July 2020 Product Updates

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Summer’s looking bright and sunny here in California, but we’re not on vacation. This month we have several new updates to our connectors as well as a sneak peek at our new Recipe Editor experience!

It was a busy month for Workato. Here is a rundown of the product updates for July with links:

  1. Coming Soon: New Recipe Editor
  2. Introducing: New Connector Community
  3. OPA Update: Transfer data directly with Smart Shunt
  4. Connector Updates:
    1. Greenhouse Connector (NEW)
    2. SQL Server
    3. SAP Connector
    4. Egnyte (NEW)
    5. 2Checkout (NEW)
  5. Platform Updates:
    1. Scheduler by Workato: No-delay testing
    2. Control Publishing of Recipes
    3. Formula Mode: Write simpler expressions to handle ‘nil’ values

Sneak Peek – Automate faster with the new Recipe Editor

We are excited to introduce the newly designed Recipe Editor! It’s designed for speed, simplifies the UX to reduce effort, and redefines collaboration. Our product, engineering, and design teams have spent several months redesigning the Recipe Editor from ground up, and we can’t wait for you to get your hands on it.

Join us in one of our special upcoming Product Hours for a sneak preview of the new Recipe Editor.

Recipe Editor Banner

 

Register Now: Link

Get automations up and running faster with Community Connectors

Workato has over 400 connectors to the most commonly used business applications, but the Workato community has built over 8,000 custom connectors using our SDK. Many of these custom connectors were previously made available for use, but took a few steps to find.

Community Connectors makes these publicly available connectors easy to find and use. The list is easily searchable on our integrations page as well as in the Community library in the Workato app.

Instead of building a custom connector yourself, you can browse and install connectors already built by Workato experts from our community. You’ll be able to install and use these connectors in your recipes in a matter of clicks and fast-track your automation journey with Workato.

Search through hundreds of custom connectors in the Community Library

 

Learn more here.

Stay compliant, faster data transfers with OPA Smart Shunt

When you need to move terabytes or petabytes of data from your on-prem system to a cloud data warehouse or to another on-prem DW, the data just needs to move with little transformation necessary.

With OPA Smart Shunt, you can transfer data directly from on-prem apps, like databases, to on-prem or cloud applications. This direct path of transferring data gives you control to keep all data inside your firewalls for compliance, and delivers significantly higher throughput that is required for loading data into Data Lakes, or Data Warehouses.

Use “Expert query result” action in the JDBC Connector to take advantage of OPA Smart Shunt

 

Learn more about OPA Smart Shunt.

Connector Updates

New Greenhouse Connector

 

Greenhouse is an applicant tracking system used by leading companies’ HR and PeopleOps teams to help expedite their hiring and recruiting process. The ability to automate most of these tasks gives recruiters, hiring managers, and HR teams a boost in productivity and time to hire.

Here are some automations companies have set up with the Greenhouse Connector:

  • Make it easier for hiring managers to flag or advance candidates by reviewing resumes in Slack.  
  • Gather interview feedback faster by integrating Greenhouse with Slack. 
  • Eliminate heavy workload on recruiters to schedule interviews by connecting Greenhouse to Google calendar. 
  • And automatically send and track offer letters that are customized for role, geo, and employment type by connecting Greenhouse and DocuSign.

Get started quickly with pre-built Recipe Collections.

Learn more about the Greenhouse connector.

Increased batch sizes for loading data faster into SQL Server

SQL server is used for a variety of critical business functions, from powering mobile and cloud applications or enabling data analytics for reporting and dashboards. Businesses today are moving an exponentially increasing amount of data in their daily operations, and we have seen this trend play out with our customers moving millions of rows of data into SQL Server using the batch insert rows action in the SQL Server connector. 

The latest update to the SQL Server connector gives a performance boost to your data pipelines for moving large amounts of data into SQL Server tables. With an increased batch size of 20K rows for Insert Action you can expect to get more than 5X higher throughput.

With larger batch sizes, your large volume inserts just got a lot faster

Read more about the SQL Server connector update.

Easier to use SAP on-premise connector

Even with the proliferation of so many SaaS apps, SAP is still the core ERP system used by most companies today. Our SAP connector is currently being used to streamline processes, like Order-to-Cash, processing tens of thousands of orders a day. It also creates a better user interface for your employees to access SAP.

With the latest updates, we’ve made the SAP connector simpler to set up, more flexible to install, and easier to use. 

Easier to set up – No one likes running around to different departments asking for data. Before this update, getting connection setup details like sender port, sender partner number, and receiver ports would require reaching out to the SAP functional team who configured SAP for Workato.

We realized that much of that data could be inferred, so we made the experience easier for you by now only requiring basic information like the SAP profile and user login details. Now it’s a lot easier, and faster, to connect to SAP.

