Kovair 8.0 Release

 

Real-time status for the integration stakeholders

For any type of data integration between tools, it is very important to remain updated with the data synchronization progress almost in a real-time basis. Now any users of Omnibus including the Administrator can subscribe for RSS Feeds, wherein for any problem that occurs during data transfer, they will get automated notifications through email or RSS feed readers. These RSS feeds can be consumed by any RSS Agent like MS Outlook. On opening a feed, users will be able to see the details of an event and action that failed.

Single screen based information help

This enhancement eases out the process of troubleshooting during data synchronization. Kovair has introduced a single menu option to check the status of the configured integration in textual format. Users will be able to use this single interface to search entity specific transaction records easily and monitor the detailed status of the transactions happening between the configured tools. Users will also be able to search the status of a particular transaction record by tracking it through its entity ID or any field value.

User-friendly Log for quick review and direct actions

There are many challenges of an integrated environment of which the major ones are participating tools going offline, tool configurations getting changed, or server being crashed. To counteract these unprecedented events it is very important to have a proper logging mechanism at every step so that each minute detail of the integration problem if any, is immediately visible for troubleshooting. Kovair Omnibus has ensured that a detail level log gets maintained at the adapter level for every operation. The content of the logs are divided into 3 categories as Information, Debug and Error.

Easy availability of Logs

Maintaining detailed logs at every level is not of any help, if those are not readily available for troubleshooting. Kovair has ensured easy availability of these logs to the admin users so that they can take corrective actions at the earliest. For each new tool registration, they can simply download the corresponding adapter log from the registration list page. The content of the logs are divided into three categories such as Information, Debug and Error. This helps administrators to quickly identify the items for troubleshooting.

For data integration between heterogeneous tools, it is not always true that only the action will fail. At times, the event collection mechanism may also fail. By understanding this need, Kovair Omnibus has provided an option for the administrators to set up a notification rule for any event collection failure. Administrators will be able to mention one email address where a notification will be sent for any type of failure during event collection. For many users, there has been a constant need for applying customized mail templates in order to send automated notifications for transaction success and failure. Kovair Omnibus allows them to create as many mail templates as they need and want to use during Event-Action configuration. During service flow creation, the relevant mail templates will appear and will allow the user to configure. A remarkable difference between Kovair 8.0 and the previous releases is the series of enhancements in the batch synchronization process for supporting more items with better performance. User can synchronize batch data between source and destination tools and can analyze the data status for each of the steps. This new release comes with a separate Batch synchronization engine. In this latest version, Kovair has built an OSLC wrapper around its Omnibus that enables all the OSLC non-compliant tools, already connected to the Omnibus, to be exposed as “OSLC Service Providers. This helps IBM Jazz users to integrate native Rational tools such as RRC, RTC, RQM with non-OSLC enabled tools such as HP QC, TFS, JIRA, SharePoint and Rational’s own legacy tools such as RequisitePro, Rational Functional Tester, and many more. For organizations, where too many projects are handled, it is a daunting task for managers to replicate the same configuration across different projects. To ease out this pain of replicating configuration, Kovair Omnibus has introduced the concept of Export/Import of Omnibus configurations. This new feature in Kovair 8.0 will allow users to configure the entire integration configuration in a single workspace and then reuse it across different workspaces. During reuse, users will be able to select the required pieces without getting forced to replicate the entire configuration. Success in data synchronization is all about replicating data of the source tool to a target tool as it appears in the source tool. Hierarchical data structure movement between tools is also an exception as every tool does not have the support for hierarchical records. In Release 8.0, Kovair Omnibus has introduced the facility for the admin user to enforce or ignore the flow of data hierarchy between tools. Once enforced, the integration engine will not process the child items until the parent data is not synched between the tools. In this new release, a dashboard for license usage of Omnibus has been introduced. This will help the admin to track the consumption of licenses purchased. It also displays additional details such as license expiry date, balance, and consumption history. To remove the pain of repeated logins in different tools, organizations are shifting more and more towards the Single Sign On access. In such scenarios, the associated integrations should also follow the same path. Kovair Omnibus, in this release 8.0, has introduced the single sign on support for ADSI users. If the same ADSI user has an access to all the tools participating in integration, the user mapping will not be needed and the same authentication will be used to access all the tools. In special scenarios, where some users may not have the access to a particular tool of the ecosystem, users will be able to apply a regular user mapping which will override the built-in ADSI based auto-mapping for those users. In large organizations, a good number of disparate tools are used for different functions of ALM. These tools are from different technologies and vendors. An integrated environment for these types of scenarios always has the demand for scalability. To cater to this business problem, Kovair Omnibus has introduced a new platform where organization can opt for multiple Omnibus Engines hosted in different servers. Each of these engines can be configured for operating on a particular set of registrations. Thus the load on the integration engine can be distributed over multiple servers for scalability. Contact us for a live demonstration and learn the benefits of developing products in an integrated ALM platform..   Now Kovair has got a more appealing, streamlined, modernized and user-friendly interface, after a series of improvements made in the overall application. Some noteworthy changes have been done in the following sections

Home Screen

The Application UI has been designed with a new set of intuitive icons for ease of navigation. The icons have been introduced to Menu Groups (e.g. Requirement management). A user also gets an option to set up Menu Group and Entity icons of his or her choice.

