Kovair 11.0 Release
Introduction to Release Notes
Team Kovair is proud to announce the release of version 11.0 for the products ALM and Omnibus. The document throws a major light on some of the latest enhancements and new features that have been added to stated products of Kovair in this version of release.
Download: Release Note 11.0
Platform and Browser Support
This release supports the deployment of Kovair on Microsoft® Windows Server 2008 R2 / 2012 R2/ 2016/2019.
Release 11.0 can be best viewed in latest versions of Google Chrome Version 109.0.5414.120 and above. The application is also supported in Microsoft Edge version 109.0.1518.70.
Kovair Omnibus
Splunk Adapter
As Kovair continuously increases its adapter connectivity – in this endeavor the latest adapter has been introduced in Enterprise Splunk 8x. The adapter is a uni-directional implementation where Splunk “Events” has been exposed to receive data across any connected Tools through Omnibus. Event-based analytics is a computing process that addresses the triage and resolution of a large amount of data for example IT events and incidents. Splunk event type refers to a collection of data that helps in categorizing events based on common characteristics. For example, data from multiple IBM RTC work items need to be pushed to Splunk for analysis for management. Similarly, Bugs, Defects from multiple tools can be pushed to Splunk as events for analytics.Zendesk Cloud Adapter
In the world of cloud-based Ticketing systems lately, the Zendesk Ticketing system has created a major footprint. To bring Zendesk tickets into the Omnibus connected ecosystem, Kovair has come up with a new adapter for the Zendesk ticketing system. Zendesk’s ticketing system makes it simple to track, prioritize, and solve customer support tickets. With Zendesk as a part of the Kovair Omnibus ecosystem- Kovair Omnibus offers a fully integrated ticketing system is the first step to building a great customer experience. The omnibus central hub for all your customer questions, requests, and concerns. Above all, it gives Zendesk users a complete picture of each customer. The Zendesk integration will bring both internal engineering and the customer closer and establishes a uniform communication channel.Jira R4J
Atlassian Jira has an enormous market in the industry, Kovair has an adapter for Jira with its various flavors of plug-ins. Kovair has lately addressed the Jira Requirement management with the plug-in R4J. Integration of Kovair Omnibus with R4J creates a powerful integration channel with requirements management by leveraging the entire range of Jira features, such as linking between different issue types with 110 connected tools through Omnibus The main features of R4J are hierarchical structures of requirements and specifications, traceability, and impact analysis of requirements changes. With the integration in place, the hierarchy of Requirements can be synched to tools like Team Center as requirements or Electronic Change Request ECR.
PlanView
This a complete new offering adapter from Kovair using Omnibus where it support cloud version of PlanView Pro. The adapter exposes Artifacts like Projects, Requests, Project Logs and Task. This offering is a milestone for Kovair Omnibus as it will to seemly connect to Kovair Project level data to Planview.Scheduled Upgrades
RTC with JAS Support
Jazz Security Architecture is one of the Authentication and Single Sign-On (SSO) solution for Jazz Application starting CLM 6.x. The adapter has been made to support Jazz Authorization Server (JAS) authentication. The same security implementation has been done for all Kovair RTC integration customers.GitHub
The new upgrade supports version 2.0 with deep level integration exposing pull Request, Repositories, Branches, commits etc. The integration uses new mechanism of pooling the data. The adapter is mostly one way of exposing the data from GitHub, however, it has extended functionality of adding Issues and Pull Request from externally.Remedy
The new upgrade supports version 20.0 with deep-level integration using ARNET API. The ARNET API is the standard interface for Remedy to integrate. The integration exposes bi-directional integration of artifacts like Incident, Problem, Change, Known Bugs, etc.Rational Door NextGen
The new upgraded adapter supports new JAS security authentication as well it support Multi Stream which is part of Jazz configuration management. Artifacts of type module, collection, text type artifacts are supported for bi-directional sync.LDRA
This is a completely new offering from Kovair, where LDRA 10.0. The integration is based on the communication using TBglhapi interface. The integration offers raw data from LDRA for Code Review, Code Coverage. The data can be extruded through the adapters and can be pushed Kovair ALM for generating management and execution level reports.MF ALM
This is a liter version of the Micro Focus ALM Adapter. The adapter supports 15.5 and above where it does not requires Add-in client installation. The adapters works in REST API of the tool and allows bi-directional integration of Release, Requirement, Test and Defect artifacts.Polarian
This is a new adapter which has wide spectrum of support for various project templates. The adapter support version 2022 R1. The adapter supports templates of various PLM domain like Drive Pilot, Drive Pilot QA, V Model Projects and Agile Software Project.JIRA
This is an upgrade version of Jira adapter supporting both SAAS and on-premises version compatible to both Basic and Cookie based authentication. It support all issue types bi-directionally. Other Upgrades
- The following are the upgrades for the following adapters.
- ServiceNow Adapter to support the Tokyo version.
- Bugzilla 5.0.6 Adapter using REST API
- GitLab Adapter to support latest 13.7.0 with added artifacts like Pipeline Execution and commit to Pipeline Execution relation.
