We're pleased to announce the next patch release of sharedo - version 7.3.1 - is in general availability as of this morning, 20th February 2022.

This release includes 11 small feature enhancements and resolutions to 14 assorted defects and usability issues.

Feature enhancement highlights for 7.3.1

A few highlights of the enhancements in this release - a full list is shown below.

MoJ integration - modern authorisation

For clients using the Ministry of Justice integration, this critical update adds support for the new modern authentication mechanism and retires the old approach, as mandated by the service. Customers using MoJ integration are encouraged to upgrade to 7.3.1 as soon as possible to avoid service interruption.

Improved detection of problematic workflow scripts

Execution engine smart plans and custom workflow actions are server side scripts governing business processes and workflow, which run asynchronously on the execution engine server. Given these are code based assets that clients are in control over, it was possible to create actions with erroneous code that would run indefinitely. e.g. An "infinite loop" added to a JS plan or action, would execute on a node within the engine, effectively tying that node up until restarted. No errors would be raised as essentially, the node is doing it's job - to run the script, but that script would potentially never end. This could result in node starvation, once all nodes were consumed running the erroneous plan.

In 7.3.1 we've added a new long running script detection mechanic to prevent this from happening. Typically a workflow action or smart plan script should run in well under 5 minutes. As a backstop to prevent node starvation, the execution engine will time the execution of an individual step within a workflow/plan, and, if it runs for longer than 5 minutes, will terminate it with an error.

Document management

Several features shipping in this release revolve around enhancements to document management.

Generate anywhere; When using the prepare document activity to generate a document, you can now select where the document should be placed after generation. Previously this was a configurable list of standard folders, which remains available, but now, the author can choose to place the generated document anywhere within the DMS repository for the work item.

Save redacted document; Using the document preview panel, the user is able to add annotations and redactions to the document. Previously to save the redacted version back to the DMS, the user would need to download the "burned in" copy and re-upload it. This has been changed to allow the burned in version to be saved directly back to the DMS without this manual step.

Rename folders; Within the repository explorer, which surfaces the structure of the underlying DMS (Office 365, iManage etc), the ability to rename folders has been added.

Options to open in app or web; For the Office 365 DMS provider, documents stored can be opened in either the browser based editor (e.g. Word online) or directly in the native application (e.g. Word desktop). Previously the default was to open the document in the online variant. With this update, users are now able to choose which mechanism to use - which simplifies the journey to get documents to open in the native application.

Better cache invalidation during solution import

Some content that can be imported into a sharedo instance have effects on the cached assets delivered to the browser, such as Javascript or HTML templates. Previously it was sometimes required to reset the cache headers feature to ensure the latest content was delivered after an import. In this update, the importer has been made aware of what content being imported requires the cache headers to be reset and will do this automatically.

Improved reference generation sequences

Sharedo offers the ability to generate references based on flexible configuration. Part of this configuration allows usage of an automatically incrementing sequence. This was limited to a single shared sequence per root within the type hierarchy. In this release, this has been overhauled to allow a more flexible approach, and allowing sequences to be defined at any level within the hierarchy. As such, different sibling types can have independent auto numbering sequences configured in the modeller.

Extensions to People and Organisations public API

The public API's available for people and organisations has been extended to support the management of custom meta data via form builder.

All features/enhancements in 7.3.1

Full list of all feature and enhancements tickets shipped in this release:

Defects resolved in 7.3.1

Full list of issues resolved in this release: