Moving (and improving!) the cheese: Introducing the new Workflows UI

French President Charles de Gaulle once famously asked, “How can you govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese?” In today’s accelerating CI/CD world, xMatters has a similar but different challenge: how to deliver important enhancements to our customers while not moving the cheese too much.

The result is that we go to great lengths to isolate customers from change by synching our biggest cheese-moving features with quarterly releases. And our upcoming Galaga release represents a pretty major cheese movement - we’re adopting new naming conventions to clearly describe application components and an improved user interface for managing your processes.

Welcome to Workflows

We start with a change at the highest level of our user interface, where the Developer tab is now called Workflows. This reflects that we’ve renamed communications plans “workflows” to better represent their capabilities. The new screen shows a list of workflows in your system that are editable by you:

This updated view facilitates the management of the workflows that matter to you and your team by combining your formerly-known-as communication plans and built-in integrations into a single view. You can still optionally see all the workflows in the system with a simple filter to toggle between a team-centric focus (“Editable”), or an enterprise-wide view (“All”).

Workflow Templates for integrating fast

The Integrations screen is now known as Workflow Templates and allows you to access a directory of pre-built templates so that you can quickly integrate with important systems like New Relic, Cherwell, and MS Teams. And we didn’t just go on a renaming spree: you’ll find an updated look and feel that unifies the management of built-in and custom workflows. 

While we were at all that, we also optimized our import process to allow you to rename a workflow when you import it (a very common enhancement request for the artist formerly known as the Communication Plan Builder).

More details coming your way

While you can expect a full rundown of the UI changes in our Galaga Release Overview, we felt the changes were significant enough to give you an early heads-up about them. We’ll be releasing the UI changes through our Early Access Program on Tuesday October 1, and into production environments with the Galaga Release in mid-November.

So, although we’re shifting the cheese around, we’re making it a lot better—we’d like to think that Monsieur de Gaulle would approve!