This past July I joined my colleagues, Blanchard Systems, and DALIM Software in New Orleans for our first beta training on the latest version of DALIM ES. Those of us who travel at IOI have a saying, “May your travel be boring.” Nobody enjoys when their business travel becomes “interesting.” So starting the trip with warnings of record high water levels on the Mississippi and an approaching hurricane did not bode well for our travel plans. We knew we were in for an adventure before our flights even departed for the Big Easy.
Fortunately, Blanchard Systems (BSI), who was hosting the training, has many years of experience with New Orleans weather and advised us to travel as planned, everything would be fine. They were correct.
Once we arrived, we learned that our training for the next 2 days would be in the capable hands of Christophe Bindler and Rafael Ordonhes from the DALiM engineering support team. DALiM has done a terrific job of adding new features to ES 6 and upgrading older elements that have been customer pain points for years.
Let’s take a look at some of the latest product updates
New Notification System
Speaking of pain points, let’s talk about ES’s notification system. Simply put, the system didn’t scale well, which caused much frustration for our client’s ES administrators. I’m happy to say that DALiM has altogether scrapped and rewritten the notification system. The notification system is much more efficient and includes several new administration tools. Administrators now have complete visibility of user notification subscriptions, notification generation, e-mail currently being sent and the history of sent notifications. Additionally, the administrator can quickly start and stop the notification service. The improved visibility of the notifications system’s activities and administration is a very welcome upgrade.
Revision Management
Revision management has finally arrived in ES 6. It is possible to change the order of and remove old document revisions from a project. Modification of revisions is still controlled by a user’s login profile, and there was a discussion with DALiM’s team about making those restraints more granular to provide further control to who can change or delete a revision. I’m looking forward to seeing how DALiM implements those suggestions in the final release of ES 6.
Job Ticket Improvements
DALiM has rewritten the job ticket layout engine as well. JTL is now much more intuitive. Setting up nested tables so that you have the flexibility to update your layouts in the future is a thing of the past. The HTML 5 based drag and drop interface has a context-sensitive configuration panel that allows you to select options for the chosen element. Meta-data elements are searchable and organized into collapsible folders, easing finding both standardized and custom meta-data to include in your layout. The new job ticket layout engine will be a tremendous benefit, given our clients increasing demand for highly customized environments to create compelling user experiences.
High-Resolution Preview Upgrade
The Dialogue high-resolution preview engine has also received some love and attention. Approving and commenting on websites, including dynamic banners, is now possible. Multiple pages can be viewed in high-resolution simultaneously. While this feature can be processor and renderer intensive, it will be a tremendous benefit to clients who require side by side comparisons of similar documents or photographs. Finally, users can configure their own custom shortcut keys.
New Machine Intelligence Features
DALiM has increased ES’s capability to work as an intelligent system. Administrators can improve ES search by adding thesauruses. This feature makes meta-data tagging of content much more robust by automatically searching based on synonymous words. Automated keywording of images has been improved beyond the built-in pre-trained model by allowing integration with third-party image tagging systems such as IBM Watson and Amazon Rekognition. Though it’s not new, the ability to search based on a similar color is an intelligent system feature that is worth mentioning once again.
Planning for long term product success
I haven’t managed to cover every new feature and improvement Christophe and Rafael fit into these two information-packed days. This training session was “beta” in more than one way. Not only were we being introduced to the beta-release of ES 6, but this was the first time they had taught the course. Teaching a room full of engineers who are intimately familiar with the product and have expectations and hopes of their own can sometimes be a contentious and challenging job. Christophe and Rafael were very receptive to everyone’s input and took extensive notes to help improve both ES 6 and the training program. The sign of genuine teacher is one who is willing to learn from their students, and I personally want to thank Christophe and Rafeal for all of their hard work and patience. I’d also like to thank the partners and Wendy at BSI for providing a comfortable and welcoming place to learn.
My first experience in the Big Easy was terrific. I learned much, met some colorful, exciting, and always kind people, and had an opportunity to enjoy some of the local cuisines. With that in mind and in closing, if you’re ever in New Orleans, stop by Cochon for dinner. Cochon is a bit off the beaten path, but it’s an experience worth enjoying.