We are very excited to announce Crowd, which features powerful collaboration capabilities that enable the creation, saving, discovery, and reuse of APIs and other integration assets within Anypoint Platform. This release will drive new levels of business agility, increasing the speed of innovation for IT teams throughout the enterprise.
Anyone in the IT field knows that the amount of work is increasing exponentially due to the demands placed on enterprises by the explosion of technologies like of mobile, big data, SaaS, PaaS and the Internet of Things. To cope with the demand, integration specialists, application developers and line-of-business across the enterprise are increasingly doing their own integration, often without guidance or collaborating with other teams. This approach is hampering business agility and introducing governance and security risks.
The key to closing the IT delivery gap is to scale IT delivery capacity by allowing IT organizations throughout the business to self-serve reusable assets to deliver IT projects. Crowd, by activating the discovery and reuse of IT assets, enables line-of-business (LOB) and broader IT teams to deliver their own integration projects quickly and securely with the governance of central IT. With self-service access to reusable assets, IT teams in all areas of the business have the capability to deliver better customer experience and quickly introduce new products to market.
Powerful collaboration and developer productivity tools
With this launch, users can design and publish API fragments, API specifications, and integration flows with a click of a mouse into Anypoint Exchange for discovery and reuse by others. Those assets are then actively presented in the interface as users are designing their APIs or integration flows to guide them through the development process. Users can provide feedback, ask questions or offer suggestions, all within Anypoint Exchange, promoting quality through community engagement and collaboration.
Crowd highlights include:
- A new Anypoint Design Center that empowers every team across the enterprise to save and self-serve IT assets:
- Web-based flow designer: MuleSoft’s web-based designer for integration flows, suited for use by IT professionals, is easy to access.
- Guided flow design: Every step is suggested based on an action the user takes, helping them to compose their flows by following best practices.
- Reuse is built in: Reusable assets are embedded into every step of the design experience, making reuse a natural choice rather than merely an option users have.
- A native collaboration, reuse, and consumption experience delivered through Anypoint Exchange:
- Promotion of reusable assets: Exchange is now integrated with all components of Anypoint Design Center, including the flow designer and the API designer. Reusable assets are suggested and promoted as you design your APIs and integration flows.
- Ratings and reviews: Any user can comment or reply to a comment on any asset within the Exchange to ask questions, offer suggestions, provide feedback and more.
- Quick view of dependencies: Every reusable asset has a portal. Within an asset portal, users can view the full list of other assets that have dependencies on it, providing visibility and insight into potential impact from changes to the asset.
- New UI: Users benefit from improved search capabilities, enhanced manual asset publication flow and support for the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) asset portal.
- New API design capabilities within Anypoint Design Center:
- Faster, consistent API design: Users can save API fragments (e.g. libraries, security schemes and data models) from within API designer into Exchange for discovery and reuse. API fragments can then be used for building any API spec, ensuring consistent, secure API design across the enterprise.
- Seamless CI/CD automation: Users can promote APIs across different environments.
”With Crowd, central IT and product teams have a unified way to bring people, process, and technology together to build an application network without losing governance and control,” says Mark Dao, our chief product officer. “Different teams can collaborate on building APIs and integration while driving toward a common outcome on a shared platform.”
Contact us to try the new release. We think you’ll be impressed. Let us know your feedback!