More OPA deployment flexibility – Previously, the OPA had to sit behind the same firewall as the SAP implementation, which often meant the integration team needed access to the SAP system or the SAP team had to manage the on-prem agent.

Now, we support encryption using Secure Network Communication, which enables you to deploy your On-Premise Agent to any server, not just the one sitting behind the same firewall as your SAP system. This increases security as your integrations team may not require access to SAP data to manage the OPA and the SAP team doesn’t need to spend resources managing the OPA.

Also, if SAP is distributed across different servers in different networks over the world,  OPA deployment can be simplified by not having them in their respective networks but managed through a central network that the integration team controls.

Better maintenance experience – Recipes using the SAP connector are often long and complex, which means making the steps easy to understand is very important to making it easy for anyone to maintain. 

We now allow you to rename SAP steps to provide a more descriptive name that makes reading the recipe a lot easier and faster. Error messages are also more specific, making troubleshooting a breeze.

Give SAP steps meaningful names to make recipes easier to maintain

 

Learn more about the SAP On-Premise Connector updates.

Keeps teams in sync with the Egnyte connector

Egnyte is an enterprise cloud file management platform that makes it easy to share files with your colleagues and customers. 

The Egnyte connector:

  • Eliminates the manual and routine tasks of sharing files with colleagues or customers
  • Automatically backs up files from any system, like Salesforce or BIM360, to Egnyte.
  • Is particularly popular with construction customers who use it as a backup system to store and share blueprints, specs, reports, and more.

Streamline finance operations with the 2Checkout connector

2Checkout is a digital commerce & payments provider that helps companies sell their products and services via multiple channels, acquire customers across multiple touch points, increase customer and revenue retention, leverage smarter payment options and subscription billing models, and maximize sales conversion rates.

With the 2Checkout connector you can:

  • Sync payments/refunds registered in 2CheckOut with deals/invoices in Salesforce
  • Manage subscription payments between 2CheckOut and Zuora
  • Notify finance teams of suspected fraud payments
  • Create Sales order in ERP when order is created in 2CheckOut

Platform Updates

Accelerate recipe development with no-delay testing for scheduled jobs

Automations that run on a specific schedule, like weekly reports being sent every Monday morning or a daily check for new CSV files, are critical workflows for businesses. Scheduler by Workato makes it easy for you to schedule this kind of work.

However, conducting tests on recipes that are scheduled to run every day or at a specific time made testing inefficient as you could wait hours before seeing if the recipe worked. Moreover, if you made an update to a recipe after a first test, you may not have been able to test this update immediately. 

With this new release, a test job will be created immediately when a user runs a test of a Scheduler by Workato trigger without regard for the actual time interval or start by date specified in the trigger logic. In addition, subsequent new test jobs will also be created immediately without requiring the recipe to wait for the time interval specified to elapse. 

Learn more about Scheduler by Workato.

Control over who can publish recipes

Sharing is an important part of who we are at Workato and we’re proud that we have over 400,000 recipes being shared by the 70K people in our community. These community recipes accelerate the time-to-deployment of automations and inspire ideas for community builders.

With our latest update, you can now control whether workspace collaborators can share recipes publicly or not.  This helps teams ensure high quality of recipes before sharing them for community use. This also protects you from collaborators inadvertently sharing recipes publicly. 

To access this setting, navigate to account settings and click the “Recipe Preferences” tab. We have added a switch so admins can decide if they want to allow people to publish or not publish recipes.

Now you can restrict who can publish recipes on the community from your settings

 

Formula Mode: You can now write simpler expressions to handle ‘nil’ values

Workato recently announced support for the Safe Navigation Operator [&.] that will allow users to write simpler formula expressions that can handle [nil] values. Previously, this required complex expressions to handle such situations.

What is the Safe Navigation Operator?

The Safe Navigation Operator [&.] is an operator with two arguments. It returns a [nil] value if the first argument (often a data pill) has a [nil] value. Otherwise, it performs the operation specified by the second argument (often a function).

For example, the ‘Created Date’ data pill in the above field needs to be converted to a date data type using the [to_date] formula. If you use it with the [.] operator, you may receive an error if the data pill contains a [nil] value. This would require a complex expression to work around this logic as shown the “before” section above; however, with the [&.] operator, it is easy to handle this situation with a simple formula expression.

Why is the Safe Navigation Operator important?

Workato’s support for the [&.] operator is important because it gives our users the ability to avoid the need for complex, explicit null-checking expressions in their formula statements. This will directly enhance productivity by including this powerful operator that is also available in several programming languages like Ruby.

Learn more about the the Safe Navigation Operator (&.) in Ruby.

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We hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Product Updates! For all of the latest updates, please visit https://docs.workato.com/product-updates.html

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