IPaaS and pure data integration, the Boomi Enterprise platform really excels at cloud application automation needs. | Adam |
| Are there plans to allow Flow Services to be exposed via API Management? | Yes, you can currently call a Flow Service via the API gateway. You can use a keyless plan and basic authentication scheme applied to an API Proxy Service. This API Proxy forwards all /fs/* requests to the Atom / Molecule which is set to use Basic Authentication, not Gateway mode. A new “gateway only” environment will need to be created so the API Proxies can be deployed. | Carolyn |
| Is Integration process execution information available to extract via APIs? | Yes. Integration process reporting information including down to the raw document data is available through the Boomi Enterprise platform web services API. This article provides examples of how you can use the APIs to extract the information you’re looking for. | Adam |
| Are there plans to support NAESB standards for EDI? | NAESB is on our backlog as a longer-term roadmap consideration. CIDX and PIDX standard support are currently ahead of NAESB. | Byron |
| Are there any updates planned for the SAP HANA database connector? | Yes we have updates to the SAP Hana database connector planned for the later part of 2023. Roadmaps are subject to change based on development priorities. | Jennifer |
| What are the connector plans for handling the upcoming Shopify API deprecations? | The team is currently working on the Shopify connector to account for the API deprecations in April. Updates are currently planned for the March release. | Jennifer |
| Can the Boomi mapper handle ITX EDI formats, which include multiple inputs and outputs? | Boomi’s mapper should be capable of handling the requirements, but it works a bit differently, meaning you can use document cache as well as map functions to achieve the same types of mapping solutions. We recommend sharing the details of your use case with your Account Executive to better understand your mapping requirements. | Byron |
| What will be possible with the Component creation APIs mentioned? | The Component creation APIs will allow the import of Boomi component XML to create or update any type of component that you can create today using the Boomi Integration Build page. | Adam |