Mar 2019 | TeamPage release focuses on Performance, Quality Management, and Interactive Tables

Traction® TeamPage Winter 2019 Release focuses on TeamPage performance. It incorporates major improvements in query optimization, handling of search expressions, and caching. These improvements will be particularly significant for customers with large journals and for those who use TeamPage solutions and reporting views that make extensive use of search expressions in queries and interactive tables. Other changes include: additions and improvements to the Impi! Quality Management ISO 9001:2015 TeamPage solution; new ability to show Google calendar events in TeamPage Calendar pages; new PDF, Excel, CSV, and print export of for Data Tables; new Data Table filtering per column; improvements to PDF generation; improved temporary file management; improved background process task management; and improved statistics gathering.

Query Performance

The focus of this release is to improve the performance of TeamPage's built-in queries. These improvements will be particularly noticeable for customers with large journals, or for customers who use queries with many search terms.

Query Optimizations

These optimizations apply to TeamPage's retrieval of the "base result set" for a query, before searches are applied.

• Modified the way that queries are serviced to ensure that requested parameters, such as date scoping, are are narrowed as much as possible before additional work is performed to retrieve any results.
• Moved all query type-specific "implicit" filtering to TeamPage's SDK query implementation layer, where in-memory metadata indices can be used to quickly disqualify candidate results that formerly had to be filtered out at higher levels of code.
• Optimized the handling of requested minimum and maximum numbers of results.
• Improved the handling of the handling of offsets used to retrieve the next "chunk" or "page" of results for infinite scrolling and in other similar contexts.

Search Optimizations

These optimizations are related to TeamPage's handling of queries that have search expressions, and are designed to minimize the amount of work performed.

• Search expressions are now simplified before any additional work, such as performing auxiliary queries, is performed to apply them.
• Added short-circuiting to avoid performing any additional work when it can quickly be determined that there are not (or cannot be) any matching results for a search expression.
• Optimized the way in which search filtering is actually applied. The best filtering strategy is selected, which may be purely iterative predicate filtering, filtering using high performing auxiliary queries, or a hybrid approach, depending upon the size of the base result set and what sort of search expressions are present.
• Optimized the handling of auxiliary queries used to handle search expressions to ensure that the parameters, such as date scoping, are narrowed as much as possible while still matching the scoping of the base query and base result set.
• Whenever possible, queries that have searches will be rewritten to use an equivalent but better performing query based upon one or more of the search expressions.

ISO 9001:2015 Quality Managment

Quality, Risk, and Improvement capabilities of the TeamPage Quality Management solution have been substantially revised. They are now more tightly integrated with each other and extensible to handle related standards based activities.

The Risk plug-in now supports use of a 'Standard' entry type. Standard entries can be created to represent various ISO standards — e.g. ISO 9001, ISO 45001, — that apply to different activities in an enterprise. A special CSV attachment to a Standard entry represents the available sets of choices for certain fields in other forms, including the Quality module's Nonconformity form. They can also designate a preferred template to be applied when a user chooses to create a new Nonconformity referencing that particular Standard. This capability makes it simpler to extend the TeamPage ISO 9001:2015 framework to handle other specific activities.

The Quality solution's Nonconformity and Corrective Action entry types, and the forms used to create them, have been improved and expanded. Most changes depend upon the Risk capability, which via the new Standard entry and other changes, offers an expanded set of form fields, although the Quality module plug-in can still be used without the Risk plug-in. When the Risk plug-in is available, to create a new Nonconformity, the user must first choose an applicable Standard, and the choice of Standard governs the options that appear in certain other fields.

Other improvements include:

• Most of the due date fields for the separate phases covered by the Nonconformity and Corrective Action forms will now have default values when the user initially opens the forms, driven by per-space settings governing the offset in days from the current date to use for each default. This way, the default due dates can reflect the expected amount of time usually required to reach and complete each phase.
• Users now have the option to create an Innovation Task to follow up on an Improvement Opportunity. This provides a lighter-weight alternative than the full Improvement Project.
• Threats, Innovation Tasks and Improvement Opportunities can now all be associated with one or more feedback reports, and will appear in the special "References" list for any feedback report alongside Nonconformities and Corrective Actions. Buttons for adding any of these types of associated entries also appear there alongside the existing buttons to add new Nonconformities and Corrective Actions.
• Added server-level navigation tabs and pages for Nonconformities, to make it easy to survey quality management activities across all spaces.

The TeamPage ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management Solution is packaged as a family of integrated Quality Management, Standard Meeting, and related plug-in extensions and templates, along with expert support to help your product or service organization work better, see ISO 9001:2015 Requirements Met By impi! Solutions. Please contact sales@tractionsoftware.com if you're interested in trying out this solution.

Data Tables

We've made a number of improvements to the TeamPage Data Tables plug-in, which is free for licensed customers.

This TeamPage plug-in integrates the open-source DataTables JQuery plug-in of the JQuery Javascript library to add advanced pagination, instant filtering, multi-column ordering and other capabilities to TeamPage HTML tables.

You can use this integration to configure and add interactive tables to TeamPage entries based on entry types, properties, dates, status, relationships, and other data. If you're a developer, this plug-in also offers you a way to create interactive tables based on other TeamPage or external data sources you specify and control. This capability is useful in creating interactive dashboard, summary and other tables for general business solutions or your specific applications. You can learn more about the Data Tables plug-in here.

Other Data Tables improvements include:

• TeamPage installers now automatically install the Data Tables plug-in.
• Use Ajax data loading to improve Data Tables performance.
• Users can now export CSV, Excel, PDF, and a print version with the click of a button. The exported data will reflect any active filters.
• Each column now has its own separate filter control.

Other highlights

• Administrators can now configure up to four Google Calendar sources to be made available for users to display in various Calendar pages. Each Calendar can be given its own display name, text color, and background color.
• Improve TeamPage metadata indices and journal entry cache design to improve memory footprint and improve performance.
• New framework for managing long-running background processes.
• New and improved statistics gathering for currently open resources.
• Allow administrators to enable or disable generation of TeamPage Digest views for Visitor accounts.
• Improve TeamPage type-ahead completion to always use Unified Search to provide more consistent results and improve performance.
• Improve performance of internal queries used to support password re-use policies.
• Improve performance of feed summary views.
• Updated SDK support Query API, File API, and handling of unexpected file load errors.
• Improve SDK support for management of Temporary files.
• Improved SDK entry filtering support.
• Improved Project Management and Status SDK entry type class definitions.
• New SDK Snippet tag for flexible generation and use of snippet text derived from entry text, external search engine content or other sources.
• Improved SDK search result Highlighter tag with simplified API.
• Security related improvements and bug fixes relating to: certain potential cross-site scripting and forgery attacks; certain potential open redirection attacks; password change requests; and web socket validation, see change log.
• The release includes many other bug fixes and improvements. See TeamPage Change Log for a detailed list of changes from this and subsequent point releases.

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