The anticipation has been building for the release of ProcessMaker v3.2 which is now only a couple weeks away. There is a lot of reason for all the anticipation. V3.2 is a big release for ProcessMaker for three main reasons: Quality, Connectivity, and Reporting. Let's first talk about the first reason - Quality. V3.2 of ProcessMaker is the first release we are making under the leadership of our new CTO, Taylor Dondich. Taylor is a first-class engineer and a great IT leader. I've also learned that he can be a real pain in the *!@!" regarding quality control. V3.2 is the most tested piece of software we have ever released. Over the past year, we have worked very hard to add a new layer of DevOps tools and processes for our QA team. We have added a great deal of formality to our entire release process. For some of our customers, this has translated into what seems like an endless wait for this version 3.2. However, there is no doubt in our mind that we have made dramatic improvements and that it is the correct way to be improving the quality and reliability of our releases. So now for the cool stuff. In our previous release, you probably noticed that we added a new way to call a REST API. We called it our ProcessMaker Connectors. You can read about them here. Well, that was just the first step. You were always able to call a REST Endpoint from within a ProcessMaker trigger. The connector simply made it much easier to add a new REST Endpoint in a standard library, i.e. our connector library. However, in version 3.2 we take the concept of ProcessMaker as a "Platform as a Service" (iPaaS), one step further. Now we have added the Service Task. The Service Task is a BPMN 2.0 activity type that is something very special when it gets combined with the ProcessMaker Connector Library. The Service Task now allows our process designers to have a visually explicit way to call a connector that connects to a third-party system. Previously, you would have to look at a step in a task and look at the code of a trigger to see what was happening. Now, you can simply use a service task to show visually in a ProcessMaker process map when and how you want to connect to a 3rd party system. We think that this will make mapping processes and integrating to third party systems easier. So for example, let's say you have a process in which we first want to connect to our SAP ERP and then pre-populate a form with SAP data. We need the SAP data for the ECO Request so that our user can select the part or sub-assembly that we want to change. The user should see the parts and the dependent sub-assemblies in a drop-down list on the form.
