ADAM – Blog posts – SUPPORT 4D

Adoption of CalVer Naming and New Schedule

Dear Customers and Partners,

We are thrilled to share with you significant changes in our development process, designed to improve the clarity, predictability, and efficiency of our products. These changes reflect our commitment to meeting the evolving needs of our clients and partners.

New Naming Strategy: CalVer

To align the naming of our products, we are adopting the CalVer (Calendar Versioning) strategy.

This approach allows us to name our versions more intuitively and in sync with time. For example, a version labeled “2024.1” might include Manager (6.0), Author (6.0), Publisher (3.0), Viewer (2.0), etc.

Besides simpler correspondence with our contracts and commitments, this will help you, our clients, and partners, to better understand and anticipate updates to our products.

Schedule with Fixed Dates

We are introducing a deployment schedule with fixed dates to make our release cycles more predictable. This will allow IT Departments to prepare more effectively for deployments and avoid delays due to last-minute adjustments.

Versioning Policy: Major, Minor, Maintenance

Major: A major update will be released once a year. This approach aims to minimize the efforts required by IT Departments by limiting infrastructure changes, while ensuring the security and updating of our applications.
Minor: Also once a year, these updates will be spaced six months apart from the major versions. They will offer an opportunity for specific client projects, based on a stable version, without incorporating major changes.
Maintenance (OCM): We will offer a monthly version during the first three months following a release, then a quarterly version. A 4D CONCEPT committee, combining technical and functional aspects, will determine the eligibility of features and bug fixes for each version.

We also offer our clients the opportunity to test the Release Candidates (RC) before the official launch, thus contributing to the early stabilization of versions.

Provisional Schedule

We are confident that these developments mark a turning point in how we develop and deploy our solutions, with an emphasis on transparency, reliability, and your satisfaction.

We look forward to your feedback and are ready to answer any questions you may have.

The ADAM Support Team

Optimization of Release Notes in the ADAM Suite: A Functionality-Centered Evolution

Dear users,

We are thrilled to announce a major evolution in the way we manage our Release Notes. This transformation is part of our commitment to enhance your experience and effectively meet your documentation needs.

1. Centralization of information for a global view

Say goodbye to multiple Release Notes for each update and bugfixes. From now on, a major version benefits from a single Release Note which is updated with each minor version. Whether you consult version 5.6.0 or 5.6.2, you will be greeted by the same note. This centralization offers you an overview of the new features and the evolution of bug corrections.

2. Total transparency on version support

Knowing the lifespan and support of a version is essential for planning your deployments. That’s why we have made this information accessible by displaying the support dates for each version.

3. Intuitive navigation with Search and Filtering

Navigating through the Release Notes has never been simpler. Thanks to our advanced search and filtering system, quickly access relevant information, without having to browse through long pages.

4. Improved readability by distinguishing the Release Note and the Changelog

The distinction between a Release Note and a Changelog is crucial. The Release Note focuses on the new features, improvements, and corrections made to a specific version to inform and guide users. The Changelog, on the other hand, offers a detailed technical history of the changes made to the source code over time.

With this update, we have taken measures to clarify this distinction in the ADAM software suite:

Release Note focused on Functionality: We have redesigned our Release Notes to be focused on functional aspects. They highlight the new features, improvements, and bug corrections of each version. Their goal is to provide users with a clear and concise overview of the updates, without overwhelming them with technical details.

Changelog for Technical Details: The technical information, previously partially integrated into the Release Notes, has been moved to the Changelog. It offers a detailed tracking of technical changes. It is mainly aimed at developers, testers, and anyone wishing to have a deep understanding of technical changes.

5. The same approach for the entire ADAM Suite

This evolution of Release Notes management will be deployed across the entire ADAM software suite, ensuring uniformity and clarity in all our documentation.

In conclusion, this overhaul of the Release Notes reflects our desire to provide you with quality documentation, aligned with the current standards of software development.

You will find:

Release Notes:
- on the support site, under the “documentation” section
Changelog:
- In the deliverables, under the “installation guide” section
- On the support site, under the “documentation” section

We look forward to receiving your feedback and suggestions.
Your feedback is essential for us, as it helps us to continue innovating and improving our software products.

