June 2005 Volume 9, Number 1

TurnOver Release 5.4 Is Now Available!

By Sandy King, Product Manager

Based on the enthusiastic flood of upgrade requests we received when we announced TurnOver Release 5.4 in early April, we're not the only ones who are excited about this new release! Release 5.4 is packed with new features to ease administration, increase auditing, and further extend software management to Java/PC/Web development teams. If your company isn't one of the many that have already upgraded, some of the more significant enhancements just might entice you to do so.

TurnOver Administrator

The TurnOver Administrator module has been completely rewritten as an Eclipse-based application, which provides many advantages. For instance, Eclipse includes graphical frameworks that allowed us to take a giant leap past the traditional GUI. With this new release, TurnOver presents your application definitions in a graphical format that visually summarizes your entire setup. From the picture you can drill down to any level of detail. This new feature is called the Application Designer, and it's the centerpiece of the new Administrator module. (It's described more fully below.)

In addition to the new Application Designer, Administrator includes all the tools you'll need to perform various housekeeping functions, such as enrolling users in TurnOver, defining library lists, and maintaining global type codes. It also lets you work with tasks, forms, and Wisedesk trees. And, TurnOver Administrator maintains a complete audit trail of changes to your application definitions with its new application auditing features.

TurnOver Administrator can run as a standalone application on your PC, or as a plug-in to WDSC (or any Eclipse-based IDE). So if you're a developer who also performs administrative tasks, you can do it all in one place.

Because the new Administrator is more fully featured than the older client/server version, it replaces the client/server version with this release.

Application Designer

Application Designer, a major component of the new TurnOver Administrator application, presents your application definitions as pictures, making it easy to understand your promotion structure. Consider the simple two-level application shown below.

Figure 1: A two-level application as it appears in Application Designer

Because the promotion paths are clearly marked with arrows, you can quickly understand how this application's objects will flow. You see promotion methods for native objects (CSCO) as well as IFS objects (CPY), and an icon above the arrow leaving QA indicates that QA forms require approval before objects can move to the next level. Icons also clearly represent object types ( = source objects; = program objects; = data objects; = IFS objects). Type codes that deviate from the default definition appear in red, and the systems or servers to which you distribute are highlighted in yellow. In fact, all colors shown, including arrows and background, are customizable so that you can display the information as you see fit.

Another great feature is the ability to export application definitions. You can save them as picture files in BMP or JPG format (handy for your internal documentation), or save them as XML files. So don't be surprised when, as part of a support call, your tech support (TS) representative asks you to email your application definition to him/her. After importing your application definition at this end, your TS representative can quickly and accurately understand and answer your setup questions.

Application Auditing and Remote Application Definitions

Those of you with auditing requirements will appreciate TurnOver Administrator's new application auditing features. Before you can update an application definition, you must first check it out. While you have the application checked out, no one else can modify it. A red icon decorator visually "broadcasts" your application definition's checkout status. Much like source checkout, Administrator archives versions of your application definitions, and you can easily revert to any previous version. Administrator also provides an application change history view, where you can compare any two versions side by side, in XML format.

Another important new Administrator feature is the ability to centrally maintain remote application definitions. In addition to managing remote application definitions in one place on your development computer, you can customize them differently for each remote system to which you distribute. An easy-to-use Remote Configuration Wizard helps you distribute your remote application definitions and system definitions to the remote iSeries computers in your network.

TurnOver Team Member

TurnOver Team Member (TTM) is a separately packaged Eclipse-based module for staff members who need only a subset of the features available in the TurnOver Administrator module (such as Forms, Tasks, and WiseDesk). It is best suited for users who have no need to access TurnOver administrative functions or application definitions, but who, as part of their daily workflow, regularly browse or update tasks, review task activity, approve and/or run forms, or need access to the knowledge base information in your Wisedesk trees. Like Administrator, it is a standalone application that runs on a user's PC.

TurnOverSVN — Version Control

SoftLanding is also pleased to announce the new TurnOverSVN product, an integrated TurnOver module that offers advanced iSeries-based version control for team-oriented Java, PC, and Web development. It extends the safety net of TurnOver issue tracking, project management, deployment, and change history that you've come to rely on for your native iSeries development, spreading it beneath your non-iSeries-based development efforts. The result is software management that spans not only the development platform, but also the entire product life cycle. This unified, cross-team development approach lets IT managers and auditors monitor development activity enterprise-wide, from a single OS/400 database.

For more information on TurnOverSVN, please read "Introducing TurnOverSVN".

Project Enhancements

Based on your requests, TurnOver Release 5.4 contains a number of project-related enhancements. Let's get right to them:

Relational dependencies between user-defined fields.
User-defined fields (UDFs) for customizing information gathering in your projects have been available in TurnOver for quite some time. Until this new release, however, the values associated with your UDFs were completely independent of one another. Beginning with Release 5.4, valid values among UDFs are enforced to improve the likelihood of accurate data entry. For example, suppose field UDF1 is defined as Type of Issue with valid values of "hardware" or "software." Suppose also that field UDF2 is defined as Category with valid values that depend on the contents of UDF1. If UDF1 is "hardware," then UDF2 can only be "Display," "Printer," or "Modem;" and if UDF1 is "software," then UDF2 can only be "JDE," "Payroll," or "Order Entry." Based on the value of UDF2, UDF3 can be further conditioned . . . and so on.

New user-defined field dependencies increase data entry accuracy

Black out times for escalation processing.
Two new exit points have been created to let you put escalation processing to sleep, based either on current date and time alone (for example, no escalating on weekends) or on the project /task of the item that is about to be processed. The latter would be useful if you have projects that need to follow different rules. For example, some projects require escalation processing 24/7, while others escalate only during normal working hours.

Conditional control of task updates.
Two other new exit points provide more granular control over project and task updates. For example, your company might want to enforce a policy where any task that is currently in Done or Completed status cannot be changed by anyone except the Project Manager. Alternatively, you might use one of the exits to control status changes, as is the case when you want to allow only Tested tasks to be marked as Done.

New Audit Event File

Triggered by Sarbanes-Oxley, a new file, TAUDEVTF, has been created to capture audit data that identifies who submitted form and distribution jobs. (This user or users might be different from the form programmer.) With the initial release of TurnOver 5.4, there are no built-in reports over the file; you must query file TAUDEVTF to obtain relevant information.

Other Enhancements

You'll want to explore a number of other enhancements, including the form filtering enhancement in the 5250 interface and two new commands.

A more complete description of the entire release is contained in the Memo to Users, which resides on our customer support Web site at https://support.softlanding.com/support/TurnOver/MemoUsers.jsp.

Important Details

Upgrades to TurnOver Release 5.4 are free for customers who are current with their maintenance.
You must apply a new authorization code for TurnOver Release 5.4 once you have upgraded. A separate code is also required for users of TurnOverSVN.
To upgrade to TurnOver Release 5.4, you must currently be running TurnOver Release 5.3 and OS/400 V5R1 or higher.

Order When You Are Ready!

I encourage you to review the TurnOver Release 5.4 Memo to Users referenced above to learn more about the new release. To obtain Release 5.4, contact your sales representative, go to our customer support Web site and fill out the on-line order form, or simply download the release. We're ready to answer any of your questions to get you going!

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