Product Update: What's New in UAC 7.9

The final UserVerse Online session covers the whole Stonebranch portfolio, not just the controller. Four speakers, four areas.

Universal Reporting Server. David Ainsworth opens with a tension customers keep raising: compliance and regulatory demands mean keeping execution data longer, but nobody wants that data sitting in the primary database or complex reports running against it. Asked what reporting capabilities they wanted, customers said the ones they already have. So the Universal Reporting Server is a separate UAC instance scoped to reporting only. It can use any supported database, and it doesn't have to match your primary one, so PostgreSQL works for both the reporting server and the long-term data store without another commercial license. With no OMS and no attached agents, upgrading it adds one step rather than real complexity. Most importantly, the application manages replication itself, and data is never purged from the primary UAC until it has replicated, so there's no data loss window. If you already run an archive server manually, there's a migration path that brings your existing long-term data across. Replication pulls directly from the database rather than through the instance, so it consumes nothing from the primary server. Agent definitions appear in reports as part of the original run without existing as attached agents.

Backup and purge improved alongside it. Data selection is smarter, packet sizes are smaller, and redundant cross-checking has been removed. Because the system knows what has already replicated, it can purge with confidence.

OMS architecture. The message database has always required a network file share so multiple OMS components could reach it and identify the active instance. Customers flagged that as a single point of failure. In the new OMS, each instance keeps its own local database, synchronized through standard database replication. Functionality is unchanged, the client-to-server protocol is unchanged, and backward compatibility means no changes to the controller or agents. One thing not to miss: replication is off by default, so you have to turn it on explicitly.

Direct Kubernetes transfers. Universal Data Mover adds SNI support, meaning you can specify the server host name. Before 7.9, a Kubernetes-to-Kubernetes transfer had to stage through an intermediate server, and mainframe UDM agents couldn't deliver directly to Kubernetes at all. With routes supported for OpenShift and ingress for AKS and other Kubernetes platforms, both now work directly, cutting steps out of container file transfer.

The approval task. Manual tasks have handled human-in-the-loop steps since UAC was built, and they still do. But as business users and more complex scenarios arrived, approval requirements outgrew what the manual task was designed for. The new approval task supports individual approvals, group approvals, and combinations, with match-all or match-any criteria on username or group name. It comes with notifications, an inbox, and its own menu items. In the Universal Portal, a badge shows how many approvals are waiting, so business users don't have to hunt for them. The manual task is unchanged and existing workflows are unaffected. Switch only if you need the extra granularity. This is built into 7.9, not delivered through the Integration Hub.

Universal Portal 2.0. Version 1.0 shipped English and German. 2.0 adds Spanish, Dutch, Italian, French, and Portuguese, for seven languages, and introduces dark mode alongside the existing calm mode. The responsive layout adapts to screen size and rotation, with controls sized for thumbs, and task states still aggregate into four categories for fast filtering.

Container guidance continues. 7.8 covered deploying UAC in self-managed OpenShift. 7.9 adds prescriptive guidance for vanilla Kubernetes and for OpenShift on Microsoft Azure, with more cloud providers to follow. The point is a documented best practice: deploy and configure a Stonebranch-built container this way and you get optimal results. In the session poll, 58 percent of attendees said they're deploying more and more workloads to containers.

New integrations. Nils Buer covers Oracle Fusion, SAP BTP, cloud, containers, data pipelines, and self-service. The new Oracle ESS integration schedules any Oracle Fusion Cloud process and ships with 65 preconfigured Fusion ERP and HCM processes; anything not preconfigured can be added through a parameter mapping file, and IDs like ledger ID resolve automatically. The SAP BTP template task now handles template parameters, which are notoriously complex, developed with SAP's team in Bulgaria and already running at major SAP installations. A HONICO BatchMan integration lets you run BatchMan jobs from Universal Controller. A ServiceNow application, in certification at the time of recording, will let business users create and schedule multi-step SAP jobs without involving the scheduling team. Dedicated Kubernetes job integrations cover GKE, AKS, and EKS with the right authentication for each, and Google's own mainframe team uses the GKE task. On data pipelines, Boomi and dbt Cloud join existing dbt support, and inter-cloud data transfer gains more than twenty rules for renaming files after transfer.

The jobs-as-code task was rebuilt and is dramatically faster, no longer issuing individual commands. Upload workflow definitions to GitHub or Bitbucket in YAML or JSON, scoped by workflow, business service, bundle, trigger relationship, or regex. In the demo, Nils uploads a workflow, changes an ABAP in an SAP task, and a webhook brings the change back through an approval task before it commits, tying the two new features together.

A new Dynatrace extension installs from the Dynatrace store, no UAC knowledge required, with a default dashboard covering logs, traces, task instances, and system overview, extensible from there. It's in evaluation and available from support in the meantime. See analytics and observability for context.

B2B file transfer. Robert Oslin draws the line clearly: UDM handles transfers inside your organizational boundary, on premises, hybrid, or multi-cloud. Exchanging data with partners, vendors, or clients is B2B, and that brings stricter requirements around security, compliance, SLAs, performance at scale, and privacy, plus partners whose protocols range from legacy to cutting edge. UDMG bridges that gap.

UDMG itself is the managed file transfer core, handling partner provisioning, authentication, transfers across protocols, routing, and UAC integration. Secure Proxy is an optional security add-on that protects data at the network edge, letting external partners initiate transfers into your internal network without exposing internal systems or opening firewall holes. Secure Proxy 1.3 adds session break, which interrupts the incoming session and authenticates at the proxy so no unauthenticated connection ever reaches UDMG. Everything stays in memory and never touches disk, including partner files, configuration, keys, and certificates. Certificate private keys can optionally offload to a hardware security module. ICAP support enables inline antivirus and data loss prevention scanning as files stream through, blocking infected files before they land on disk, and ICAP also works in UDMG for scanning files at rest.

Protocol support now includes AS2 bidirectionally, which brings high security plus auditability and receipts. SFTP and FTPS are both bidirectional, new for FTPS which previously ran server-mode only, and interactive HTTPS transfers continue through the web transfer client. UDMG can pass business service parameters to UAC for mapping to monitor events. Security additions include IP allowlists and blocklists you manage in the product rather than through firewall tickets, enhanced rate limiting, and domains, which segregate configuration across business units much like namespaces. Both partner accounts and administrative users support SAML and OIDC/OAuth2 for authentication and authorization, with attribute mapping to roles and permissions plus just-in-time provisioning. High availability moves from active-passive to active-active for horizontal scaling, credentials are centrally managed and referenced throughout, roles are fine-grained down to individual client operations, and the web transfer client has been rebuilt with ad hoc secure share links.

Two closing notes. Ops-CLI is deprecated as of 7.9, which means neither deleted nor end of life; the new UAC CLI and REST web services are the forward path, and Stonebranch is asking for feedback from anyone with concerns. The Universal Reporting Server requires an additional license.

Key Takeaways:

• The Universal Reporting Server runs reporting on a separate UAC instance and database, with application-managed replication and no data purged from the primary until it has replicated
• Each OMS instance now keeps a local message database synchronized by standard replication, removing the network file share dependency (replication is off by default)
• A new approval task handles individual, group, and combined approvals with match-all or match-any criteria, surfaced with a badge in the Universal Portal
• Universal Portal 2.0 adds five languages for a total of seven, plus dark mode
• UDM SNI support enables direct Kubernetes-to-Kubernetes and mainframe-to-Kubernetes transfers with no intermediate staging server