Warm regards,

The ADAM team.

The ADAM SUITE is undergoing a technological evolution.

ADAM SUITE must follow the versions made available on its technical base to respond to security, performance, and obsolescence issues. This evolution of the technical components is expected to occur in the first half of 2024.

Our clients have their limitations and IT strategies, and our teams will work together to tackle them. Hence, our teams will be eager to provide guidance on the optimal deployment alternatives provided by these advancements. You can rely on us.

Updated components

What are these new features bringing?

Spring Boot will facilitate deployments and expedite the installation of new versions by utilizing these technologies and techniques. We will provide you with the following options:

Around Tomcat. We will provide two deployment solutions:
1. “Standalone” with Spring Boot technology and the Tomcat server embedded in the application.
2. “Expert” under Tomcat to retain customization possibilities.
With ANSIBLE version 2. We recommend implementing this scenario as it offers numerous advantages.
We will furnish deployment scripts that customers can modify to their environments to enhance automation.

Not only that, but we will also do a webinar about these innovations in the coming months. This communication aims to prepare CIOs who oversee operating applications for these methods.

The ADAM team.

About ANSIBLE

Ansible is an open-source automation tool that is used for various IT tasks, including configuration management, application deployment, and task automation.

Here’s a brief summary of Ansible’s key features and capabilities:

Automation: Ansible allows you to automate repetitive and complex tasks, making it easier to manage and configure systems and applications.
Agentless: Unlike some other automation tools, Ansible is agentless, meaning it doesn’t require any software to be installed on the target systems. It communicates with remote systems using SSH, making it lightweight and easy to set up.
Declarative Language: Ansible uses a declarative language to define the desired state of systems. You specify what the end result should be, and Ansible takes care of figuring out how to get there.
Playbooks: Automation tasks in Ansible are defined in YAML files called playbooks. Playbooks describe the tasks to be performed on specific hosts or groups of hosts.
Idempotent: Ansible playbooks are idempotent, meaning they can be run multiple times without causing harm. If a task has already been completed and the system is in the desired state, Ansible won’t make any changes.
Extensible: Ansible can be extended through modules, which are reusable units of code that perform specific tasks. A vast library of Ansible modules is available to support a wide range of operations.
Inventory: Ansible uses an inventory file to keep track of the target hosts it manages. This file can be static or dynamic, allowing for flexible host groupings and organization.
Role-Based: Ansible promotes the use of roles to organize and reuse sets of tasks. Roles can be shared and reused across different playbooks.
Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a large and active community, contributing to its extensive library of roles and modules. It also integrates well with other tools and systems.
Security: Ansible employs secure communication via SSH, and it doesn’t require a centralized server for operation, making it a secure choice for automation.

Ansible is widely used by DevOps teams and system administrators to streamline and simplify infrastructure management and application deployment processes, making it a valuable tool for modern IT operations.

Analysis, control, search, discover the advanced features of ADAM Manager’s Search and Analytics module.

Documentation processing is alive and well! For many, that’ s not a surprise. Once a project is completed, many external parameters and factors can impact the documentation during the product life cycle. A change of parts, a tool, a reference number or a consumable, or a customer request or a new normative or regulatory constraint, are all reasons why documentation has to be modified and/or updated (RFU, reason for update).

The issue is therefore no longer whether or not the publication assets will be impacted over the 20 to 30 years of product use, but to visualize precisely and quickly where this will be the case.

THE IMPACT ANALYSIS

In most cases, modifications are in response to typical cases that have an impact on the publication assets, such as updating a tool, which may, depending on the case, have a knock-on effect on a set of procedures.

At best, a modification can be limited to updating the reference number of a tool. However, as mentioned above, changing a tool, even if it has the same purpose as the previous one, can have an impact on the way certain tasks are carried out.

Impact analysis meets the important need of quickly and easily identifying all the data modules that reference the tool in order to analyze them and, if necessary, assign them in batches to specialists who can update them.

This sort of impact can be extended to any change in support elements required to carry out tasks, be it an item, an ingredient, test equipment, a change of location, a warning message, a hazard, a sign, a name, etc.

