2018 was a big year for us at Workato. We were featured in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the first time (and ranked as a leader!), won Constellation Research’s Best Enterprise Software Startup award, and raised $25M in our Series B.
Most importantly, we welcomed a new era of automation. This era focuses on using technology to enable the experiences that both customers and employees have come to expect, whether it’s instantly unlocking paid features or requesting (and approving) PTO via Slack.
Part of ushering in this new era involves upgrading our platform. From our revamped UI to new connectors, here’s the coolest stuff we shipped in 2018!
A more user-friendly platform
2018 brought big changes to our UI. We wanted to make Workato more self-serviceable and improve on the user experience for all our users, particularly those with no prior experience with integration products.
The new Recipe UI introduces a flowchart building interface that clearly displays the flow of logic through the entire recipe. Other updates include app icons that make our platform feel distinctly less code-like and help users see the apps within their recipes clearly.
With our new recipe editor, we’ve focused on simplifying the user experience to empower both technical and non-technical users to create better automations, faster. Check out the interactive image in this post for more information!
Intelligence at its best
When building recipes, you may have noticed the phrase “Powered by RecipeIQ.” This revamped feature uses sophisticated machine learning algorithms based on billions of integration events and hundreds of thousands of integration use cases to help users build more effective integrations, more easily. RecipeIQ will:
- Suggest the most popular fields associated with every action and the most popular actions depending on the connector.
- Help with HTTP configuration by recommending the request body schema for you based on the API endpoint URL you’re calling.
- Tell you the best data pills to map to a particular field within a particular action
- Get more accurate the more you use it!
Something for everyone
Our users have come to expect cutting-edge features from Workato, and we worked hard to meet those expectations in 2018.
Many of our users build complex automations and integrations on the Workato platform, and now it’s easier for them to add steps to both main and nested recipe flows. We’ve also updated the drag-and-drop experience to include orange indicators so you can move steps more accurately.
Another big update is how data mapping works. In the past, our customers often told us that they wished they could map multiple data fields at once. Now they can, thanks to our new group data mapping feature!
Connecting to more apps, more easily
We know our users value flexibility—and that it’s especially important as we move into the new era of automation. To that end, we launched several new app connectors.
Maybe the most exciting is our brand-new SAP on-premise connector. Integrating with SAP is a big priority for many of our enterprise customers, and we wanted to make it easier. The new connector allows you to easily automate processes between your SAP system (on-premise or on a firewall-protected server) and external apps and databases, without coding!
Our HTTP connector is a fan
The newly-updated Version 2 of the HTTP connector introduces a 3-step HTTP wizard, which provides a more guided user experience in building HTTP actions. Instead of configuring your HTTP action from scratch, Workato can
Because we’re committed to making automation more intelligent, we also debuted several connectors for Google’s AI services. These include:
- Google Vision: Allows reading of
text from images and scanned documents.
- Google Speech-to-text: Allows conversion of a short speech-to-text transcript.
- Google Text-to-speech: Allows conversion of text to synthetic voice audio.
- Google Translate: Translates text between languages
These aren’t the only new connectors we added, though—they’re just the highlights. As always, you can see the full list of connectors here.
Putting Workbot to work for you
Since its launch in 2016, countless Workato users
One of the coolest changes is that message attachments are now grouped, nested, and collapsed for a lot less clutter in the recipe. They can also be configured with our friendly UI, rather than having to use JSON!
Managing multiple bots is also much easier with the new S
Slack is ultimately a collaboration and communication tool. To make it easier to collect info from your colleagues, we debuted several new dialog features like support for multiple attachments and slash commands, complete with hints so you’ll never forget what to type!
For more information on these new dialog features, check out our detailed tutorial video.
No more size limits
On Workato, you may have noticed that previously, there were file size limits of about 20-50 MB on our file-related actions. But unlimited file download and upload capabilities are important to our customers, so we worked to change this in 2018.
With our new file streaming approach, data is downloaded from its source piece-by-piece. Rather than loading the full set of data onto our server memory (which is finite), it’s then uploaded or streamed to its target destination.
This means that file size is no longer an issue as files are never downloaded or uploaded in full. Users no longer have to break up their data into appropriately-sized chunks or manage file sizes to automate with Workato!
If you haven’t tried Workato before, we’d love for you to check us out. And if you’re a current user, we always love hearing from you! We know these upgrades will make a great impression—but more importantly, they’ll help bring your automation and integration dreams to life.
