Pega Mobile

People are working in more flexible, non-traditional ways and the ability to connect anywhere, anytime has become a must for productivity. With the surge of remote work, the expectation for those experiences to be mobile and intuitive is intensifying. The need to be Agile - to rapidly build, modify, or automate to fill process gaps - is more important than ever before and seamless intuitive user experiences are a universal expectation.

Traditional mobile app approach

The traditional approach to mobile app development is often slow and complex. Solutions commonly follow a channel-centric approach, embedding logic in each separate channel, such as a mobile app. This approach leads to disconnected and frustrating customer experiences, resulting in increased churn rates and increased maintenance costs because changes must be recoded in each channel.

Pega Mobile

The low-code approach of Pega Mobile simplifies the mobile app development process by taking a center-out approach to business architecture: starting with the customer journey and building out from there. By starting from the center and building out, customers can have a consistent experience as the microjourney is common across channels, including mobile. Any updates to the application are instantly reflected in the environment to which you deployed. It is unnecessary to use a native development or test environment to build a Pega Mobile app.

Offline-enabled mobile apps are useful for mobile users working in locations without network connectivity. By using offline-enabled apps, mobile users can create new cases for case types that developers enable for offline processing. Users can also process assignments within offline enabled cases while working offline. Data synchronization between the mobile device and the server occurs automatically when the mobile device is online.

Prerequisites

A Pega Platform™ application with a mobile channel configured for the application

Approach

• Leverage the functionalities provided by App Studio, and do not implement custom code.
• Identify and enable the appropriate case types for offline processing.
• Identify a stage that contains the steps that a user can take offline.
• Configure a reconciliation process after the offline stage to handle the conflicts and issues.
• Define a data synchronization strategy (for example, full synchronization versus delta synchronization).
• Define a strategy to improve the speed of data synchronization.
• Enable caching data in the offline-enabled apps to help users to begin their work without unnecessary delays.
• Disable server-side postprocessing in offline-enabled cases to avoid redundant processing of actions and increase app performance.

Case type considerations

• When multiple users need to perform the same offline task, create a child case to perform the task independently.

Process design considerations

• Offline mobile apps require specialized design considerations. Pega Mobile apps normally rely on the server for various UI and processing features. An unavailable server disrupts those features. Use offline-supported flow processing features, controls, and actions. Rules such as activities and smart shapes cannot be placed in the offline stage. However, remote system updates and notifications can be placed at the end of the offline stage.
• Avoid using declarative indexes in offline-enabled apps to avoid any duplicate index entries in the database.
• Rules that work in offline-enabled apps do not support parameters.

For more information about Pega Mobile, see the following Pega Community and Pega Academy content:

• Designing a mobile app experience
• Mobile apps for Pega applications 
• Mobile Solutions