We're pleased to announce the next point release of sharedo - version 7.5 - is in general availability as of this morning, 1st June 2023.

This release includes 51 new or enhanced features and 91 assorted defect and usability fixes. 7.5 also incorporates a roll up of new features and defects shipped in all patch releases since 7.4.0.

Feature and enhancement highlights for 7.5

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

Email UX improvements

There have been a number of enhancements around how emails are handled within the platform. 

Email failure notifications

Firstly, should an email fail to send for whatever reason, rather than silently failing with just the state of the task moving to "failed", or having to write a workflow to alert the user in some way, a new standard notification has been added to the system that will tell the user when an email they submit fails to be sent.

As with all notifications, this can be turned on and off via the notifications settings on your profile menu.

Warning when sending mail outside of the organisation

When an email is being sent from sharedo to a participant that is external to the organisation, the system can now warn the user to ensure they are aware that this is occurring. This is configured in the “Outbound Email” global feature by turning on the “Warn if sending email to external address” option, specifying the domains considered internal, and a message to show to users.

When composing the outbound email, if the recipients includes any address that is not on the internal domain list, the configured warning will be presented.

Persistence of CC/BCC preferences

A small, but time saving feature is that now, the email blade will remember your preference for whether or not to show the CC and BCC fields.

Major rework to the usability of participant controls

The control used to select email recipients has been overhauled to make composing emails faster and more intuitive. You can still choose to open the list of existing  participants to select from as before, but now, all the search and selection can be done directly within the recipient fields themselves. You can enter a free form email address just as before, or, where you choose an existing participant that does not have the necessary contact details, the system will signpost you to the appropriate place to enter it and automatically update.

More intuitive “refresh content” actions when using templates

Prior to 7.5, creating an outbound email using a template, the insertion and refreshing of the template content wasn't obvious. After selecting a template to insert, the body content would be replaced, finding the button to refresh the content from the template was cumbersome, and it would replace your content with no warning should you click it after making edits.

The buttons to insert and reload from the template have been made clearer, and the system will warn you should you reload and risk losing any edits you have made.

Custom phase features

When creating workflows etc, it's generally best to rely on abstractions rather than specifics. For example, a workflow fired on phase change might check if the phase being moved to is a very specific phase. Whilst this is fine, it's not reusable or portable between work types with differing phase models. Instead, it would be better to check if the phase being moved to has some flag set against it governing the behaviour your workflow will implement. In doing so, the workflow can be fired against various types, with differing phase plans, and still behave accordingly as the phases would be marked as having a particular feature rather than checking for specific phase names.

In 7.5 we have introduced the concept of custom features, allowing you to define these flags and attach them to phases, specifically for this purpose.

From the phase plan editor, when editing a phase, you will see features that can be tagged and configured against it.

Notice the new + button on the section title. This will allow you to define your own custom phase features. Describe your feature and it's intent and click save.

You are then able to enable that feature on phases and can check these flags in workflows.

To make this even easier however, the concept has been carried through into the workflow triggers configuration, where now, for phase events, you can define the trigger to run when a phase feature is enabled rather than specifying the individual phases to trigger on. Here for example, we are defining a trigger to run a workflow on any phase change for any work type, where the phase has our “Work item abandoned” feature enabled.

Multi-stage form aggregator

Some work items involve a lot of complex data capture that can become fragmented across multiple screens. Some may be found in the participants screen, others on the key facts blade, and some in individual forms to be opened to capture discreet pieces of data.

Whilst that is fine, and process combined with data quality rules etc can ensure the correct data is captured at the right times, we may want to present a cohesive list of all the key data, showing completeness of the capture, what data is still to be done etc.

The new multiple form view aggregator widget is ideal for this purpose. It allows you to configure different sections of display content (using data composer), set visibility conditions, define ready/not ready validations (using data composer expressions), and then add calls to action (any valid menu commands) to direct users to the correct screen to complete the capture.

By composing aggregate forms and data in this way, you are able to create relatively complex, yet intuitive data capture wizards for your users. As this feature is relatively involved, a full guide will be made available.

Scorecard modeller

The underlying scorecard system has been enhanced and brought into the modelling tools to configure your own scorecards based on metrics and measures you define.

By enabling the “Scorecard” global feature and opening it, you will have access to the scorecard modelling tools to define the metrics, aggregation and resultant bands for cards and attach them to various work types. These are then managed and visualised in portals (sample above). Typical use cases include tracking risk profiles or business value.

Voice notes

You can now add the recording and play back of voice notes to work items. To begin, enable the voice notes global feature and configure how it will name the recording files, plus the maximum recording length and bit rate (quality) to record at.

Once enabled, the “Related Documents” aspect can be used on work types, and it will now have configuration to enable voice notes to be captured against work items.

With this enabled, the related documents aspect will update to allow direct recording of voice notes.

Clicking the “Record new voice note” button will open a blade to allow you to start recording and preview it once done. After doing so, the recording will be ready for upload to the work item, where it will be added to the DMS using the file naming convention defined in the feature.

The related documents aspect will also allow for playback from the list of files.

Public API for external filing integration

Several clients leverage their own filing applications to receive documents and file them into their CMS. These applications are typically built in house, or at least integrated by an in-house team. For example, PaperRiver.

To support filing into Sharedo from external applications, the public API has been extended to allow easy querying of DMS folders for a work item, to obtain the user's most recent work items, most viewed, bookmarked etc, along with other enhancements to the related documents and work item search APIs.

For more information, see the public API guide within modeller.

Finance enhancements

Several enhancements have been made to the finance system including adding the ability to support ranges across fee sections and supporting fee elements that are negative. Additional commands have been added to the menu system also to allow editing of fee estimates and actuals to be added to menus and calls to action etc.

Custom plugin enhancements

Sharedo features a plugin system to allow for extension by developers and third parties. This has been extended significantly to round out the experience and capability of the plugin infrastructure to allow for custom physical data models to implemented, custom content to be shipped (independent of the in-built IDE), and new coded start up tasks to run when a plugin is installed or updated.

Workflow enhancements

Over 10 new or enhanced features have been added to the visual workflow toolset. 

Highlights of new actions added include the ability to add  comments to work items, to be able to deliver documents via channels such as email and eSignature, the ability to name individual running instances of workflows and the capability to send and receive SMS messages.

The runtime for workflow also now has the capability to stop an executing workflow from the UI, which is also available as a workflow action. For example, during perhaps a case abandonment procedure, a workflow may need to find and stop all other running workflows against the case to stop all processing.

When defining a trigger for a workflow against an event, it is also now possible to inspect the event payload to understand what fields and data are provided in the trigger to map them to workflow fields. From the list of available events, clicking the blue “I” circle will open the list of data fields provided by that event.

Search indexing optimisation

All the lists and searches within the application are driven off an index that is optimised for dynamic searching. This index is kept in sync with the transactional data via a combination of synchronous and asynchronous mechanisms. For example, when data is updated against a work item, it is immediately reflected both in the transactional data and in the index (immediate consistency), but, given the way the index is optimised to “de-normalise” certain data fields from related data, that change can require other work items to also be refreshed in the index. This is done asynchronously (eventual consistency).

This asynchronous mechanic could, in certain circumstances, prove inefficient. Multiple consecutive updates to the same data, in a short space of time, could require discovery and re-indexing of the same related work items multiple times.

The indexer has been optimised to avoid unnecessary indexing operations. Rather than discovery potentially re-queuing the same work items multiple times, the indexer now maintains state to understand what work items are queued and when they were last re-indexed. Where data is being changed by one or more users that then would typically require the same sets of work items to be re-indexed, the indexer will intelligently ensure this is only done once.

In addition, the operation of the indexer has been tuned with an average 80% gain in throughput for batch processing (in other words, if the indexer could manage 3000 work items per minute before, it will now handle 5400 with no additional resources).

Features/Enhancements in 7.5

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

Defects resolved in 7.5

Full list of issues resolved in this release: