As 2018 draws to a close we thought we’d look back at some of the highlights of this year’s ESB Agile product releases. Version 18.04 marked the change to a quarterly release cycle – with releases numbered x.01, x.04, x.07 and x.10 to reflect their month of release. Feedback on the new quarterly releases has been positive and we intend to continue this trend into 2019.

Data Vocabulary

The new Data Vocabulary was an important feature for assisting customers with GDPR compliance. A typical ESB Agile installation can contain thousands of fields, and many of those store the same type of data. For example, if you create a hundred on-line forms and each has a field called E-mail Address, you then have a hundred different e-mail address fields to manage for data compliance purposes. The Data Vocabulary allows you to define a set of common fields and link each form field to a vocabulary item – thus providing administrators with a single view of data across the entire system. The Data Vocabulary goes hand-in-hand with our optional Data Management module to make GDPR compliance significantly less challenging.

Scheduled Reports

A regularly-requested feature for our reporting engine was the ability to schedule the automatic production of reports and have them emailed directly to the recipient. This feature has now been added, and allows any ESB report to be sent automatically via email on a defined schedule. Recipients do not need to be ESB users, and the report data can be sent as either an Excel spreadsheet or an Adobe PDF document. The spreadsheet option is perfect for cases where users may want to perform additional post-processing of the data, while the PDF option provides maximum portability and readability.

Fully Customisable Self-Service Registration Page

The Account Registration page of the Self-Service portal received a major redesign earlier in the year, with all fields now fully customisable from within System Configuration. You can customise the core fields as well as adding your own. In addition a lot of Self-Service configuration options have been moved out of the configure file and are now configurable through the System Configuration pages.

System Configuration Enhancements

While we’re on the subject of System Configuration, there are many areas that have received minor improvements throughout the year. The System Configuration module is where our administrators, configurators and developers spend a lot of their time, and our focus has been on continuing to streamline and improve the usability of what is an inherently complex part of the product.

Technology Changes

Behind the scenes we have seen a number of changes to the underlying platform – including full support for Microsoft SQL Server 2017 and the ongoing migration from ASP.NET Web Forms to MVC.

Looking Ahead

The next release of the ESB Agile platform, version 19.01 is due in early January. It will continue the recent theme of enhancing the usability of the System Configuration module and refining the user interface to improve productivity for all users.

The ESB Agile product team are working hard on a number of major enhancements to business rules, and we should be in a position to reveal more details in the new year.