Flow Designer - Technical Preview Version

The Spectrum™ Technology Platform Team is pleased to provide a preview of its Flow Designer web-based job, service, and sub-flow design and deployment tool. You can launch Flow Designer from the Spectrum Welcome Page after you have installed Release 2019.1.

This preview version allows you to test-drive the fundamental capabilities that we believe you will use most often. We are providing this preview version now so that you can help us make sure that future releases will have the features that you find most useful.

As you explore this preview version, keep these things in mind:

• If you find yourself thinking, "It would be great if I could…," let us know what you want to do. You can submit an enhancement request to Technical Support, or you can join our Spectrum Knowledge Community and submit your ideas there.
• This version does not include all stages currently supported in Enterprise Designer. You will see a descriptive message if you try to open an unsupported stage in Flow Designer.
• If you encounter a roadblock, or if something isn't working as you'd expect, we ask that you let us know through our Technical Support team.
• Although we encourage you to use this preview version of Flow Designer in your production environment, know that we cannot provide standard service level agreement (SLA) for preview versions of our software. Additionally, we cannot guarantee that the work you do with the preview version will migrate to future releases.
• Custom Transforms are configurable through Enterprise Designer for this release. You can save those transforms and use them in Flow Designer jobs. Note that multiple Custom Transforms are not supported in this preview version.
• We will listen to your feedback! Your comments and suggestions can have a significant role in shaping future releases of Flow Designer.

If you are new to Spectrum and have not had experience with Enterprise Designer, our previous workflow solution, you may need some explanation of the terms used in the product.

• Flows ("workflows," in previous releases) are pre-built or custom processes that contain stages. Flows don't need to stand alone: you can integrate them into other jobs and services to perform specialized processing.
• Stages represent units of functionality such as data input, data output, aggregation, filtering, sampling, reporting, and geocoding. Though flows can become quite large in size, you can think of them as a series of connected stages, operations, or tasks.

This preview version of Flow Designer includes these features:

• Drag-and-drop stages from the palette to the canvas, with some stages configurable in this version
• Create new flows from templates
• Import and export existing Enterprise Designer *.df files
• Perform basic flow validation
• Inspect flows and stages
• Create custom data transformation scenarios - Additonal transformation scenarios will be available in a future release
• View flow history
• Read from or write to files on servers

As we continue to add features to Flow Designer, future releases will provide local file support, additional control stages, and additional module-specific stages.