Metrici Advisor 1.25.0

Metrici Advisor version 1.25.0 is a significant release that brings many incremental improvements to administration and customisation.

The main motivation behind version 1.25.0 is to allow Metrici Advisor to support surveys, but the enhancements will have uses in many other areas.

Administration improvements

Version 1.25.0 introduces full delegated user management capabilities, allowing authorised users to create, search, amend, delete and fully manage their own groups of users.

User disable/enable is introduced, to allow a user's sign on to be temporarily disabled without removing any of the user's data.

Usage improvements

The asset delete function has been enhanced to provide the option of deleting some or all of an asset group's members when the asset group is deleted.

Customisation improvements

Version 1.25.0 provides greatly improved support for theming, including:

• Nomination of alternative home page, for example to take the user directly to the asset list.
• Main menu customisation.
• Full styling of assessment pages and grades. As an example, this allows themes to structure the grade lists for some or all criteria horizontally across the page, instead of down the page. It also allows different styles to be set for different questionnaires.

New criterion properties enable:

• Action buttons. These are additional buttons added to assessment pages that can perform actions, such as requesting a report. Additional actions have been created to validate that all responses have been answered, remove the current user's permissions for an asset, and to anonymise the responses, which can be combined to give a "submit assessment" function. Please discuss your requirements with Metrici.
• Presenting the grade list before the response text.
• Custom text for the header of the grade list.

A new reporting extract is available for asset groups that extracts data for all assets in a single service. This is much more efficient than using the consolidation mechanism for custom reports that do not involve rule processing. (Rule processing still requires the consolidation mechanism.)

Development

Internal to Metrici Advisor, version 1.25.0 includes improvements that help Metrici continue to develop and enhance the product.

A generalised data structure for assets and criteria has been defined. This forms the basis of the new asset group reporting extract. This will simplify meeting new reporting and user interface. (For example, the new asset group delete function uses the same back-end service as the asset group reporting extract.)

Service request parsing has been simplified and improved. This makes it easier to support both internal identifiers and references as inputs to back-end services, making services more flexible.

Error numbers returned from report extracts are handled better.

The assessment process has been improvemed to allow validation. Currently this only supports validation through action buttons, but the changes will simplify full validation of responses if the need arises.

The action button changes open up many future possibilities, such as providing capabilities to reveal/hide optional sections in an assessment.

Bug fixes

Version 1.25.0 fixes the problem with duplication of permissions.

Data management

Version 1.25.0 introduces new features for intelligently purging unused data from the database. It also maintains a last sign on timestamp to identify lapsed users.