In a system where configuration management is an important element, the Search and Analytics module allows you to search for specific configurations and provide a list of document objects corresponding to your configuration criteria.

MASS CHECKS

In the same way, the Search and Analytics module allows for mass checking of your publication assets. In the case of a modification affecting a greater or lesser number of documentary units (DMs), this ensures that all the documentary units that need to be modified have been modified, and that the entire revised content corresponds to the impact analysis.

It is also possible to perform a search to extract Data Modules with their RFUs (reasons for update) to ensure that none have been forgotten. In fact, an exhaustive list of all the RFUs per documentary unit can be obtained.

ADVANCED CONTEXTUAL SEARCHES

Another way to take advantage of this module, besides impact analysis, is to develop and perform contextual searches on the XML structure of the document, such as searching for a word in an ‘Abbreviation’ tag rather than searching for that word independently of its semantics.

The Search and Analytics module, a quiet revolution, increases the publication-asset search and analysis capabilities tenfold. It offers new perspectives to users and managers, who can now easily and quickly anticipate, quantify and check all and any updating work.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The Search and Analytics module allows the user to perform advanced search queries on the XML structure of the Data Module. The aim here is to have a list of DMs available as a result.

For instance, the queries could be:
– What are the DMs that refer to such and such an identifier or such and such a tool?
– Which DMs contain at least one inline applicability??
– Which DMs specifically contain this text in the RFU?
– Others

These requests based on the XQUERY language can be created by an administrator with sufficient knowledge of that language, and are taken into account in real time as soon as they are made available on the server.

Users can then enter parameters before executing them, define how the results are displayed, and export them in CSV format. The user can access details of a DM with a simple click.

Naturally, a list of queries accompanies the Search and Analytics module by default. They cover a wide range of current topics including:
– Full text search on content bloc.
– Return all RFU element on all domain search.
– Return RFU element with a specific id
– Return Tool element with a specific toolRef
– Return Supply element with a specific text on name (e.g ‘grease’)
– Return DM with an issueType changed
– Search the impacted DM by a revised CIR fragment
– Search Abbreviation on content (ATA2300)
– Search techLabel on content
– Search reference to the document
– Return all inline applic element on all domain search

4D Concept offers services for tailor-made customer solutions and for training users.

ADAM Manager 5 breaks the sound barrier

This is an important period for the ADAM suite and especially the Manager module. Graphic redesign, improved performance, enhanced security, 4D Concept has not left anything out of its version 5 offering of the CSDB S1000D, the most powerful on the market.

Security

Security is a major issue in the management of sensitive projects. In an increasingly agile and flexible context for employees, who are now more than ever in home-offices with all the problems inherent in remote working, the heart of the matter is system intrusion resistance, which sends a shiver down the spines of managers and CIOs alike.

This is why 4D Concept has made it one of its main areas of focus, now and for the years to come, and particularly since the beginning of 2020 with the implementation of the ISO 27001 certification reference system dedicated to the security of information systems.

ADAM Manager 5 is already benefiting from these developments, with a first major technical upgrade linked to a version upgrade of the technological bricks used and the replacement of those considered outdated, guaranteeing greater stability and much better resistance to intrusion.

ADAM Manager 5 is already ready for these changes, with a first major technical upgrade linked to a version upgrade of the technological bricks used and the replacement of those considered outdated, guaranteeing greater stability and much better resistance to intrusion.

Performance

Powerful tools are prerequisites for successful project management. ADAM Manager 5 already outperforms the competition in this respect.

Nevertheless, we have thoroughly tested the solution through a major performance study which makes it possible for us to guarantee optimal response times and import times (-66%), check-ins (-25%), execution of requests known as “usual Admin”, which are very resource intensive (-78%) because they feed

the Dashboards, and PDF publications (-15%).

ADAM Manager 5 drives your projects 1.5 times faster than the previous version.

All tests were carried out on an AWS environment.

Ergonomics

You won’t recognize Manager!

The development teams have been working hard for a year to keep all the strengths of ADAM Manager while offering a new graphical interface that is simpler, more readable, easier, just better! Manager 4 users will not be lost, and the new users will appreciate a more modern and user-friendly GUI.

