We are pleased to announce the release of Xoom version 3.2. The release contains a major new command line tool, some other new features and also maintenance changes, such as bug fixes, stability improvements and improvements in the coverage of Service Optimization features. We summarise the changes below.

Xoom Processor

We are introducing a very exciting and very powerful new command line tool called Xoom Processor (xp.exe). The tool introduces the following main capabilities:

• In addition to a traditional Xoom file, the tool introduces a new standard way of storing a configuration into a folder structure containing individual Xoom files for each individual item. This is particularly useful in configuration versioning, where instead of seeing that something in the configuration has changed one can now immediately see what specifically has changed without having to look any further than the log file.
• The tool can transparently read the configuration on which it operates either from a live Xoom server, a Xoom file or a Xoom folder. It can also write the result of its work to either one or several targets of any of these three types.
• The first basic operation that it supports is a transformation of a configuration (or the result of a previous transformation) using an XSLT. This can be used for automation of reporting with minimum strain on the server, as well as for building more complex automation workflows where configurations are transformed in a certain way and then applied elsewhere.
• The second basic operation that the tool supports is a merge of two configurations, supporting scenarios such as automatic integration of features from two different development sources with clear division of responsibilities to be automatically integrated and stored for later or applied immediately to an integration system.
• The third basic operation is relative complement or difference between two configurations. This results in a minimum Xoom file that would be required to go from one configuration to another.
• The tool is used for building workflows, where a configuration or configurations can be taken from various sources, transformed in various ways using the three basic operations, and stored in different forms or applied to live Xoom servers from any stage of the workflow.

Other new features

• A new report called ActiveScheduleAgentsReport has been added. The report lists all active background optimisation agent instances configured in the system, and for each of them lists the agent, the BGO instance, the trigger (if the agent instance is configured to start after another agent instance), the decomposition in use including its configuration (task index, days and territories), and the optimisation steps including the optimiser in use and the logic domain for each step. The report is very useful to get a fairly detailed overview of how exactly the optimisation is configured with a single click.
• ClickSchedule bundler configuration is now supported out of the box and is no longer considered to be a customisation.

Improvements / changes

• Data-entries for custom logic components are now handled much more robustly. When the configuration is not explicit and multiple matches have been identified, Xoom no longer just takes the first match. Instead, it lists all the potential matches in XoomDataEntries.xml, but doesn’t use any of them as there is no way to know for sure and taking the first match could result in a wrong match and therefore erroneous configuration representation. This hasn’t been a problem in the past, but with an increasing number of logic customisations we decided to take a more cautious attitude on this issue.
• We also improved the way the changes to the configuration of custom logic components are distributed, allowing for the changes to be automatically incorporated without worrying what was left in the installation directory after the last uninstallation.
• Full coverage of the extended match rule expressiveness in Service Optimization 8+ in all its combinations has been added.
• ClickAnalyze reports are now part of the standard default query, resulting in their capture when using the auto capture tool on a generic Xoom installation.
• Data-entry mappings are now always included in the corpora, resulting in better environment capture for customisation and support purposes.
• A number of new interpretations of new Service Optimization features.

Bug fixes

• Groups with index criteria as now interpreted slightly differently in versions 7.5 and 8, just as they are in Service Optimization.
• A couple of fixes to the interpretations that caused unwarranted bad references to appear under certain circumstances.
• Incomplete corpora can now be used for reconstruction despite incomplete capture and therefore missing information. The capabilities degrade graciously, taking advantage of as much information as there happens to be available.