Announced in February 2008, Process Commander V5.4 offers dozens of new capabilities for developers, application users, and system administrators, and resolves issues found in earlier versions. This announcement summarizes V5.4 enhancements and new features that support integration of Process Commander applications with external systems, in seven areas:

• Email
• Portlet services
• JMS Services and Connectors
• Asynchronous service processing
• SOAP connectors
• Service accelerator
• Integration with Microsoft Outlook email client

To learn about V5.4 features in other areas, see What's New in Process Commander 5.4.

Email

Two enhancements are available for processing incoming email:

• Email services can now process AutoReply and Delivery Status Notification messages. See How to create an email service that responds to AutoReply and Delivery Status Notification (DSN) messages
• In releases before V5.4, embedded images and other content in incoming email messages are
  always managed as work object attachments. Starting in V5.4, you can configure an email listener to save the original email, complete with embedded images, as a work object attachment.

See:

• About Email
• How outbound email works
• How inbound email is processed
• Before you begin configuring email
• Setting up outbound email (email account)
• Setting up an inbound email (email service)
• How to test your email configuration
• Integrating with Outlook calendars

Portlet Services

Several enhancements improve portlet services:

• Portlet applications can now be deployed as a WSRP producer. Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) is an OASIS standard that enables portlets deployed on one portal server to be displayed in the portal page of another portal server.
• Portlet applications now have Log4J logging.
• The WAR file generated for a portlet now includes a Liferay portal server configuration file, liferay-display.xml, by default.
• The Process Commander portlet Java classes now maintain the HttpClient object. Your portlet no longer needs to maintain session state by setting the requestor session ID in a cookie.
• You no longer use the ContextURL parameter to construct URLs to static files such as images. You now can reference files stored as binary or text file rules the same way in the HTML stream rules used for portlets as you do in
  the HTML stream rules that are not used in portlets.

See:

• How portlet services work
• About JSR 168 Portlet Services
• About JSR 168 portlet Web pages
• Building a JSR 168 portlet
• Running the JSR 168 portlet samples
• JSR 168 Portlet troubleshooting tips
• How to configure log4j logging for portlets
• How to deploy a Process Commander portlet as a WSRP producer in WebLogic Portal Server
• How to Configure BEA Workshop for WebLogic 10.0 to deploy a portlet

JMS Services and Connectors

You can now identify the Java Message Service resources (connection factories, destinations, and so on) a JMS service or connector interacts with through resource references defined in the Process Commander deployment descriptor file. See How to configure a JMS service or connector to find JMS resources through resource references.

Additional new articles describe JMS design and development in V5.4:

• About JMS Connectors
• How to enable JMS support in Process Commander
• Planning JMS connectors
• Creating JMS connectors
• Creating connector activities for JMS and MQ connectors
• How to set up a JMS service
• How to deploy a JMS listener as a message-driven bean (MDB) (V5.4)

Asynchronous service processing

Services generally process service requests synchronously. That is, they immediately perform their requested processing and return a configured return value while the calling application waits. However, you can configure EJB, HTTP, Java, JMS, MQ, and SOAP services to use the new Queue Manager infrastructure to queue the request for asynchronous execution and the calling application calls back later for the results. See:

• What is asynchronous service processing?
• How to configure a service to process requests asynchronously
• How to configure a service to queue a failed service request for another attempt

SOAP Connectors

• SOAP connectors can now send or receive SOAP messages with attachments. See How to configure a SOAP or dotNET connector to send or receive SOAP with attachments.
• The SOAP connector architecture uses an Apache Axis client to make the SOAP call and process the SOAP response. V5.4 supports Axis 2 for specific requirements, as well as Axis 1.2.1.

Service Accelerator

The Service Accelerator is enhanced to support resource references. See:

• Using the Service Accelerator in version 5.4
• How the Service Accelerator works
• Before you run the Service accelerator
• How to create services with the Service Accelerator
• Examine and edit the results after running the Service Accelerator

Integration with Microsoft Outlook email client

Two new standard flow actions GetAppointmentList and SendMeetingRequest enables users to query the Microsoft Outlook calendars of other operators. Typically they are used in sequence: An operator uses GetAppointmentList first to determine whether another operator is available at a specific time, and then use SendMeetingRequest to make and appointment. See Integrating with Outlook calendars.

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