Boomi Product Roadmap – Q2 2023 – Everything You Want to Know

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 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

Sean Collins

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.

• Integration Quick Start: With this all-new wizard you can get started creating your integration processes with just a few simple questions. This feature is available to all accounts and we’ll be continuing to enhance, bringing even more intelligence and recommendations to make it easier than ever before.
• Bridge Mode: A new process mode has been introduced for Integrations called Bridge. This mode of execution provides low latency-like performance with more granular process logging.
• Flow Co-Design: This feature allows you to collaborate in real-time with other users on the same flow. A shared cursor view lets you know when and where other users are in a flow. This helps educes overwriting errors and promotes collaboration across your teams.

Below are the service specific roadmaps and recent delivery highlights. Thank you for your continued support and partnership.

Platform

Dana Burkart

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, you now can login via the platform login, to help you install and use recipe solutions faster than ever. We encourage you to visit Discover and try a new recipe for yourself.

Boomi is engaging with select customers and partners for an Early Access program for Custom Catalog. Custom Catalogs are designed to help customers manage their Boomi Enterprise platform usage at scale by creating a simplified portal where users can interact with managed integrations. If you are interested in joining the program, you can sign up here.

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 Boomi Enterprise Platform, Flow, and DCP as well as the community and training sites with one set of credentials. We expect to have all users exercising unified platform authentication by Q2 2023.

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be launching Boomi Labs on the platform as a workbench for Boomi developers to access products used to build, manage, share, and publish Boomi assets. Products will include Integration Packs, Bundles, Custom Catalog, Process Library, and the Connector Developer Portal.

We are also working towards an early access launch for Bundles where users can create and package multi-product solutions in an easy-to-use UI. From there, users can also share Bundles to any account on the Platform.

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:

• Enhanced Discover login
• Custom Catalog – Early Access program for use of Custom Catalog.

Integration

Adam Arrowsmith

Within the Integration service, we continue to focus efforts around two key areas of investment: delivering an awesome user experience and providing robust lifecycle management to help teams scale their use of Boomi. We want to help you and your team get started intuitively, build productively, and then be able to most effectively manage your integrations and automations as you grow.

We’re very excited to share the release of the all-new integration quick start wizard! Now you can get started creating your integration processes with just a few simple questions. This feature is available to all accounts and we’ll be continuing to enhance, bringing even more intelligence and recommendations to make it easier than ever before.

To help with lifecycle management, we’re currently developing APIs for component creation, helping you to begin your Boomi journey by migrating legacy integrations into Boomi, as well as to enable partners and solution builders to generate integrations dynamically.. Beyond that, as a first step to enhancing version management for teams working in Boomi, we’ll be enabling you to easily find 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

• Streamlined and improved usability of the process step palette and connector choosers throughout the application.
• Platform APIs to edit ComponentMetadata and Folders to manage and organize your account programmatically.

Have a product or technical question? Want to share a tip? Check out the Integration Product Forum.

API Management

Calvin Robbins

We are delighted to share some fantastic new features and enhancements that have been introduced to the API Management platform over the last quarter. Our team has been working tirelessly to improve your experience, making the management of your APIs more efficient than ever before. Let’s dive into the key highlights of this release:

We are also thrilled to announce full support for the latest OpenAPI Specification (OAS) 3.0 in our platform. This new feature allows you to take advantage of the numerous benefits and improvements of OAS 3.0 over the previous 2.0 version. With improved security and performance, more robust data modeling options, and increased standardization across the API industry, OAS 3.0 is the way to go for your API development needs.

For users of the Developer Portal, we’re excited to announce that we now support the consumption of the OpenAPI 3.0 specification. This provides more accurate, expressive, and descriptive API documentation and offers seamless integration for developers using the OpenAPI 3.0 standard.

Another significant update we’ve introduced is the ability to configure refresh and retry intervals when retrieving a JWKS for a JWT IDP in the container properties. This feature is designed to help you manage your APIs more effectively, ensuring they are always up-to-date and available when needed.

In terms of metrics management, we’ve made some noteworthy improvements to both Gateway and Atom container metrics. We have introduced new custom properties for configuring the maximum size of metrics event files, giving you more control and flexibility. Additionally, we’ve streamlined metrics reporting, eliminating the need to configure a local directory.

To enhance reliability and performance, we’ve added a new Gateway container property that enables TCP keepalive, ensuring your Gateway container maintains long-lasting connections with clients.

