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Appian 21.1: New features make building apps and workflows easier and faster than ever

Blog: Appian Insight

Appian is the leader in enterprise low-code automation. We didn’t get there by being complacent, but rather from continuous, industry-leading innovations. With each release, we reinforce our commitment to helping you build apps and workflows rapidly on our low-code automation platform to help you maximize your resources and improve business results.

Appian 21.1 helps organizations increase productivity by making it easier than ever to automate complex, time-consuming tasks. We help organizations accelerate business by making it faster and easier to build beautiful, powerful apps. And we provide organizations with the peace of mind that they are scaling on the secure, reliable platform.

Automate across environment

The 21.1 release makes it even faster to build powerful bots with low-code and use computer vision to automate tasks across both desktop and Citrix VDI environments.

In Citrix environments, often used by business process outsourcing (BPO) organizations, the screen is sent as an image, making it difficult for bots to identify field locations. Appian low-code RPA now includes computer vision capability that quickly processes images to identify field locations to automate repetitive tasks.

We’ve also expanded support for low-code actions, including mouse actions, tab-through forms, keyboard shortcuts, and text entry in fields, allowing you to create more powerful bots in low-code.

Appian RPA now includes broader ROI insights to help you manage bots at scale. These insights use RPA metrics to calculate break-even points, projected vs. actual costs, and other benefits to show the business value from automations.

Eliminate the paper shuffle

Most companies still rely on many time-consuming document-centric processes resulting in lost productivity. To help you further automate document processing, 21.1 provides new IDP features, including broader native extraction capabilities to process a greater variety of digital PDFs without having to send them to 3rd party cloud. This feature is in preview within the 21.1 release, and customers should test the quality to their satisfaction before using it in production.

Build beautiful, powerful apps faster

Appian 21.1 continues to make it easier for you to rapidly build beautiful, powerful apps, with new features for better collaboration and greater design flexibility.

Remote development teams will appreciate the enhanced collaboration features that eliminate manual steps with enhanced merging in expression rules, collaborative packages, and real-time best practices feedback. Designers will appreciate the greater flexibility in UI design.

Merging in expression rules and interfaces reduces errors by eliminating manual steps. Developers can easily reconcile changes to an object when comparing the differences across environments.

Collaborative packages make it simple for teams to track work in Appian by creating multiple packages with links to a ticket or project management tools such as Jira. Packages are visible to all developers with access to the application.

The Health Dashboard and design recommendations make it easier to ensure apps are built for scale and maintainability by offering developers real-time feedback on design best practices. This release adds scanning for common design risks in interfaces, expression rules, web APIs, and Appian RPA.

The Appian 21.1 release continues with our ongoing focus towards improving UI and accessibility. The new Nav bar feature improves design flexibility and accelerates UI development, while enhancing overall control.

Get faster results with the data you need, when you need it

Appian low-code data makes it easy to have a complete view of your enterprise data, regardless of where the data is housed by unifying data from multiple systems within Appian.

Appian Data Sync lets users sync 3rd party systems and databases into Appian. 21.1 more than doubles the number of rows that users can sync from a source from 100,000 to 250,000, making it easier to sync large data sets. You can expect significant gains in the number of rows with each subsequent release. Users will now have the ability to select which rows to sync, allowing users to optimize performance.

Having all the data you need in one place is a good start. Being able to quickly gain valuable insights from that data is even better. That’s why Appian 21.1 includes improved reporting with enhanced charts making it faster and easier for users to create interactive data visualization and charts with multiple measures.

Making it easier for users on the go

We know that more and more of your users are on-the-go. With smoother onboarding, Appian 21.1helps organizations drive mobile adoption by making it easier for users to start using the mobile app with frictionless user onboarding.

Trust that your data is secure. And reliably accessible.

You trust Appian to be secure, reliable, and available. That’s why Appian infrastructure is constantly evolving, striving to be faster, leaner, and always available. For the 21.1 release, the Internal Messaging Service and its associated services have been updated and improved to be even more resilient in the event of network, OS process, or machine hardware failures.

Also, we’re delighted to announce that the Appian Cloud has been officially certified for ISO 27017 and ISO 27018 standards. These certifications are internationally recognized and provide evidence that additional controls for cloud-specific security risks are firmly in place.

Explore Appian 21.1

Appian 21.1 has several exciting new features to help you improve your business processes through automation. To learn more, watch the detailed release webinar and read the release notes.