Intro

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

It is meant to give an 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.

It covers all aspects from planning, implementation, testing and operating on a single platform.

It is turnkey: That means it works out-of-the box and provides many built-in services each fully integrated with each other such as for example:

• User and Identity Management

• LDAP / AD Service

• Reporting Service

• File Sync & Share Service

• Archiving Service

• Forms and List Builder

• BPMN Workflow engine

• RPA

• Data Integration Pipelines

• Push Notifications

• And more…

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

The Self Service Portal

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

Once a new business application has been created and published by developers, it appears on the portal.

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

The Business App

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

Apps can include various elements such as forms, lists, workflows, and data integration pipelines among others.

Once the app has been published, it can be used by customers, employees or partners.

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.

Since this pipeline is written in YAML in a very simple Low-Code format, it can be managed by source code control systems like GitHub for example so it can be easily shared and collaborated by a team of software developers and citizen developers. Here is an example of such an automation pipeline:

pipeline:

  - http.get: https://host/sales-numbers.pdf
  
  - drive.save: downloads/sales-numbers.pdf
  
  - mail.send:
      to: sales@mycompany.com
      subject: New sales numbers
      message: Here are the latest sales numbers.

This simple automation pipeline downloads a PDF document from an HTTP endpoint, stores the document in the cloud drive and finally sends a reminder email to the sales team. All with three simple commands.

Furthermore, there is a No Code designer available in order to edit the automation pipelines without any source code touch points so it additionally lowers the barriers for non-technical users:

The automation pipeline connects data from different endpoints like forms or APIs for example. It can calculate, normalize, map or convert data from other systems and interfaces. It can also execute business logic and workflows if required. All of this is done using low-code and no-code. So there is no need for deep dive development.

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