We released Freestyle Orchestrator last year and could not have wished for better feedback and enthusiasm from our customers, who have been using it for a wide range of use cases. Freestyle Orchestrator is a powerful, low-code workflow orchestration platform that empowers IT admins to automate complex tasks with conditions and sequencing to achieve business outcomes. Freestyle Orchestrator delivers a canvas user interface with drag and drop capabilities, conditions and actions, and an intuitive graphical presentation of the workflow.
As we continue our journey to autonomous workspaces that we announced a few months ago at VMware Explore, simplifying, unifying, and unlocking automation capabilities across Workspace ONE continues to be top priority for us. We are planning to achieve this in two steps. First, we’re delivering the Freestyle Orchestrator experience to Workspace ONE Intelligence. Today, existing Workspace ONE Intelligence customers will see the Freestyle Orchestrator canvas on the left navigation. That means that Workspace ONE Intelligence customers can now build the same powerful, policy-based workflows but with a modern, low-code canvas user interface. Second, in the future, we will unify workflow automations across Workspace ONE into a single orchestration platform, unleashing the combined power of Workspace ONE UEM and Workspace ONE Intelligence to empower IT admins to solve the most complex use cases through a single solution.
Bringing the Freestyle Orchestrator canvas to Workspace ONE Intelligence automations allows for an immediate improvement to user experience and starts us on the pathway toward the next evolution of automation improvements across the Workspace ONE ecosystem — more capabilities within the canvas, additional resources, improved connector framework, and more complex workflows across the IT ecosystem.
Navigating to Freestyle Orchestrator in Workspace ONE Intelligence
The new Freestyle Orchestrator canvas for Workspace ONE Intelligence replaces the previous Intelligence Automations experience. Navigate to the Freestyle page in the left navigation (previously called Workflows), where you can find your previously built workflows and start building new ones.
Let’s explore the new canvas by building out a basic workflow example. An enrolled device reports a compliance failure status event. A workflow is initiated with the following actions: the device is locked, a ServiceNow ticket is created to inform IT, then a Slack message is sent to notify the end user. With the new Freestyle Orchestrator canvas UI, the workflow will look like this:
You can see that the graphical presentation on a canvas is not only visually nicer, but it also opens up a world of opportunities that were not previously available with the automation engine in Workspace ONE Intelligence. For example, today you can define multiple actions in Workspace ONE Intelligence, and they will execute synchronously in order. In the future, we will add more capabilities to allow for more robust workflows. For example, imagine you could granularly define actions and whether a group of actions should take place synchronously or at a specific sequence. Other capabilities will include nested conditions, more robust forking (providing an ELSE option in case the condition is not met), and using more granular data.
Expand workflows to third-party apps
By leveraging the data available in Workspace ONE Intelligence, admins can automate the most complex tasks with granular conditions and task sequencing. Additionally, integrations with third-party applications allow for workspace automation across the entire IT ecosystem.
The ability to expand workflows to third-party apps is especially powerful in the context of your Workspace ONE environment. Let’s look at a couple of basic examples for utilizing third-party workflow connectors:
- Open a ticket in ServiceNow on behalf of the user when the system identifies that the user is experiencing an issue, or when the user experience score turns poor.
- Send a Slack notification to streamline communication with end users.
- Start a Coupa procurement process on behalf of the user based on data available in the system; for example, new user onboarding or battery is reaching end of life.
What’s coming next?
Bringing the Freestyle Orchestrator canvas to Workspace ONE Intelligence is the first step in our journey. Our goal is to transform Freestyle Orchestrator to deliver a unified orchestration framework across the Workspace ONE platform and third-party apps. This framework will bring together the capabilities of Workspace ONE Intelligence and Workspace ONE UEM to provide a single workflow experience within the product.
The unified orchestrator and the innovations mentioned above are enabled by a new microservices architecture that leverages open-source technology. This thoughtfully designed architecture embraces a distributed execution model across a client-server ecosystem that exists within the Workspace ONE platform: devices, Intelligence, and third-party integrations. The new microservices will improve all areas of the workflow architecture, including data ingestion, workflow preparation, distributed execution, auto-scalability, and execution logs. These new architecture efforts are well under way with the delivery of the new Freestyle Orchestrator canvas in Workspace ONE Intelligence and the new Connector Management Service.
As this effort continues through 2023, we’ll continue to provide updates at each milestone with content and in-depth technical articles from our product and engineering teams to help guide you on this transformational initiative.
The product team welcomes feedback and ideas! Post your thoughts on our ideas page (choose “Workspace ONE Freestyle”).
