We are proud to announce a release of Xoom 3.4. This release contains significant improvements in the coverage of recent Service Optimization features such as user-friendly coverage of generic events and generic status flows, as well as other functional and stability improvements and bug fixes.

Service Optimization feature coverage

• Generic events are now fully interpreted by Xoom. They are included as part of the default query in the generic installation of Xoom for Service Optimization 8.1.7 and later. They are also accessible in Settings Migration Tool where their editor is located in Service Optimization Administration tool.
• Generic status flows are now fully interpreted, and are accessible in Settings Migration Tool where their editor is located in Service Optimization Administration tool.
• Added in-depth coverage for schedule idle resource workflows and stages.
• Added built-in coverage for priority index.
• XSL transformations of outgoing messages are now interpolated as XML in the Xoom representation. They can now be found, explored and extracted using standard XML tools, including Xoom Explorer.
• Improvements in the coverage of bundler parameters where the representation of the configuration changed in different versions.
• Minor interpretative improvements in ClickRoster corrective action types.

Improvements and  important functional changes

• Xoom Explorer, Xoom Processor and Xoom Toolkit now all support EXSLT functions in XPath and XSL. This radically improves the expressiveness with features such as regular expressions, set operations and more powerful string functions.
• Xoom Explorer’s interactive XPath now also supports results of function calls (including EXSLT, as mentioned above), not just node sets, making it very useful not just for Xoom files, but also as a general purpose XML exploration and XSL development tool.
• Revision and Stamp are no longer routinely removed from Service Optimization objects that have them. This has been flagged as particularly useful in configuration versioning situation, where the information on when the change happened and who initiated it can be very useful. Both Revision and Stamp are ignored when configuration items are compared for import.
• A new report on active schedule agents configuration called ActiveScheduleAgentsXmlSummary.xsl has been added. The report produces and XML file that contains in-depth information about the configuration of active schedule agents. This information is convenient for use in further transformations, in particular for automated analysis and reconfiguration of optimisation.

New parameters

New parameters that allow configuration files that are Xoom-version sensitive (for example for controlled backwards compatibility) have been introduced. These new parameters are:

• ProductInfo.Product: Xoom
• ProductInfo.Version: three number Xoom version (major, minor, build number), such as 3.4.3246.
• ProductInfo.CosmeticVersion: a user-friendly version, which equals the version number used on release announcements.
• ProductInfo.Configuration: specifies whether the build has been compiler using Debug or Release configuration.
• ProductInfo.BuildType: Release, HotFix, Release Candidate, Beta, Alpha, Development.

Bug fixes

• XSPXoomGetObjects is now much more robust, and performs correctly regardless of the combination of properties or the ordering of the Key element.
• Internal SXP calls in version 7.5 are now implemented using in-process COM calls for better speed and avoidance of authentication problems.
• The handling of SXP errors is now more robust, covering a larger range of scenarios.
• Settings Migration Tool no longer displays a .NET exception when connection to the Xoom server fails. A single message box informing the user of the problem is displayed instead, and the same message is also logged.
• References will no longer result in data corruption when misconfigured. Instead, the problem will be identified and reported in the event log, and the target node will be marked as a general bad reference.

We are pleased to announce the release of Xoom version 3.3.1. This is a hotfix release fixing the following issues found in release 3.3:

• Versioning script now works correctly with folders that contain spaces.
• Xoom Console no longer tries to establish the connection while server name is being typed in. Connecting to a non-existing or unreachable server now also emits a more informative message.
• The configuration for remote connections now contains increased memory limit, making it possible to use pure client installations productively without initial configuration effort.

We are pleased to announce the release of Xoom version 3.3. The release contains a new versioning script supporting per-item configuration versioning with Git, Mercurial and Subversion, major improvements on installation file information retrieval, some enhancements of Xoom Processor, usability improvements of Settings Migration Tool and some other minor improvements and bug fixes. The changes are listed in detail below.

Continue reading Xoom 3.3 has been released →