I will try to add some more info and explanations about what we are doing with Workflow.
In R77.x, Workflow was an additional blade that was purchased on top of the Management license. It had various features, but from our talks with customers the following two were most prominent:
- Changes diff report to see what changes were done before pushing to the gateway, or saving to the DB. The vast majority of users purchased Workflow for this feature.
- Approval cycle, most commonly a simple 4-eye-principal, where another person is needed to approve the changes. For some of the Workflow customers, this was also an important feature.
To a certain extent, the above can be achieved with existing R80.x features such as the sessions management and the change summary before pushing a policy. However, the usability and clarity when doing so, is not at the level that we want to reach.
Workflow has additional features (that some use), but we made a decision to focus on the two main features instead of implementing a replica of the R77.x design into R80.x. Also, we decided that these two features will be included in the product and will not require another license that needs to be purchased.
The Change Diff report was implemented using our new SmartConsole Extensions technology. The cool thing about that is that we can provide the feature over R80.30, even though the development continued after R80.30 was closed for new content. This was used by multiple customers as part of our EA process and we can provide it to additional customers on demand. We still have a few kinks and bugs that we want to squash before we declare it public for everyone.
The 4-eye approval is developed using new I/S (SmartTasks) that we've added in R80.40. It's possible that it will be a "soft launch" in R80.40 and a quick RFE request will be needed to get it. We want to get some feedback on usage and perhaps do some more development on that before we open it up more publicly.
Feel free to reach out to me or @Amir_Jaron about this.