Finally, we’ve made advanced SOAP functionality for uploading custom WSDLs more accessible. With this update, any account with access to the related API service component can enjoy the benefits of advanced SOAP functionality without enabling any additional features.
We hope you’re as excited about these new features and improvements as we are. Stay tuned for more updates and enhancements coming soon. If you’re interested in gaining early access to upcoming changes, we invite you to join our APIM Early Access Forum by requesting access at https://boomi.to/apimearlyaccess. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions.

Have a product or technical question? Want to share a tip? Check out the API Management Product Forum.

Atom Runtime

Joel Alonzo

The runtime continues to focus on delivering on our promise of greater scale, and strong security. This quarter we are excited to share with you our progress in that regard.

With respect to scale, this quarter, we will continue our work behind the scenes to deliver on a major architectural change to enable greater elastic scale for executions later this year.We will also continue our efforts to reduce the overall utilization of the shared file system, by allowing adding support for connector jars to be offloaded.  This builds on similar changes delivered last quarter, with plugins and custom libraries respectively. We expect this to continue to enhance not just performance, but also improve the overall experience specifically on Windows deployments.

Specific to security, this quarter we will be rolling out the next available minor Java 11 update and expect to continue releasing one Java patch a quarter. Likewise, we are patching a third party library used by runtime installers called Common-compress, coupled with a broader re-architecture of our class loader to make future updates more seamless for both our internal teams and our customers.

Recent Delivery Highlights:

• New process mode called Bridge, that provides process logging and low latency-like performance
• Local work directory property with support to connector jars 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

Byron Hall

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 2023 is now underway.

Have a product or technical question? Want to share a tip? Check out the B2B, Trading Partners, EDI Product Forum.

Connectivity

Madhav SBSS / Lavanya Sambasivan

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:

In the march release, we introduced a new container property that would allow listener shutdown wait time to be configurable. A container owner can now configure the shutdown time to a value that would allow the listener to complete its tasks before being forcefully interrupted. In this release, we also made enhancements to REST and Open API technology to support NTLM authentication, and we released the OpenAPI technology connector in Tech Preview.  Most recently, as part of the April release,  we made the connector management and deployment APIs publicly available to all our partners and customers.

Connector developers can gain greater flexibility and control by directly invoking these APIs or integrating them with their own CI/CD pipelines to deploy and update connectors. This will help accelerate the development lifecycle for all Boomi connectors and ultimately lead to faster delivery of business solutions.

We took Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage and Salesforce Market Cloud connectors from Tech Preview into GA. SFMC connector lets you increase customer engagement through automating subscriber updates. ADLS connector makes Azure Storage the foundation for building enterprise data lakes and big data analytics. We updated Snowflake to 3.13.25 and addressed a few defects around staging path and date time format when using AUTO option, the new driver provides support for stored procedures and better logging. We have also updated the MongoDB connector driver to support v5.x, it addresses deadlock issues and better handling of NaN values and much more. Mail (IMAP) we fixed a defect where mail attachments are being corrupted when Set Property is used to write the attachments to Disk and we added several new features to the Oracle Database connector including Connection Pooling for better performance, reading Custom Views that simplify your queries, Timeout configuration to avoid hung processes, VARRAY Tables that guarantee the order of items and reduce the need for complex SQL Joins.

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.

In Progress

We’ve completed certification of NetSuite connector for version 2023.1. We are updating the Database V2 connector to address security vulnerabilities and defects around Null values, trailing spaces in the Query operation. We are adding extensions support to Oracle Fusion so that you can leverage connections between environments, and in the Shopify connector, we’ve added support for the new Fulfillment Order endpoints, the deprecated end points will be supported but we encourage you to move to the newer endpoints right away to avoid issues.  In the SFTP V2 connector, we are addressing a few defects and adding multibyte Japanese filename support and additional cipher support.

Up Next

We plan to work on Google BigQuery custom location in Upsert operation which will give you the benefit of more location support and potentially reduce your costs and we will address a defect fix in the Query operation not handling Array field type in the JSON response. In Database V2, we are working on dynamic SQL queries, partitioned table for PostgreSQL which gives you flexibility and better control over your data, Upsert into multiple tables for better performance and a few others are also in consideration such as NVARCHAR and Rollback and Commit. In SAP JCo V2, we are considering adding SAP Router properties to protect your SAP network against unauthorized access, X.509 authentication, Low Latency Logging among other feature requests. A big and much requested functionality for IAM Role based authentication is coming to Amazon S3 REST, SNS and SQS connectors, with this functionality you can gain better access control over your AWS resources.

