Resources

Monday, October 20, 2008 18:8
Improvements in Usability
We have received some requests to simplify the Timesheet Quick Entry Web Part. This includes a way to cache data already entered (in case the browser times out), additional notifications after hitting the "Apply" button and some additional alerting features.
There are three methods that users can use to enter data into the ER Management Suite. The method chosen can reflect on the way the employee likes to works. (1) Using the Timesheet Quick Entry, (2) Timesheets and (3) Using the full ER Management Suite interface. The proposed changes only relate to the first option.

Thursday, May 1, 2008 16:10
ERMS 3.1.0 in testing
ER Management Suite 3.1.0 has been in testing for a few weeks now and things are looking good. The two significant improvements in this version are the addition of two completely unrelated components; asset management and user specific time-zone support.
Previously, the users time-zone information was obtained from the users computer through the web browser. Sounds great in principle because as the user moves into a different time-zone, ERMS follows it. However, we have found that there is a bug in some web browsers that prevent ERMS from getting the correct time-zone information. The only conservative option was to place a time-zone setting in the users profile.
Background Information on Time-Zone and Daylight Saving

ERMS stores all date/time data in universal time. Date/times that are entered by the user get converted to universal time upon entry and converted back into the local time-zone when they need to be displayed.

Daylight Saving forces an additional offset to be made upon each conversion when the date/time falls within the daylight saving period.

Complexity arises because the date/time being converted could also be in the past or in the future. For example when you run a report that covers several years you are looking at old daylight saving periods. This is resolved by keeping a cache of daylight saving periods for the pertinent time-zones and monitoring changes made by adhoc Windows patches that update time-zone information.

Having daylight savings cached per time-zone and user specific time-zone settings mean that ERMS can accurately support simultaneous users in multiple time zones.
Asset Management will form the platform for the Change Management Application currently under development. It will be fully functional now but there are bigger plans in this area. More about that later.(BW)

Thursday, April 10, 2008 22:15
A little more on security
We thought we would add a blog entry summarizing security because we were getting some questions on the differences between controlling access to pages vs controlling functions within pages. ERMS has a complex security architecture so here goes...

Security is based on 'Groups' and 'Roles'. You assign a user to them and they receive the privileges and accesses that those groups and roles have.

The following diagram tries to outline the relationship of roles/groups in ERMS. One way to look at the relationships is that you modify security by editing the object at the arrows source. For example, if you edit Groups you will see web pages that can be accessed by that Group (bottom left of the diagram).

What's the difference between a group and a role? Roles are predefined and control some of the underlying access across the suite. For example the predefined role of 'Incident Manager' allows members to see additional features and functions within the Incident Application, including the ability to see all tickets assigned to any resource. This type of predefined access is built into the system and cannot be modified. Roles are shown in the lower right of the diagram.
What is a predefined Group? The following groups have special significance and cannot be deleted: Everyone, Guest, No Access, Administrator and Standard User. Refer to the online help under Site > Groups > View/Edit for their function.
So what is a group? As mentioned before, you assign a user to a group and they receive the privileges and accesses that those groups have. Roles and predefined groups are just special types of groups.
How do you use this exciting information about Groups? Security in ERMS can be broken into the following three areas shown at the bottom of the diagram:
Securing Access to applications, pages, web parts and functions.
Securing Data - control the data that the user can access. For example, can the user access a particular Todo.List or look at data for a particular company.
Security Roles - Predefined security specific to a particular application as explained above. For example, can the user see Incident.Tickets assigned to other resources?
Securing Access This is controlling parts of the suite a user can access. For example access to a particular application such as 'Incidents' or an individual page within that application.

Application security is a simple mechanism that either allows or disallows a group access to an application such as "Incidents". Page Security is a simple mechanism that either allows or disallows a group access to a page.

However, there are four types of pages: Normal, Security, Applet and Sub. So defining rights to a page has a slightly different effect depending on the page type. You can see the page type by navigating to Site > Pages > View/Edit. Securing a 'normal' page secures a particular web page. Securing a 'applet' secures a particular web part on a page. Securing a 'security' page secures a function on a page. Securing a 'sub' page secures all pages under a tab group.

Finding a normal page to secure is straight forward because you navigate to the page and the page name appears in the browsers address bar. Knowing which 'applet' or 'security' page to secure can be determined by looking at the online help for the particular page and if you are an administrator this information appears at the end of the help.
Securing Data will be left for another blog entry if required and Security Roles was explained earlier in this entry.
Other Useful Information:
Application security always takes precedent over page security when determining what specific parts of the suite a user can access.
Try to not modify the pages assigned to the default groups. Create new groups instead.
Reload the cache after any security modifications. This can be done on a live system with minimal performance impact.(BW)

Sunday, March 16, 2008 13:44
Profile Preferences - Template Users
We have found that many customers are not taking advantage of the user copy function under 'Client > Contacts > Copy'. This webpart will create a new user based on an existing user. This includes copying all groups, roles and all preferences. The favourites are not duplicated. Operational management is very time consuming when this feature is not used.

