We are pleased to announce the release of Xoom version 3.1. This release brings various incremental improvements in performance, usability, expressiveness and stability. It also implements further steps in making Xoom a more generic configuration management solution for multiple products. We summarise the new features and bug fixes below.

New features

• The PowerShell configuration versioning script Store-ConfigInRCS is now included with the installation, and supports Git, Mercurial and Subversion version control systems out of the box.

Improvements / changes

• References to multi-value and aggregate collections within ClickSoftware Service Optimization scheme, and multi-part property references following object indirection, are now correctly resolved across the configuration. A number of interpretations have been added that take advantage of this capability.
• XPath queries in Xoom Explorer can now return any type of XML nodes or XPath expressions, not just elements or attributes.
• The interpretation and coverage of a number of aspects of ClickSoftware Service Optimization has been improved.
• The treatment of XML comments within the configuration has been significantly improved. All comments are now left in place, regardless of the functional role of the node in which they are located.
• Agents statuses and triggers, which are transactional data, are no longer included in the configuration representation. This eliminates the need to run the Remove Transactional Data report on the Xoom files produced using Xoom Console, Xoom Explorer and XoomToolkit if they are to be used for historical reference.
• The initialisation of the Windows service is now cleaner, and reporting of initialisation faults better. The shut down procedure has also been improved. Unlike before, the service now also recovers when virtual machines running Xoom are put to sleep and later woken up.
• Xoom configuration files now use simplified names, and namespaces that clearly identify the intended context of interpretation instructions, and their source (generic Xoom, Service Optimization, other third-party products). This represents a further step towards a more generic Xoom, and this trend will continue in future versions.
• The stability and responsiveness of client tools during lengthy operations has been improved.

Bug fixes

• Non-existing bad references are no longer reported in the Settings Migration Tool for OQL query bodies (groups and reports in ClickSoftware Service Optimization).
• The formatting of XML files produced by all tools is now consistent, even when previously the indentation wasn’t working correctly due to misplaced white space nodes in the XML.
• The ordering of dependency types in the Xoom files produced using Xoom Console is now consistent with the ordering produced by other tools.
• The inconsistencies in representation that happened in some cases for system events in ClickSoftware Service Optimization have been fixed.
• None of the reports contains superfluous spacing characters anymore.
• Line endings from various operating systems are now correctly preserved in the text inside the configuration.