IBM BPM 8.6.0 (December 2017) was the last "BPM" release before the product became Business Automation Workflow (BAW 18.0, which merged BPM 8.6 with Case Manager). The main new things in 8.6:
- Web Process Designer becomes complete: BPDs, client-side human services, service flows, coach views and business objects are all editable in the browser; the desktop designer is no longer required for new work (and deprecated).
- Service flows replace the many old service types (General System Service, Ajax service, Integration service, Human service) with one server-side service artifact; new inline user tasks in BPDs (question 2512).
- Shared business objects (question 2536) and durable subscriptions for message events.
- Teams replace participant groups (with team managers, team filter services), and Team-based task management in the portal.
- Process Portal refresh (responsive, work / launch tiles), REST API additions (task actions, and CSRF protection with the BPMCSRFToken header from the 2018 cumulative fixes), Process Federation Server improvements and the federated portal for BPM + BPEL + Case.
- Continuous delivery: 8.6.0 introduced the CF (cumulative fix) model - CF2017.12, CF2018.03 ... - which continued as BAW 18.0.0.x.
- UI Toolkit (the Salient Spark toolkit) bundled as the "BPM UI Toolkit" with the responsive controls, and the Dashboards toolkit updates.
- Platform: WebSphere 8.5.5.12+, Java 8, new supported databases; the desktop Process Designer became a 64-bit application.
What came right after and is often mistaken for 8.6: case management integration (BAW 18.0.0.0, 2018), Workflow on containers (BAW 19.0.0.3), the Operations REST API and Workplace (BAW 20.0.0.1).
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