Your administrator can create a template user for each user class. These template users do not require login rights and hence they do not need additional licenses.

Support have been requesting that we pre-populate the favourites list when a new install is performed or a new user is created. Then a lot of these handy features are easier to find and not several layers down into the menu structure. The problem with this concept is that ERMS is used in such a variety of ways, creating such a list of favourites is impossible. (BW)

Saturday, March 1, 2008 19:12
Reloading the cache
Modifications to page security will not take effect until the cache is reloaded. This is done from "Site > Administration > Options > Reload Cache".

The cache is a performance optimization feature for the security subsystem. Because the security subsystem is called upon for every page request the cache can improve the performance for heavily loaded systems.

The one caveat is that page security (and updated language strings) will not take effect until the cache is reloaded. The good news is that a single cache reload will not be noticeable even on heavily loaded systems. Of course the caching can be disabled from "Site > Administration > Options > Settings". (BW)

Tuesday, February 26, 2008 14:24
Demonstration System at Capacity
We have a demonstration network that we provide to users when they want to test out certain configurations. This network is isolated from the production "hosted" systems but has some cross over with the public web site. With the ERMS 3.0 release things have been a little stressed.

We are looking at ways to improve this capacity problem. However, it is a little bit complicated because there are technical dependencies we cannot break at this time. The "Hosted" environment is completely isolated from the not protected systems from a network and server point of view and has a different architecture due to different scaling requirements.

We will probably reduce the demonstration period from 30 days to 15 days sometime in March. (TL)

Friday, February 15, 2008 22:34
Profile Preferences
Another message request from the support guys: There some useful settings contained in the users profile that most customers are not aware. Simple settings such as changing the 'menu type' from 'full' to 'spilt' can significantly improve the performance for users who are connecting from remote locations. There are other settings that control what does and does not spawn in new browser windows. (BW)

Friday, January 4, 2008 0:19
PDA access over the Internet
We have been receiving customer queries indirectly through the sales team about the security and technical aspects of accessing the product over the Internet from both mobile PDA users and home users.

Although the product works without modification over the Internet to PDAs and web browsers, vendor recommended security precautions related to placing a web server on the public Internet should be respected. Microsoft has numerous IIS articles in this area. If you already have a public web server then you have probably addressed the security questions, if not then you need to ask yourself how much emphasis you are willing to place on Internet security.

We are planning to put together a whitepaper on this some time in the future, which will probably include a number of references to Microsoft's own whitepapers. (BW)

Thursday, December 13, 2007 4:12
Asset Tracking
The core features of Asset Tracking and how it integrates with Change Management and Workflow have been demonstrated internally today. This is one of our key internal milestones. Most of the discussion related to the constant trade-off between keeping things simple vs. trying to do everything.

As it stands, the key relationship is that an Asset will have an owner(s). This will form the basis for all Asset related workflow, the most obvious being Change Management. There will only be one level of abstraction allowed above an Asset, probably called a 'Service', which is used for status information. All the expected e-mail routing, overview/summaries, reports, and integration between the various applications are present.

We are finding that we spend a significant amount of time ensuring the upgrade path from ERMSV3 and ERMSV2 is as simple and smooth as possible and not just at the end of the product development schedule. BTW, our architect is personally responsible in upgrading all local beta sites and our internal systems. (BW)

Saturday, December 1, 2007 20:48
Version 3 Ready
Version 3.0.2 is has just passed final testing. This will be the version that customers will see as the 'new version' of the suite early next year. There are internal changes (some of which will simplify the upgrade path for workflow), usability changes, and several new applications that we have been working on for the past 12 months.

We received a lot of customer requests to increase the integration between applications. Most of this work ended up being cosmetic with no changes to the underlying object model. We believe this is due to the close relationship between the logical objects and real life objects. Customers can now view a department, a company or a contact and can see all their related objects plus navigate between the objects with single clicks. (BW)
A quick overview of the key additions include:
Time Management
Project Management
New menu navigation control
Mobile controls for Windows Mobile
More flexible e-mail and e-mail workflow

Friday, November 30, 2007 11:35
Upgraded Web Site
The new East River Software website is live. It is released to coincide with the impending new release of the suite. This site is a complete re-write and all new content. We will look at adding some of the old data and customer case studies into the new format later in the year.