- Enterprise Architect 16 has been supported using Plug-ins and adapter for Omnibus
User Interface and User Experience
Enabling and Disabling Batch Omnibus Service made easy.
This new release of the Omnibus Configuration will allow the Configuration User to have appropriate access rights to Enable to Disable multiple Service Flow for Omnibus in a single click. This will facilitate the configuration to provide faster access to the tool end-user for initiating the integration.
Adapter Configuration matric
For an ESB Platform where it operates with connected tools in terms of connecting, mapping, Business flow, and routing, a lot of sequential configurations are required to bring the ecosystem Live and running with full potential. In This release, the entire Configuration Progress has been revamped considering Configuration user usability and understanding. The new interface will clearly act as a window for the configuration users to have an overall idea of what has been configured and what is remaining, moreover, the interface also allows direct navigation to the required interface for configuration. This interface is a massive facelift to the administrator.
More in-depth visibility for Omnibus Named License
Omnibus Support Named License for the integration tool user. This release has exposed more visibility to Instance administration and the management about the License user usage and their last synced data. This will also help the configuration admin to deactivate some of the non-operation users and free up the License.
Email Notification after 80% Omnibus License consumption
As Omnibus supports Named License for the Sync tool users thus it is very critical in a Production kind of ecosystem that there is always enough balance Named License available to maintain the continuity of the production synchronization. Currently, Kovair provided Dashboards that provide the complete visibility of the License consumes and balance along with other data. However, for management stakeholders, it is always necessary that know the License consumption well ahead so that based on it proper action can be defined with any production downtime due to License exhaustion. With this new platform enhancement, the management members can be informed well ahead over email whenever the consumption of license crosses 80% of the total applied License.
New Features in Kovair ALM and PPM
Introduce the option to select a Default Filter for Document type Entities.
In earlier Releases, for Document type of entities there was no provision to select a Default Filter. But based on the requests received from customers, Kovair felt a genuine need to introduce this feature. In Release 11.0, Kovair is releasing this feature, which will enable the administrator to select any System or Custom Filter for all the Document type of entities existing in any of the workspaces, thereby providing an enhanced control over the records to display in the entity list page.
Quick Retrieval of View / Filter name with Wild Card Searching from the Drop-Down list in the Entity List page
For quick retrieval of specific View and Filters names from the corresponding drop down lists in the entity list page, in Release 11.0, Kovair has introduced a wildcard search functionality for quick retrieval of the desired View and Filter. Using this capability, one can search for a View or Filter with “*” followed by a portion of the View/ Filter name. The system will perform a quick scan on the entire list of Views / Filters defined for that entity and fetches only those specific Views / Filters that contains the specified text in the View / Filter names.
Export All Action to export all Records in a Single Click
Prior to Release 11.0, Kovair had a menu option called “Export” in the Action Menu in the entity list page. Using this option, users could export all the records from the list page based on the Filter selected, but with a limitation that a maximum 3000 records could be exported.
In Release 11.0, along with the earlier “Export” option, Kovair has come up with a new enhanced export functionality called “Export All”.. Using this option, the system will export all the records of that entity that is fetched by the selected Filter in the list page. The “3000 record retrieval limitation” is no more a consideration for this Export All function.
Define Customized Hierarchy of Entities and Relations to Organize the PPM level.
Kovair allows the designing of Portfolio level hierarchy by defining multiple entities and establishing relations between them. This hierarchy by simple mouse clicks by means of a visual drag drop designer. An administrator can design the hierarchy in a parent child model where he gets the facility of selecting one or multiple child entities under the same parent entity. The designer allows the linkage among all the entities included in the GUI. While linking the entities to one another, the designer checks if there exists any relation between the two entities. If it exists, it allows the administrator to select from the existing relations, else it opens up a new interface to define a new relation between the two corresponding entities. This enables the administrator to get a “visualize as you define“ the Portfolio level hierarchy.
Implement User Access Control and Permissions on Portfolio Items
In this upcoming Release 11.0, user access control and granting of permission to the various Portfolio users have been implemented. It has been designed in a manner that the Portfolio users are first assigned to the topmost Portfolio entity and then they are inherited to the child entities with granted access rights like add, edit, Delete etc. The users are inherited to the last level in the Portfolio hierarchy where Projects are defined. In this manner, it allows complete drill down access control of the users on the Portfolio level items down below to the Projects.
Indicator for Delayed Tasks in the Tasks list page
In this Release 11.0, an Indicator has been introduced in the Tasks List page to quickly identify delayed Tasks..
A new column called Task indicator has been added to the Tasks list.
It will show a red colored watch icon for those Tasks whose Planned Finish Date is earlier than the current date and the Task status is still not Completed.
It will show a green colored watch icon for such Tasks whose Planned Finish Date is later than the current date.
For Unplanned Tasks, that is, Tasks with no Planned Finish Date, it is shown as Unplanned.
Timesheet Functionalities Enhanced
Prior to Release 11.0, time entries were not allowed to be done by a user on another user’s behalf in his / her timesheet. The time entries for the assigned Tasks were solely to be done by the Owner of the Tasks in his / her Timesheet, called “My Timesheet.”
