Xoom version 2.2 has just been released. This release improves the support for Service Optimization 8+, introduces a generic concept of configuration stages, hierarchical parameterisation for Xoom, and Zany Script, a language for expressing configuration conditions with contextual awareness. Detailed documentation will be provided later, but we summarise the new features and bug fixes below.

Features

• The generic concept of configuration stages has been introduced. By default, two stages are defined for Service Optimization: scheme changes and everything else. However, the tools are now stage-aware and independent of Service Optimization, making Xoom more generic. On the Service Optimization front, this makes it possible to support additional stages, for example file installation and database schema creation, without any further changes to the client tools.
• Xoom parameters are now hierarchical, making it possible to manage various features of Xoom and also use the same installation of Xoom to manage different products. A number of parameters are also populated by various initialisation code, such as Service Optimization version, making the configuration context aware. Zany Script, a language taking advantage of this information to represent configuration decisions, makes it possible to use the same configuration files for different versions of Service Optimization, with different sections applying conditionally depending on whether the relevant features are available in that version of Service Optimization or not.
• Service Optimization 8 (and newer) is now a fully supported product for the first time.
• Logging now supports aggregation of messages in the event log. By default this is used during scheme changes in order to avoid a large number of server locking and unlocking messages all being issued at the same time for the same reason. This capability is configurable and can be used for other types of messages as well if desired.
• Added support for multiple root-level elements in the body of XML-encoded settings.
• Implemented transcode tweaky with support for HTML-encoded strings in the configuration.

Improvements / changes

• Multi-threaded behaviour of Settings Migration Tool and Xoom Console have been improved, making the tools more responsive and more stable.
• A large number of new interpretations, some for later versions of Service Optimization 7.5, and a majority for version 8.
• The installer now supports a number of additional circumstances:
• It can be run as any user on Windows 2008, even if UAC is turned on, as long as the user is able to access elevated privileges for the purpose of the installation.
• Logic components with grade functions now all work correctly and report their configuration in an identical way.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed the task groups reported by the BGO report.
• Fixed the total optimisation time reported by the BGO report for 7.5.5 version of the representation (optimisation stages).
• Reference-triggered loading of Xoom items now works correctly in all known circumstances.