Intro

This tutorial provides a brief introduction to PIPEFORCE's key components and concepts, without going into extensive details.

It is meant to give an a first, simple overview about the core spaces and act as a starting point for research tasks.

The Platform

PIPEFORCE is a turnkey cloud platform for operational excellence teams to do AI-based business process automation and data integration.

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Having these combined services you can 100% focus on your business related solutions.

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The

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Portal

The self service portal is the central starting point for both: employees, developers and customers.

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Upon logging in employees, customers and partners can see a list of available applications and easily start them by clicking one the tiles:

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The Business App

An business app in PIPEFORCE is typically the first step to build a business automation solution.

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You can learn more about apps here: App.

The Automation Pipeline

An automation pipeline (sometimes also called “data pipeline” or just “pipeline” in short) in PIPEFORCE is the “glue” between all data entities, workflows, executions and integrations of a business application.

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On the other hand, for more advanced users, there is always the option to “open-up” and create more complex solutions, in case the low-code approach isn’t enough.

You can learn more about data pipelines here:  Data Pipelines Automation Pipelines.

The Command

Every automation pipeline consists of one or more commands.

A command is a single endpoint step, which can be called to do an operation like returning the current date, up to more complex executions like scanning documents for keywords or starting an BPM workflow to automate something.

Commands can start a microservice in PIPEFORCE or trigger an external cloud service and many more.

You can learn more about commands here: Commands.

The Workflow

More complex and stateful human interactions are defined in BPMN 2.0 workflows in PIPEFORCE.

This is an official ISO standard to define business processes with a standardized graphical way.

In PIPEFORCE you can design, manage, deploy and directly start BPMN workflows from within the user interface without any breaks:

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From inside such a workflow you can then connect a task to other automation pipelines or to custom forms which allows you to not only document your processes but also to directly implement and bring them to life with the matter of a few clicks.

You can learn more about workflows here: BPMN Workflows.

The Command Line Interface (CLI)

The command line interface is a little command line tool, which can be used to automate tasks from your local command line and to manage a workspace.

However, this is recommended for advanced users only.

If you’re new to PIPEFORCE, consider starting with the online workbench and low-code features first.

You can learn more about the CLI here: Command Line Interface (CLI).

The Property Store

The Property Store is a key-value database, which stores all resources (mainly JSON documents) related to your business apps. Any resource stored in this database is called a property in PIPEFORCE.

Whenever you submit form data, store configurations for apps, want to temporarily cache data, or need just a persistent storage, the property store is the primary location to store this data.

It is hierarchical and supports advanced features such as tagging, searching, encryption, locking and much more.

You can learn more about the property store here: Property Store.