Finally, the overall ergonomics have been designed to integrate authoring skills into ADAM Manager in the very near future. Web authoring is coming…

ADAM is on track for S1000D 5.0

Since the beginning of the year, ADAM received many improvements, becoming always closer to our customers’ and users’ expectations.

ADAM is now in capacity to:

Handle S1000D 5.0 to manage, write et publish your content.
Manage a JOB queue to optimize long and greedy tasks.
Directly connect to JIRA, leader project manager software to steer your documentation and your teams day to day.
Export, publish and preview CIR format from the writting and to the publishing.

ADAM Author benefits from:

A CSNRs links generation assistant (CSNRefs)
A gathering CIR Widget.
A multiple preview management (HTML, PDF).
An ability to search in previews.
A S1000D style sheet improvement.

To contact our sales team and find out about all new features of the ADAM suite, click here

ADAM Author is a “tagless” XML editor, based on a robust engine, open to API, and rapidly configurable for your particular business, regardless of your editorial structure or your DTD or XSD. Together with ADAM Manager CMS, ADAM Author lets you expand production power, reduce errors and improve overall quality so that you can focus on the fundamentals – the content.

More about ADAM

RELEASE NOTE – NEW VERSIONS OF ADAM AUTHOR AND MANAGER

Our team has just gone live with important new features for ADAM Author and Manager.

ADAM Author, the technical authoring tool, has been completely redesigned with a brand-new graphical interface. The user experience has been rethought with an innovative ergonomic design that guides authors in the execution of their tasks.

ADAM Manager is now equipped with innovative features that have a direct impact on users’ ability to manage their workflow and make the viewing and publishing processes more fluid.

“These latest versions of Author and Manager are definitely major improvements to the ADAM Suite, strengthening its authoring and publishing abilities.”

Alexandre NIO – Product Owner – ADAM

As these updates facilitate exchanges between Author and Manager, the ADAM suite provides you with many useful improvements:

WORKFLOW: Make it easier to set up one or more workflows on S1000D documentary units.
PERFORMANCES: Save time with a thumbnail display of illustrations and their asynchronous loading, optimisation of data module loading time and enhancement of the Author view style sheet.
PREVIEW: Read your contents easily in ADAM Author and Manager with an HTML preview.
PUBLICATION: Create filtered publications directly from Manager.
DEPLOYMENT: Maximize your deployments with external services.
REFERENCE: Open references straight from Author

Contact our sales team and find out about all new features of the ADAM suite.

PSA chooses the ADAM Suite for its documentation production

With a view to improving their after-sales documentation production process, PSA wanted to migrate some of its editorial tools towards a solution that would:

Include a tool for writing structured and multilingual technical documents that complies with precise business rules and reference terminology,
Publish each type of document according to different corporate identities and style guides.

The documentation solution proposed and implemented by 4Dconcept is based on the ADAM software suite, directly interfacing PSA’s SCRIPTA editorial system.

ADAM improves productivity while proposing simple and easy-to-use mechanisms to facilitate the documentation process.

XML document structure within ADAM is compliant with PSA structures, to allow early rounds of document validation and revision.

ADAM Suite, which tightly integrates a very efficient writing tool with a powerful XML database, provides significant productivity gains and great ease of use, according to users in major companies.

ADAM product support platform

Out of concern for quality and visibility, we have in place an ADAM product support platform. We are constantly looking for new ways of further sharpening our customer focus.

This collaborative and intuitive platform allows you to interact with our product teams through the Questions / Answers section, but you can also find answers to certain technical requests and “how-to” questions in the FAQ section.

You can also access information about what’s new in the Blog section, sales brochures and technical documentation in the Resources section, and everything you need to know about the latest versions of our ADAM tools in the Release notes section.

Key strengths:

Valuable source of user information
Great forum of mutual exchange
Simplified Google-bar search function
Information about new releases / updates
Platform in French and English

Objectives:

Monitoring news and product development
Providing quick and easy access to first level documentation and online resources
Surveying and centralizing your requests
Creating a true user community around ADAM products

We have tried to make our ADAM platform very simple and user-friendly. We hope that it will be of great help to you in your user experience of our ADAM tools.