Questions New Acumatica 2018R1 Feature - Business Events

I've been playing around with the first build of Acumatica 2018R1 and I noticed something really cool called Business Events.

I first heard about this back in June during the Acumatica Cloud xRP Summit. They were calling it Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) at the time. Here are the notes that I took about it:

https://twitter.com/TimRodman/status/877973673533100032

  https://twitter.com/TimRodman/status/877973934959808512

https://twitter.com/TimRodman/status/877974229777473537

https://twitter.com/TimRodman/status/877974338338729986

Now it appears to be called Business Events instead of Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).

There is a new screen for configuring Business Events. It's Business Events (SM302050) and it looks like this:

Some cool things to note about this screen.

First, and most importantly, it's based on Generic Inquiries. I mean, isn't everything cool in Acumatica build on Generic Inquiries? I decided to update my Generic Inquiry Foundation slide to reflect this:

Second, the Type field allows you to choose from either Trigger By Record Change or Trigger By Schedule which is very nice. We've had the Automation Notifications (SM205040) screen for a while which allows you to send an email notification when a record is saved, but you couldn't set things to run on a schedule.

Third, the Operation field down in the grid has some very interesting options: Field Changed, Field Value Increased, Field Value Decreased, New Field Value, Old Field Value, Record Inserted, Record Deleted, Record Changed. It fries my brain just thinking of all the possibilities that this opens up.

Fourth, just like they added to Dashboard widgets, there is an INQUIRY PARAMETERS button in addition to the Shared Filter To Apply dropdown. This means that you no longer have to create a shared filter. You can create a hidden parameter on a Generic Inquiry, then interact with it using the INQUIRY PARAMETERS button.

This is going to open up tons of use cases. But let's try a simple one here.

What if I want to know every time a 1099 Vendor is created? Because maybe I'm going to want to collect some additional paperwork from them.

There are tons of new out-of-the-box Generic Inquiries in Acumatica 2017R2. For more on that, click here.

So I can take one of those new out-of-the-box Generic Inquiries, AP-Vendors, and add a hidden parameter to it, making sure to check the Hidden checkbox.

Then I can use that hidden parameter on the CONDITIONS tab of the Generic Inquiry like this. What I'm basically doing here is telling the Generic Inquiry to only apply a filter if my hidden parameter gets checked by something, maybe a Dashboard Widget, or, in this case, a Business Event.

This part is totally not intuitive to me, but it does make sense that you need to define your email notification message somewhere. So you do it in the Notification Templates (SM204003) screen like this. And, what, you can now define a Notification Template on a Generic Inquiry? Yep, crazy huh? Note: Most of those new out-of-the-box Generic Inquiries are sitting in the Hidden -> Primary Lists area of the Site Map menu highlighted below.

Now I can go over to the new Business Events (SM302050) screen and setup my stuff, including setting my hidden parameter by using the INQUIRY PARAMETERS button like this;

The part that is totally not intuitive to me is the SUBSCRIBERS tab where I was expecting to type in an email address, but it expects the Notification Template that we setup earlier in the Notification Templates (SM204003) screen. This does make sense because it also needs to know what the email message should look like, but I just wish the field was called Notification Template rather than Subscriber ID.

While we're on the SUBSCRIBERS tab, I should point out that currently the only option in the Type column is EMail Notification, but I would expect to see SMS as an option in the future based on the Twitter notes on the top of this post.

I should note that I wasn't able to get my example above to actually trigger anything. I did get it to work by changing the Trigger By Record Change option to Trigger By Schedule and got it to log some stuff in the new Business Events History (SM502030) screen, but there were errors and no email actually sent.

So it's a very new feature. There doesn't even appear to be a help article for the Business Events (SM302050) screen yet. But I'm sure we'll learn more about how to actually use it during the summit keynotes next week.

Also note that this is new in Acumatica 2018R1 which I personally wouldn't want to use in a Production environment until we have Acumatica 2018R2 and it moves from the Early Adopter Track to the Long Term Support Track which likely won't happen until early 2019. The Early Adopter Track is for people who like to live life on the edge. And I'm not one of those people, especially when it comes to my ERP system. But it's great to see that this feature is coming. There are going to be a lot of creative uses for it. Maybe we'll even need to create a separate forum for it at some point.