CMDBuild Newsletter n. 69

In a few weeks’ time there will be the CMDBuild DAY 2018, which will take place on 20^thNovember in videoconference.

It will be an important opportunity to discover all the features of new 3.0 version and to listen together to many testimonies and case histories of system’s users.

The CMDBuild Day 2018 program includes:

• 10.00 am: Opening of the Conference and initial greetings;
• 10.10 am: The new CMDBuild 3.0 version: state of the art and development plans (intervention of the Maintainer Tecnoteca);
• 10.30 am: Case history presented by some important users of CMDBuild and openMAINT, who will then answer questions from participants;
• 4.00 pm: Final session of questions and answers among the participants;
• 4.10 pm: Closing of the conference and final greetings.

The detailed and complete program will be available on the event website.

The event will be held in English language and can be followed directly online via browser.

Participation is free but registration is required, everyone is invited to participate, even for a part of Conference if for any reason cannot attend for whole day.

Hashtag of the event: #cmdbuilday2018

As a result of technical and commercial evaluations, unlike what previously announced, the 2.5.2 release initially scheduled for October will not be released. The 2.5.1 version of last May will therefore remain the last of the 2.x series.

Since there are no significant bugs to solve, we preferred to postpone the expected BIM improvements to version 3.0 and dedicate all available resources to that goal.

In the following news you will find more details about the activities carried out in the last two months, which you can preview in the updated 3.0 demo, accessible at this link (username = demo, password = demo).

The work continues with a team strengthened in the various areas of development (client and server, GIS and BIM, development and testing) to progressively integrate the missing features. We will keep you updated in the upcoming November and January newsletters.

The goal remains to have the 3.0 version available for download at the beginning of next year.

If there are no particularly critical issues to overcome, a possible date for the release may be February 2019.

As usual, when the newsletter is sent we publish an updated public preview of the 3.0 version under development.

In the Data Management Module, we have implemented the support mechanisms for editing data cards, with the functionalities described in the following news (help, validation rules, dynamic modification of the visibility of an attribute), as well as having completed some specific behaviours of the different attributes’ types.

We have then integrated the main GIS functions: display of the map, display of floor plans, data panel with integrated management of navigation tree, layers, list of cards of the current class, current card, editing on the map of the graphical representation of the current card (point, open polygonal, closed polygonal).

In the Administration Module some functionalities have been integrated in the management of classes and attributes, the management of the lookup lists has been completed and the management of the menus has been implemented.

At Server-side two important changes have been made in the basic structure of classes and processes: the management of all the ID type attributes has been extended using BigInt type numbers instead of Integer (with all the possible consequences) and the EndDate attribute has been moved from the historicization tables to the basic tables, to obtain better performances in the analysis of historical data. All REST support services have been implemented for the new Client-side functionalities.

The work will continue in the next two months with reports, views, filters and BIM viewer in the Data Management Module, with users, groups, permissions, GIS and BIM settings and general configurations in the Administration Module, with the conclusion of the management of permits, the migration of processes opened by Shark to the new engine developed by Tecnoteca, and new Server-side REST methods.

In the May Newsletter we have already talked about contextual menus, for executing useful commands by displaying the cards of a class, and the “form triggers”, for performing operations when opening a data management form or after modifying them.

Further functionalities will be available in the Administration Module to facilitate the editing of a card in the Data Management Module.

For each attribute can be defined a help text (formattable in Markdown format) which can be consulted via a special "?" button positioned after the label.

It can be then defined validation rules in javascript language, which will allow to implement any kind of controls, both on the current attribute and by comparing more attributes among them (range of values, range of dates, verification that a data type attribute is greater than another previous data type attribute, etc.).

It will then be possible, always with a javascript expression, to dynamically hide an attribute depending on the compilation of a previous attribute (for example, if the type of employee is “internal” the identification number is still visible, otherwise it is hidden).

In the updated demo 3.0 have been configured some examples of the options described above in the "Building" class.

Finally, in a version after the 3.0, it will be possible to specify the actions to be executed to confirm the value of an attribute (useful, among other things, to automatically populate a subsequent attribute; for example, to value the gross amount having entered the net and VAT).

The editing of a process card will also have improvements compared to the current version.

The first line of the form will show the possible statuses of the process with specific graphics and will highlight the current status.

In each step of the process the second line of the form will show the list of the actions allowed in that step (progress mode). Depending on the action chosen, the form can then hide attributes rather than others through the option described above.

AC Camerfirma S.A. is a Spanish company with almost 20 years of experience in the provision of certification services. Today, and after passing the evaluation phase in accordance with the eIDAS Regulation, Camerfirma has become a qualified provider of Trust Services and appears in the Spanish (TSL) and European (UETL) Trust Service Lists, which allows to provide qualified trust services that benefit from legal presumption of validity and offer greater guarantees to the user against unqualified trust services.

In May 2014 we started using the CMDBuild solution for the management of the company assets. This tool has allowed us to control in a simple way the situation of the assets, status and location, together with the relationships between them and the changes that may have happened in their life time.

In addition, with the potential of Alfresco, the possibility to attach files and images with each asset is a great benefit to have all this centralized management. Another very useful feature is the possibility to generate reports.

This tool is quite well established in our daily work, so in the future we will continue counting on it and exploiting all its potential, since there are functionalities, such as workflows, that we haven’t used yet.

Eva Vaquero López (Systems Dept., AC Camerfirma S.A)

The CMDBuild project periodically receives reviews in the Italian and foreign press.

We would like to point out the recent article “Mit CMDBuild Asset- und Service-Daten im Griff” (“Keeping track of Assets and Services Data thanks to CMDBuild”) from the German IT magazine “IT Administrator”, highlighted on the cover and then reported inside.

The full article is available in an authorized original version in German and then translated on the CMDBuild website.

The review describes the objectives and the philosophy of the project, and then analyses in detail all the available technical solutions (configurations of classes and types of reports, workflow and reporting engines based on external open projects, CMIS interface with market DMS, users and permissions, task manager, GIS and BIM support, dashboard, history, relationship graph, etc.), and then conclude with some considerations.

In the end the CMDBuild project is “promoted”: “With CMDBuild the Tecnoteca developers have created a useful solution for the business management of IT data. Basically, the environment does exactly what it has to do, nothing more and nothing less.”

Two additional panes then describe the interoperability solutions of CMDBuild and the CMDBuild READY2USE version.

In this regard, we report only a small inaccuracy: CMDBuild READY2USE is also released with open source license, only the external components as the Mobile APP, the Self-Service Portal and the connectors with LDAP, OCS Inventory, VMware, LLDP and Zabbix are supplied with commercial license.

Finally, we were glad to read the pleasant note about Italy that, besides being a homeland of pasta and pizza, and the birthplace of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, is now also known in the information technology sector with CMDBuild.