Listen to this articleDear Kovair Customers and Prospective Customers:
As we launch the Kovair Newsletter in the first quarter of 2009, let me wish all of you a very successful and profitable year. However, after the events of the last few months, there is no doubt that this is going to be a challenging year for all of us. It is not at all uncommon to run a “tight ship” during times like these! However, it is also unwise not to adopt measures that bring additional efficiency, cost reductions and quality improvements during a time when the slower economy demands such measures for enhancing competitive position in the market. Kovair has been making such investments in the recent past for further product enhancements and the culmination of these efforts will be a totally re-engineered Release 6.0 of the Kovair Global Life Cycle product to the market before the end of Q1 2009. This release has some major new features that are listed elsewhere in this newsletter. S uffice it to say that we are very excited about the introduction of this new release which will considerably enhance user experience with its new UI, advanced features, ease of use, improved performance and excellent traceability, dashboard and reporting capabilities.
The message I would like to convey to the potential customers is that by investing in Kovair, you will considerably reduce your development costs, achieve timely product releases and deliver a better quality application for the end user. These are very important factors for competitive advantages in a slow economy. Our 100% browser based Life Cycle and IT Management Platform facilitates multi site global development better than most other tools in the Application Lifecycle Management and SDLC market space particularly when you are considering outsourcing or off shoring of development activities. Kovair with its capabilities both in process control and multi-tools integrations along with total reporting brings peace of mind to the people managing development whether it is onshore, offshore or outsourced!
We appreciate your continued support of Kovair and are looking forward to expanding our reach to many of you who are not yet using Kovair Global Lifecycle for all aspects of Applications Development and IT Service Management.
Bipin Shah
CEO
Kovair Software, Inc.
What’s New in Kovair 6.0
The new 6.0 release is going to be one of the watershed releases in the history of Kovair. The changes in 6.0 can be categorized in three areas: User Interface, New Functionality and Major Enhancements of existing Functionality. In addition using new caching and other techniques the software performance has been enhanced quite a bit.
New UI and Multi-Browser Support
For the existing users of Kovair, the first surprise will be the brand new design of the user interface.
The redesign of the UI was driven by three factors: Ease of Navigation with on the fly configurations, Support of multiple Browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome) replacing ActiveX by Flash and usage of Ajax to provide the best interactivity for any Browser based applications available in the market. One other major UI change we made is by replacing ‘Tabs’ in the custom Forms by ‘Expand/ Collapse Sections’. We have put a lot of thoughts in these areas and sincerely hope that the users like this new UI including an ability to select different color themes.
Graphical Visualizer
One of the major themes of new functionality of Rel 6.0 of Kovair Global Lifecycle is ‘Visualization and Graphical Editor’. The most visible of the visualization features is Kovair’s brand new ‘Dashboard’ with Drill-down capability. Any graphical or tabular reports can be converted into a ‘Dashboard’ gadget and put to one or more Dashboards across multiple workspaces. Each user can select to one or more dashboards based on their roles. The new graphic editor enables one to visualize and manipulate the relations among various items in a network diagram. The other new graphic diagramming tool is to visualize the version map of an item. Using Kovair’s new item versioning capability, an item (say a Requirement) may be modified to create a new version, create a new branch or merge multiple branches. The version diagram depicts the history and map of various versions in anetwork format.
Document and Traceability Views
The next important new categories of features are in enabling users to view lists of items in various useful ways. The first such view is known as ‘Document View’. This view lists the rich text descriptions of a set of selected items (for example Requirements) in a continuous format like a document. Each of the Requirements may be edited in place in this Document view. Another new view, taking advantage of Kovair’s powerful Traceability Relation features, is the ‘Traceability View’. This view allows users to see the hierarchy of related items (say list of Requirements with related Testcases as sub-items and related Issues to Testcases as sub-sub-items). Under the same View category now Kovair allows users to compare two versions of the same items or two different items to see the differences in their descriptions.
Process Enhancements
The biggest enhancements in Kovair 6.0 were achieved in the area of Kovair’s industry leading Process Engine. Now for each entity multiple processes may be defined (e.g. separate Review/ Approval and Change processes for Requirements Management), each can be versioned independently. While modifying an existing active process Kovair supports lifecycle of the process development and deployment by recognizing the ‘Design’, ‘Debug’, ‘Published’ and ‘Inactive’ state of each version of a Process. To model the most demanding process needs, Kovair has added the capability of conditional Role resolution, a new node type to execute a Web Service triggering an action at an external tool and Pre / Post Activity Policy execution. Some new custom field types are introduced including Autonumber, Image, File, HTML, XML, Email and Log. These make Kovair’s custom field types the most comprehensive in the industry. Moreover the custom fields can be used to create structured queries and full text search queries across multiple workspaces and Entities. We believe Kovair’s Rel 6.0 has pushed the envelope for achieving the most functional ALM and ITSM solution delivered in an integrated 100% browser based package and create a new benchmark for all other tools in this category to measure against.
