News

Xoom 3.5 has been released

We are proud to announce the release of Xoom 3.5. This is a significant release that contains major improvements in the way Xoom supports newer versions of Service Optimization. The release also contains new reports and usability and stability improvements.

Service Optimization scheme support

Support for subtleties of scheme in various releases of Service Optimization 8 has been significantly improved:

  • Collection sizes are now explicitly stated in the scheme representation taking advantage of the features introduced in SO 8.1.4. The new element is called CollectionSize and replaces previously existing CollectionIdPool, which was heuristic and only mostly reliable. (The representation of the scheme for SO 7.5 is unaffected by this change.)
  • The identification of scheme changes that can actually be performed has been improved. (The changes that don’t make any functional difference are ignored during the import process, just like in previous versions of Xoom.)
  • The stability and reliability of scheme import has been improved, in particular where it can now use reliable information about collection size.

Other Service Optimization-related changes

  • Significantly expanded support for rules and objectives of all products in the suite, in particular ClickRoster. All product rules and objectives up to Service Optimization 8.1.10 are now fully supported.
  • The errors reported in the event log when analysing reports and plan rules on some versions of Service Optimization have been addressed.
  • The generic version of Xoom now contains a Scheme named query by default.

Xoom Processor

  • XSLT’s document() functions are now supported inside Xoom Processor, which enables a whole new type of reports where external XML documents, such as Service Optimization reference configurations, need to be considered.
  • Introduced % as an alternative to # to denote XSL transformation operation to enable the use in shell scripting as # can denote a comment in that context.
  • Xoom Processor now also supports XSL parameters. The parameters are specified on command line after the # and before the transformation file name, using the following syntax: 
    xp.exe in.xml % =:ParName1=Val1 t.xsl

    As many parameters as desirable can be specified in this way, as long as they all have the required syntax and they are all listed between the % and the XSL file.

New features

New reports for extracting settings that don’t exist as their own configuration items (objects) within Service Optimization. The settings are expressed using Xoom’s partial update commands, which makes the resulting file easy and safe to edit or distribute, without the danger of overwriting other parts of the object that holds the configuration. The following settings are supported:

  • Agent types, which are defined within the body of Agents Manager.
  • Agent instances, also defined within the body of Agents Manager.
  • Rule and objective types, the former of which is defined within the body of Rule Types setting and the latter within the body of Objective Types setting. The resulting document is useful as a template for distributing custom rules and objectives without overwriting anything else that is defined on the target system.

Improvements

  • Increased connection time-out from ten minutes to one hour to allow long-running configuration changes (in particular scheme changes) to complete without a time-out. (The time-outs don’t actually invalidate the import, but they do create an impression that something may be wrong when the import is actually successful.)
  • In light of a longer time-out, Settings Migration Tool now reports every five minutes that the import is still in progress for as long as it actually is still in progress.