What's new in Activator 5.12

What's new in Activator 5.12

Axway Activator 5.12 introduces the following new features and functional improvements.

Product enhancements

The following product changes have been made:

What's new Description
New Functionality
Platform updates

Operating systems (all 64-bit):

  • Windows 2012
  • RHEL 7
  • AIX 7

Databases:

  • DB2 10.5
  • Oracle 12c
  • MySQL 5.6
  • Axway Database 4.6.0

Java: JRE 7

Security: TLS 1.2

See the Activator Installation Guide for a full overview of supported platforms.

Admin user password change requirement To enhance product security, when logging into the Activator user interface for the first time as the admin user, the interface requires you to change the default admin password.

Acceptance of email sender by domain

Email pickups now include an option for accepting inbound email from a POP3 server based on server domain. Wild card characters are supported for defining groups of accepted email sending addresses.

See:

Web Services

SOAP header metadata

You can now configure Activator to generate metadata attributes from the SOAP headers of inbound Web Services messages. The metadata can be used in ways similar to other Activator-handled metadata.

Sequential delivery Guarantees the delivery order of distributed messages. The new capability ensures the messages are delivered in a first-in first-out (FIFO) order. For example, this makes certain that a Purchase Order message and an Order Update message are delivered sequentially. This promotes productive and efficient supply chain relationships.
Security governance

Enhanced fine-grained roles and access controls ensure a comprehensive approach to user level permissions and restrictions. Complete support for encryption and TLS/SSL is supported throughout the product, as well as password credential encryption. Additionally, EDI transaction-type level encryption and signing validation is supported.

FTP message processing can now be set to the order of oldest to newest

FTP external pickup configuration now enables you to use the consumption order (consumption timestamp) to determine the message processing order.

Enhanced communication adapters

Communication adapter enhancements have been made to multiple communication protocols including:

  • APOP (Email)
  • MQ (V8/SSL, Multi-Instance)
  • FTP (SAPPEND/SUNIQUE)
  • PeSIT
  • SMTP (New sender validation allows broader range of sender email addresses)
  • Staged HTTP (Updated OS and JRE support)
  • FTP/SFTP (Embedded servers upgraded to create events when files are downloaded)
Visibility - Sentinel performance and exchange monitoring
  • More detailed reporting to Sentinel
  • Heartbeat information from Activator
  • Improved installation and configuration, including configuration of the backup Sentinel server for notifications
  • Sentinel server connection configuration from the Activator user interface
  • Sentinel tracking of WebTrader events - Sentinel now collects information about WebTrader user and administrator actions
  • Sentinel Tracked Object evolutions - The number of events reported by the Sentinel Tracked Object for Activator has been reduced to limit processing load.
Additional message standards and protocols

New standards support for retail value chain, healthcare, and financial have been added for:

  • MLLP
  • AS4
AS4 support

Activator provides support for AS4 message trading with remote partners. This includes support for:

  • One-way message push exchanges
  • One-way message pull exchanges
  • Server-mode AS4 message queuing
  • Client-mode polling of remote AS4 server queues
  • Large message splitting and joining
  • Duplicate message detection
  • Message retry and resending
  • UserNameToken and X509 user authentication

See AS4.

User interface enhancements
  • Enhanced search tools including more granularity for searches of unpackaged protocols
  • Improved display controls - Pagination / scalability for displays of thousands of configuration objects
  • Updated navigation and help links
  • Permission-driven control of users' rights to change/delete all objects
  • Flexible trading partner management, with user-defined attributes
Security improvements
  • Access control enhancements - More permissions, controls, and restrictions
  • Broader support for encryption and TLS/SSL everywhere
  • Broader configuration of encryption on partner and transaction type levels
  • PGP enhancements
WebSphere MQ 8.x support

Activator now provides JARs in support of WebSphere MQ 8.x.

CRL retrieval using HTTPS URLs

You can now configure automated CRL checking and downloading using HTTPS URLs, in addition to the HTTP and LDAP URLs that were already supported.

Documentation enhancements

This release of Activator includes the following documentation changes: