Dan’s Dev Corner – December 2017

Since we’re near the end of the year, I thought it might be useful to look back at what development has been up to this year.  I’ve broken this down into the areas we typically think about internally.

Platform

It seems like we’re always adding new connectors and this year was certainly no exception.  We added connectors for GoogleDrive, OneDrive, and Safelink, and are in the process of more.

We’ve had C# and SOAP-based web services for some time now, but we really wanted to open that up some more to support different types of applications using the REST paradigm that everybody’s familiar with.  Instead of just re-factoring existing APIs, we also decided to update the virtualization model that it exposes at the same time.  We’ve certainly learned a lot over the years on how to write apps that work seamlessly across numerous document management and file sharing systems.  So, we designed the new API so that it’s even easier to write an app once that works with any of our connectors without having to worry about things like property names, date formats, containment models, and all that.

Echo

In addition to constantly adding new synchronization features, we added a whole new rule set to specifically support HighQ.  The “gatekeeper” rule set is bi-directional with the added feature of using the HighQ UI to let certain users control exactly when and what gets synchronized back to a DMS such as iManage or eDOCS.

The new ruleset is user-driven and in general, we’ve been busy adding some things to make user-driven synchronization easier to initiate and control.  The general direction here is to allow DMS users to stay within their normal work environment and synchronize documents and folders out to whatever system they want.  For example, an eDOCS user working from that client can synchronize their recently edited document list to their OneDrive account and back.

Fusion

In addition to hooking up new connectors to the UI components, we’ve continued to improve the user interface in general and specifically the components used for user synchronization.  Even though the client extensions appear native, they’re actually specific layouts from Fusion, so any improvements we do here automatically show up directly to the users.

In order to support environments where Fusion users are not Windows/AD users, we’ve implemented a version of the product to support direct authentication.  This is generally only intended for deployments where a user can’t be authenticated using normal Windows authentication.

Velocity

For me, probably the biggest areas of progress are with the migration product.  Velocity+ is a complete rewrite of the prior migration product with a focus on an improved user interface and greatly increased performance.  Some of the development work was actually done last year, but 2017 was the year where we took the first version, tested it in all kinds of environments, refined it, tuned it, hooked it up to numerous more connectors, and made it as easy as possible to deploy and operate it.