In Release 11.0, Kovair has introduced a flag called “Is Project Owner” as Yes and No. By default, the flag is set to No. If it is set to Yes, then the user who has been identified as a Primary Admin during Project creation becomes the Project Owner and he gets the automatic privilege to do time entries on behalf of his Project members, start and stop entries for them as well.
Session Management using Auto heartbeat
In Release 11.0, Kovair introduced a feature to skip unnecessary error messages that appears, if the session is kept idle for long hours, or in cases where the IIS has been restarted/Stopped for various reasons or if the network is disconnected. On trying to revive the last used application page, the application will pop up the login dialog where the user needs to only feed in his / her password to regain the last accessed page. This would help the user from re-logging into the application every time and do multiple clicks to navigate to the particular page he / she was working on.
Introduce Automatic Age calculation based on Company Calendar
In Release 11.0, a new system defined field has been added in the application called “Age in Days” which will be available to all the entities defined in every workspace. This will automatically calculate the age of each of the entity items like Requirements, Features, Tests, Defects and others based on the working days and standard working hours defined in the Company Calendar, ignoring the company holidays and weekends.
Enhanced Views Definition to include more Fields.
In Release 11.0, views are extended to include more fields and hence lot more information can be displayed to the end users for the entity records. Currently the Views definitions have been enhanced to include more than 30 attributes , 3 relation fields and 5 complex fields like summary or calculated.
Enhanced “My Tasks” Page with new UI and Graphical Metrices
In Release 11.0, the My Tasks page has been re-designed with a new user interface and presented with a lot more textual data and graphical metrices. The “My Tasks” page presents a comprehensive detail of all the Tasks assigned to the logged in user as on current date, primarily segregating those into Planned and Unplanned Tasks. Apart from the list of Tasks, now My Task page shows some nice graphical metrics showcasing the Productivity, the age of the assigned Tasks to the logged in user and also the percentage of Time entries done by the logged in user with respect to his Completed and Pending Tasks, showing his / her readiness and alertness in recording the time spent on various Tasks. Overall, with this new enhanced My Tasks page, the logged in user gets more structured, organized and meaningful information which facilitates in making him / her more organized and aware towards his work.
Summary on Additional Field for Relation
In Kovair, one can define relation fields between two entities. The relation field has a property to define additional fields to store some more information about the two related records, but it is not a field of any of the two entities. Now prior to Release 11.0, these additional fields could not be used in performing any other operations like summation, average, etc. In Release 11.0, these additional fields functionality has been extended and now these fields will be available for doing any kind of aggregate kind of operations.
Map and copy Portfolio level Attributes data to the Project Level
While creating Projects from the Portfolio layer, it is often needed to copy certain portfolio level attributes data to the underlying Project level, more precisely to Project Entity Artifacts Attributes. For example, typically a Proposal which is a Portfolio level artifact has the attributes like Budget, Cost etc., needed to be passed on to the underlying Project for referring those during the Project Planning, Monitoring and Execution stages. To address such scenarios, in Release 11.0, Kovair has introduced a functionality by which a Project Owner will get the option to map specific fields of a Portfolio level artifact to a Project level artifact during the creation of Project based on a Project template. Based on this field mapping, the application, during the Project creation process will copy over the mapped fields values from the Portfolio level artifact to the Project level automatically without any manual intervention.
Provision to select multiple Owners for an Activity in Workflow definition
Prior to Release 11.0, in workflow definition, an Activity was assigned to only one Owner. An Owner could be a Role, a User Field, or a User. But coming across some legitimate scenarios, Kovair felt the need that an activity can be assigned to multiple Owners like two or multiple different roles or two or more user fields, etc. Hence in Release 11.0, Kovair has introduced the functionality of assigning multiple Owners to the same Activity.
Visualization of Tasks in a Weekly Calendar Format
With the enhanced PPM functionalities, Release 11.0 brings a dedicated interface for Weekly Calendar for logged in user. On logging into the Kovair ALM application, a user can see all the assigned task across all projects in a weekly calendar format. The user doesn’t have to go to various interfaces for checking his task across projects. Each Task has a color indicator tagged to it, indicating whether the Task is On-time (Green) or Delayed (Red)
Effective Project Scheduling with Enhanced Task Scheduler
The Enhanced Task Scheduler has been powered up with multiple improvements
- Project Plan may span over years – therefore to improve the user experience the Task Scheduler now comes with advanced filtering options by timelines where the Project Manager can make a long plan shorter by filtering the WBS Items defined in the plan with selected Month and year so that they can operate on comparatively smaller set of data.
- Task Schedular now allows the configuration user to map to any Entity so that when the scheduler is published the Items for the artifacts are created automatically along with associated task to follow.
- Resource Allocation Percentage is now visible during creation of Task Scheduler with multiple resources. This gives an insight of the allocation of the Task for assigned resources thus minimizing the cases of over allocation.
UX Improvements
In this release the entire look and feel for Relation matrix interface has been redesigned where user navigation and data visibility has greatly improved. Next, the Process diagram export as image will show the data and the diagram more prominently.