Planned

we have completed the implementation of Salesforce REST API connector and it is going through testing, it is available in early access and you can to try it out, it supports OAuth, a more secure authentication method, it can be used to augment the SOAP connector functionality and it is planned for GA release by Q4. We plan to launch Amazon Selling Partner connector, ServiceNow REST connectors and enhancements to FTP V2, SFPE, HANA DB and OData Client connectors. Stay tuned, we will have more details. 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 our portfolio of Boomi connectors, we are making active efforts to ensure that the code gets open sourced. All of these connectors are available at boomi.to/oss for custom feature development utilizing our SDK tools.  We will continue to work with our Technology partners to provide better educational content on connector development. More to come on this in future roadmap discussions.

Connectivity Services

In Connectivity Services we continue our focus on developer tooling and enabling connector development.

In Progress

In our effort to continue supporting our technology partners, we are building a CI/CD pipeline for our partners as a next step in ensuring that partners have the necessary tools to develop and test connectors more efficiently, which will help improve the quality of connectors and accelerate the development lifecycle.

Up Next

We are enhancing the import wizard in connectors for importing object definitions. This would improve the usability and efficiency of connectors. With a more intuitive and user-friendly interface, integration builders will be able to create operations more quickly and easily. A standardized interface for defining objects and properties will  ensure that connector operations are created in a consistent manner.

Planned

We also have some exciting plans for the year ahead, including the introduction of a new UI capability that will allow anyone to create a connector using open API specifications. This means that users will no longer need to know Java or connector SDK to create a Boomi application connector, provided that their application is backed by Open API specification. The new UI capability is designed to simplify the process of creating connectors, enabling users to generate a branded connector with just a few clicks. By leveraging open API specifications and a user-friendly UI, we will  make it easier than ever for users to create connectors and integrate their applications. This will help reduce the time and effort required to create connectors, and also improve the overall quality and functionality of Boomi’s connectors.

Have a product or technical question? Want to share a tip? Check out the Custom Connector Development Product Forum.

Master Data Hub

Geoff Bockelmann

Our primary focus this year is on enterprise performance and scalability enhancements to support our customers that are synchronizing larger domains with Hub. Phase 1 of this enterprise initiative will be centered on improving golden record query performance and responsiveness.

We are also strengthening our security capabilities by providing user authentication options and privilege assignment directly at the repository level. Up next, we are looking to build on these new access management options by supporting data masking for sensitive field data within the model configuration.

We are also working on providing more golden record statistics and business context on the deployed model page. This will provide statistical profiling of golden records and other views such as metadata tagging, enterprise business glossary and a data dictionary so more users can contribute to building trust and business context into the golden record definitions.

Up next, we’ll be working on improving our consolidation and synchronization capabilities with a 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.

Have a product or technical question? Want to share a tip? Check out the Master Data Hub Product Forum.

Flow

Carolyn Musa

We had an eventful quarter delivering a number of key features that enhance the user experience, cohesive platform efforts and simplify the building experience. We delivered a new modal map shape allowing a user to display content in a modal window after a page map element. Secondly, we released a new Co-design feature that allows users to collaborate on the same Flow in real-time and know when and where others are in a Flow. Third, we released a new default player with user interface enhancements as well as performance improvements. Lastly, we delivered an auto arrange feature to arrange your map elements in a tidy view.

In the next few months, Flow will be focusing on some key areas that enhance the user experience.

We will be implementing a translation graphical user interface so that Flow users can run a Flow in a selected language. Flow users will also be able to export a single XILF file import into a translation suite and back into Flow seamlessly.

Additionally, we will be delivering a mechanism to edit a Flow in run time to help you save time from having to re-run a Flow from the beginning.

Lastly, in efforts to provide a more simplified building experience, we are working on a grid container within the page builder to allow you to layout your page in a grid format if you’d like.

Recent Delivery Highlights:

• New Modal Map Element: allows you to display content in a dialog popup window, layered on the top of the main Flow page. To learn more, see here.
• Co-design: shared cursor view allows you to collaborate in real-time with other users on the same Flow.
• New default player: offers an improved runtime experience for your Flow users. Learn more here.
• Auto Arrange: allows a user to layout the map elements in Flow in an organized view with one click.

Have a product or technical question? Want to share a tip? Check out the Flow 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

• 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.