Revision as of 14:16, 1 April 2009

General Information

The SmartSimple platform is upgraded with new features and enhancements approximately every 6 to 8 weeks.

This page will provide a general overview of each upgrade, with links to the Wiki articles describing the specific features and how to use them. You can also subscribe to the Technical Journal that is sent out prior to each upgrade at Newsletter Signup Page

System Upgrade Process

The objective of this process is to ensure that every customer that needs to review how their applications and information will work with the upgrade has a chance to review, without compromising the integrity of their production system. In order to take advantage of the new procedures you will need to know how to access your backup instance of SmartSimple. If you need assistance either refer to the Backup and Testing Instance Wiki article, or call the help desk for assistance.

Backup Server Update

• Each backup server will be updated to the "release candidate" on the Tuesday of the update week.
• This update will provide for instance specific testing of release candidate, as you can log into your respective backup server and test the the changes against your most current data and configuration.
• Internal staff will also be using these servers to perform instance specific testing.
• The update will stay in place on the backup server for the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of the update week.

Update Go/No-Go

• Subject to satisfactory testing on both the pre-production server and the production backup servers the go/no go decision will be made on Thursday at 12:00.

WebEx

• There will be a Pre-Release WebEx session the week prior to each upgrade that will provide technical details on how to implement and use the new features and enhancements.
  
• Details of each WebEx session will be posted on this page once it is scheduled.

Upcoming Upgrade: April 2nd 2009

WebEx Session for April 2nd 2009 Upgrade:
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. EST.
You can join the meeting by going to https://meetmenow.webex.com and entering the meeting number - 945 394 679, Meeting Password: upgrade.

If your organisation has a dedicated SmartSimple server, or if you host in-house, the support team 
will be in contact with your system administrator to schedule the server upgrade.

Click on any heading to go to the associated Wiki article for detailed information

Security Enhancements

We have enhanced the password security features to bring them in line with current corporate standards.

Password Expiration

• You can now set a system-wide password expiration number of days. Each user will be forced to change their password once that number of days has passed.

Password History

• You can set the number of previous passwords (to a maximum of 32) that the system will remember for each user. When changing their password, users will not be permitted to re-use a previous password until the specified number of unique passwords has been used.

Document Management

Document Management is of high interest to our client community and though we do not position SmartSimple as a Document Management System we continue to enhance the system's abilities to create, store and manage documents. This month we are adding the ability to create and populate MS Word documents dynamically as well as significant enhancements to the current PDF document management features.

MS Word Merge Custom Field

• This new Custom Field type provides the ability to dynamically create an MS Word document from underlying SmartSimple data.
• The MS Word document can also include tables that will list details of Level 2 or Level 3 activities associated with a given record.
• The SmartDoc Template also allows you to easily upload the resulting MS Word document back to SmartSimple to be stored in a specified Single or Multiple file field.

Allow Merging of PDF Documents

• If you are using a Multiple File field to store PDF documents then you can enable a "Merge" button.
• Clicking the Merge button displays a list of all the PDFs document stored in the Multiple File field and you select which documents you wish to merge into a single PDF document.
• The resultant document will also be stored in the Multiple File field. The original documents will not be changed.
• This feature will provide for easier printing of "sets" of documents.

Multiple File Field: Display Additional File Attributes for PDF Documents

• This feature allows you to display extra information (called Meta Data) extracted from each PDF file stored in a Multiple File field, and display it as extra columns in the list view.
• The additional attributes that can be extracted and displayed are: author, creator, producer, keywords, subject, title, number of pages, creation date and modified date.
• Only PDF files stored in the Multiple File field will display this information. The added columns will be blank for all other document types.

Single File Field: Display Additional File Attributes for PDF Documents

• This feature allows you to extract extra information (called Meta Data) from a PDF stored in a Single File field and store it in a Read Only - System Variables field.
• The additional attributes that can be extracted and displayed are: author, creator, producer, keywords, subject, title, number of pages, creation date and modified date.
• Only PDF files stored in a Single File field will display this information.

See Also

• SmartSimple Technical Journal Issue - 32 (February 2009 Upgrade)
• SmartSimple Technical Journal Issue - 33 (March 2009 Upgrade)