Engenda 5.0 New Features

Engenda 5.0 is now shipping. This major, new release provides the following new features:

Improved user-interface for Content Contributors

Engenda 5.0 features a new, streamlined user interface for content contributors. The UI is cleaner and more focused on how business users typically interact with the system.

• Easy and intuitive to use, with fewer buttons and menus and an email-like interface
• More content focused rather than task focused. You can use the Quick Action button to add or find existing content and create a task all in the same dialog
• Sorting of tasks by task name, due date, and owner

Publishing Engine

Engenda now comes with an improved publishing UI, providing a standard, built-in capability for an authorized user to easily publish content to one or several output locations, including the filesystem, FTP or another DynaBase web.

• Publishing can be done through the Publishing UI in Engenda or through a custom Workflow Action as part of your workflow process
• Provides the ability to publish content on a scheduled or periodic basis
• Fully customizable publishing capability thru the publish.xml file
• An XSLT stylesheet can be used on an item at publish time to transform the item.

Improved task list display times

Large task lists are now displaying much more quickly. To speed up task list rendering even more, a resource can be set to limit the refresh of tasks during a session.

Version comparison viewer

Users can now easily view side-by-side versions of the same reusable information object (RIO). From within the comparison viewer, they can choose to revert to a prior version of a piece of content, making it the current version. The compared versions need not be contiguous in history

AutoGenerate Page

Engenda now supports the ability to automatically generate a page when a RIO is created. It comes with a sample implementation of auto-generating a press release page when a press release RIO is created. This feature is geared to address a common activity. The sample implementation provides a blueprint for developers so they can easily create AutoGenerate capabilities for other content types.

• Content Contributors can use the out-of-the-box Press Release authoring forms, with dynamic capabilities for adding, inserting and re-ordering content.
• AutoGeneration results in a streamlined task with fewer clicks to create and submit for publishing

Dependency Finder

Users can start with a page and quickly find and attach to the task all the reusable information objects (RIOs) that make up the page. Alternatively, they can start with a RIO, and find all the pages that use that content item. Thus, they are able to quickly makes changes, fix errors, and in general assess the impact of a website change either due to a change to a shared RIO or change to a page.

Deleting “orphaned” RIOs

Users can now easily find and delete “orphaned RIOs” -- RIOs which are not being used in a page or task.

URL Aliases for RIOs

Prior versions of Engenda have supported URL Aliases for pages. Engenda 5.0 supports URL Aliases for RIOs. This capability allows customers to mimic their site structure for images, PDFs, JavaScript, stylesheets, etc. so that links on Web pages that are not yet being managed by Engenda continue to work. This makes it easier to migrate to an Engenda deployment and to gradually move your Web content into Engenda.

Filtering through Domains

Domains provide a way of grouping users so that a user sees only the information relevant to his group (or domain). The domain of the user, in conjunction with new domain-related capabilities, is used to filter the display of tasks, principals, and content in the Engenda dialogs. For example, content can be assigned to a domain so that it is only visible to member of that domain. When a user searches for content, only content in her domain is shown in the search result set. When routing a task, only principals in the domain are displayed as candidates for routing. When selecting a content type or a workflow, only content types and workflows that the user has the right to view are displayed.

The domain filtering feature can be enabled or disabled

Improved searching

In addition to searching by meta-data, Engenda now supports

• full-text search in HTML and XML
• tag-aware queries (such as <title> cont Engenda).
• queries for text using wildcards (* and ?).
• queries on read-only properties
• queries using search operators, such as “less than” (<) or “less than or equal to” (<=). Users can define which properties use search operators.

Filtering content types, workflows and meta-data properties

With Engenda 5.0, it is now possible to decide which content types, workflows or meta-data properties are made visible to defined sets of users

Graphics in Word documents

Images in Word documents (.gif and .jpg file formats) are now supported in Word-based authoring.

Additional features

• Task sorting is no longer case sensitive.
• Users can now modify their own passwords.
• Read-only metadata properties are now exposed for searching.
• The "Add New" and "Add Existing" buttons in the Attachment pane can be hidden based on Engenda capabilities. These buttons can also be hidden based on the current workflow state.
• A new "promote" button merges the former "state" and "route" buttons. Now you can transition a task to a new state, change the task carrier, or do both in the same dialog.
• Using the modify task functionality, the owner of a task can now change the owner of a task and optionally make the new owner the carrier
• FBA Forms now support the ability to search for and add an image to the form. Only images stored in the Engenda repository are available.
• A new sample form gives examples of checkboxes, radio boxes, and multiple selects in forms.
• A new sample XMLCI project and new sample Word documents give some examples on how to use XMLCI to generate XML and HTML. One sample document (MSWordStyles.doc) shows how you can generate HTML from some of the standard MS Word Styles.
• Action maps in workflows have been greatly simplified by supporting the wildcard "* " in the type attribute and by supporting spaced-delimited lists in the type and state attributes.
• You can now attach multiple items at once following a search for existing content.
• A new task report, seen only by principals with administrative privileges, lets you find and delete tasks with no attachments and no subtasks.