A user can collapse the Left Panel to get more real estate to work with, yet navigate across the Menu Groups and Entities with the icons in collapsed mode.

Core List

The list page being the mostly used view, have been organized for consistent look. On clicking, the default row wise items in this page will open up the Record view page in separate Tabs. With this option, a user can open as many Records as possible in horizontal Tabs, view the individual Record details and come back to the List page without having to reopen or refresh the page frequently.

Document Views

The Document view of record items has been made intuitive with in-place editing option. The quick menus enable a user to participate in collaborative review of records and facilitate in better management of documents from a single place.

Modern UI based Forms

Kovair has done a significant UI enhancement in form rendering. Now organizations will have a choice to set their Record View either in Vertical scroll mode or in Tabbed mode. A tabbed view form will allow the users to view and navigate through different attributes of a record from one place without the need of scrolling up and down.

With time, the UX of any application is becoming more important from end user’s perspective. Performing daily activities should be possible in minimum clicks. In Release 8.0, Kovair has also focused on this need and has done certain usability enhancements in the following areas.

Exposing different system sections in action menu of list page

The list page includes additional action menus to make it more controllable from one place, thus reducing the need to go for a detail record view for triggering an action. The actions menus are grouped as per their relevancy.

Availability of archived data in Change History

The system archives Change history data at specified interval, for example 365 days as defined in the Workspace setting. Users, now will have a way to ’View Archive’ in Change History section for viewing the archieved data. The archieve page is provided with a search panel, thus facilitating a user to search by date, users or fields.The Change History section is recommended to keep in collapsed mode for better performance.

Other than the UX, Kovair in this release has also done some major feature enhancements based on the feedbacks from esteemed customers and market research.

Folder like List Views

Proper organization of artifacts is very important in order to increase the efficiency of entire application development lifecycle. At Kovair, we have often seen that as a general practice, users prefer to organize artifacts in folder hierarchy. This helps users in storing artifacts as per category, priority, or any other logic based on organizational needs.

In this release 8.0, Kovair has introduced this Folder view option wherein users will be able to organize artifacts in different folders and manage them efficiently.

Introduction to Project Management

Kovair in this release has added the feather of ‘Project Management’ to its ALM product. With the inclusion of project management, users can now do the following within Kovair application.

• Define WBS – Work Breakdown Structure
• Create project schedule through a scheduler
• View resource availability
• View resource workload
• View project calendar

Kovair ALM with its capability of both project and timesheet management allows users to view the planned vs actual data in the schedule without any manual intervention. For details please read the product literature.

Enhancement in Test Management

Kovair has enhanced its integrated Test Management offering and extended its support for achieving DevOps by integrating existing tools of any organization. Users will be able to execute automated test scripts written in Selenium or QTP from Kovair application interface itself. This will enable organizations to increase testing productivity. For more details, please read the blog.

Introducing diagramming capability within Kovair

Kovair has introduced the basic support for modeling within the application. Users can now draw diagrams like BPMN, Use Case, Wireframes and many others and embed them within the description of a record. Diagrams can also be created and maintained as attachments of a record within the application. For further details, please refer to the modeling section of Kovair website.

Text Search within Attachment

Kovair has enabled the feature of performing Text based Search within the Record Attachments. The checkbox for File Search needs to be checked in order to Search for particular texts in the Attachment files.

Enhanced Versioning and Change history support

Versioning and maintaining audit trail of records are important to users for auditing purpose. In this area, Kovair has made certain significant enhancements as given below.

• Facility of version rollback
• Facility of reconstructing artifacts from previous version
• Introducing relation fields in change history

 

Enhanced Support for Impact handling

The ability to analyze impacts beforehand strengthens change management and helps managers to take an informative decision about change request implementation. Kovair through its traceability option has introduced proactive impact analysis. The impact of an individual record can be seen from the record itself whereas a central screen has also been provided to view all the impacted records and their source of impact.

Enhancement in Word Import

Microsoft Word is an extremely popular requirements capturing device for its ease of use and rich text capabilities. For any organization, to move the requirements to a RM tool, it is mandatory that the tool has an extensive support for direct import of items. Kovair earlier had this import feature enabled through a Word plug-in which needed to be installed in the client machine with Microsoft Word. In this release, Kovair introduces built-in word import capability for importing items directly from the word documents online. Read the details in our website

Enhanced support for collaborative Review between stakeholders

Kovair has introduced online collaborative review system for requirements reviewers and moderators in this release. This will allow stakeholders to do a collaborative and informative review of items to ensure that things are right at the first place. For details please read the product literature.

Enhancement in Requirement Management

The enhanced Word Import, Document View and Collaborative Review capabilities tied together in Kovair 8.0 along with its quick navigation ease out the entire requirement management process from a single place. Requirements can be imported online, modified in-place, put for collaborative review, proofed with change notification to moderator and finalized much faster reducing overall time needed to manage the requirements.

Kovair has made substantial amount of improvements in different areas of application performance as mentioned below.

Home Screen

• Searching items
• Folder like view of documents
• Traceability view
• Dashboard and Report
• Session Management

Contact us for a live demonstration of Kovair 8.0 and learn the benefits of developing products in an integrated ALM platform.