Releases: oaeproject/Hilary
OAE Heron
This upgrade will introduce the following new features and enhancements:
- The ability to organise content items in folders
- Support for Shibboleth access management federations
- Email notification improvements. Email notifications now aggregate more intelligently, reducing the overall number of emails being sent out. Emails have also been made more readable on mobile devices
- Improvements to the unread notifications count, ensuring that the number will always correspond with the real number of unread notifications
- More informative activity summaries, especially when creating new content or folders
- Fully documented REST API responses in the REST API documentation
8.0.2
8.0.1
Griffin
OAE Griffin brings a complete overhaul of the collaborative document experience, metadata widgets, full interactive REST API documentation and improved Office document previews. Next to that, OAE Griffin also introduces a wide range of incremental usability improvements, technical advances and bug fixes.
Collaborative documents
The collaborative document experience in OAE Griffin has been completely overhauled. Whilst OAE's collaborative note taking capabilities have consistently been identified as very useful during usability testing, the actual Etherpad editor user experience has always tested poorly and never felt like an inherent part of the OAE platform.
Therefore, OAE Griffin introduces a fully skinned and customised collaborative document editor. The Etherpad editor has been skinned to make it fit seamlessly into the overall OAE interface and a number of under-utilised features have been removed. The editor and toolbar now also behave a lot better on mobile devices. All of this creates a much cleaner, more integrated and easier to use collaborative document experience.
At the same time, the activities and notifications generated by collaborative documents have also been fine-tuned. OAE Griffin now detects which people have made a change and will generate accurate activities, providing a much better idea of what's been happening inside of a document.
Metadata widgets
It is now possible to see the metadata for all content items, discussions and groups. This includes the full title of the item, the description, who created it and when it was created. For content items and discussions, it is also possible to see the full list of managers and people and groups it's shared with. All of this will provide a lot more context to an item, for example when discovering an interesting content item or when wondering who's involved in a discussion.
At the same time, the long-awaited download button has been provided for all content items, ensuring that the original file can easily be downloaded.
REST API Documentation
OAE Griffin introduces a REST API documentation framework and all of the OAE REST APIs have been fully documented. This work is based on a REST API documentation specification called Swagger, and offers a nice interactive UI where the documentation can be viewed and all of the REST endpoints can be tried.
This documentation is available on every OAE tenant and sits alongside the internal API documentation. All of this should provide sufficient information and documentation for widget development and integration with OAE.
Office documents
The OAE preview processor has been upgraded from LibreOffice 3.5 to LibreOffice 4.3. This brings tremendous improvements to the content previews that are generated for Office files (Word, Excel and PowerPoint). Especially the display of shapes, pictures and tables has been much improved, whilst some additional font support has been added as well.
Email improvements
The email notifications have been tweaked to ensure that emails sent out by OAE are as relevant as possible. At the same time, a number of visual improvements have been made to those emails to ensure that they look good on all devices.
Embedding improvements
Browsers have started introducing a set of new new cross-protocol embedding restrictions, which were causing some embedded links to not show correctly in the content profile. Therefore, OAE Griffin puts a number of measures in place that improve link embedding is and provide a fallback when a link can not be embedded.
CAS Authentication
It is now possible to pick up and use SAML attributes released by a CAS authentication server. This allows for a user's profile metadata to be available immediately after signing into OAE for the first time, without having to pre-provision the account.
Icons
The icons used in OAE Griffin have been upgraded from FontAwesome 3 to FontAwesome 4.3, allowing for a wider variety of icons to be used in widget development.
Apache Cassandra
OAE Griffin has been upgraded from Apache Cassandra 1.2.15 to Apache Cassandra 2.0.8, bringing a range of performance improvements, as well as the possibility of setting up simple database transactions.
7.2.0
This release upgrades Apereo OAE from Etherpad 1.2.91 to Etherpad 1.4.0. Whilst this brings a number of visual and usability improvements, it mainly puts the foundations in place for a number of upcoming improvement to the notifications and activities for collaborative documents and a skinning effort of the Etherpad editor to make it fit better into the OAE experience.
Next to that, a number of smaller improvements and bug fixes are included in Apereo OAE 7.2 as well, including:
- REST API documentation framework
- Visual improvements to the email notifications that are being sent out
- Improved handling of embedded external services following recent browser security constraints changes
7.1.0
This release brings the full French, Dutch, German and Spanish
translations for emails. Additionally, there are minor bug fixes and
improvements such as:
- Fix initial page position for PDF previews on mobile devices
- Fix compatibility issue with Flickr API changes
- Hide the change password tab in user preferences if a user is
authenticated using an external authentication provider
Falcon
OAE Falcon comes with a complete overhaul of the OAE email notification experience, as well as a more complete set of utilities for user and system management.
Changelog
Email Preferences
A frequent request from OAE users is to provide greater control over how often they receive email. OAE Falcon provides the ability for users to specify how often they wish to receive email:
- Immediately - When selected, users will receive an e-mail immediately after an important activity has taken place. When multiple important activities happen in quick succession, they are aggregated into a single e-mail
- Daily - When selected, users will receive an e-mail once per day containing all the notifications the user received in the last 24 hours
- Weekly - When selected, users will receive an e-mail once per week containing all the notifications the user received in the last 7 days
Regardless of the email preference, users can still access their notifications from the OAE user interface in real-time as they occur.
Email Templates
The e-mail templates have been completely overhauled to provide a gorgeous design inside your inbox. When recent notifications are sent by e-mail, the design will be more consistent with what is seen in the regular OAE user interface as well as take on the branding configuration of your institution.
In addition to being branded to an institution, the e-mail templates are now completely translated using the standard Crowdin translation approach.
All of this greatly simplifies the maintenance of e-mail templates in Apereo OAE.
Screenshots of the new email designs can be found in the Apereo OAE Falcon blog post
User Management
OAE Falcon provides the ability for global and tenant administrators to perform a variety of maintenance tasks to help support their users, including:
- "Become" a user, allowing an administrator to browse the tenant on behalf of the user
- Reset user account passwords
- Update user profile information and visibility
- Create new user accounts
- Search all user accounts in the tenant
System Maintenance
In addition to an enhanced set of tools for managing users, OAE Falcon improves administration for the Global Administrator by providing tools to reindex items in the search index and reprocess content previews based on content and revision filters.
Automated Testing
Support for UI unit tests based on the web browser emulator "PhantomJS" has been added to the automated build process, starting with over 600 unit tests and more to come. These are being added to the existing automated test suite of over 1000 back-end API unit tests, providing even more stability to the release process.
6.5.1
6.5.0
This version will upgrade OAE from ElasticSearch 0.20.6 to ElasticSearch 1.1.1. Other than bringing OAE up to the latest version of ElasticSearch, it also improves the general ordering of search results and fixes a bug where not all expected search results would be returned.
6.4.0
- It is now possible for end users to provide feedback about OAE and its features. Ideas and suggestions can also be browsed and voted on. This is achieved through an integration with UserVoice, and a
Feedbacklink will be available from the OAE footer at all times. The user will automatically be logged into UserVoice without needing to create a UserVoice account. [https://oaeproject.uservoice.com/](Feedback can also be provided directly). - Fixed an issue that could cause old versions of files to be served incorrectly from cache after a production upgrade. This had the potential of breaking parts of the UI until the user cleared his cache.
- Fixed a bug where the content previews of restored content revisions could end up looking mangled until the page was refreshed.