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Small but mighty, FileHold 17.1
It is always exciting for me to be able to announce a new release because it is the end of all the hard work that went into it and a chance to show the world what we accomplished. There may only be a .1 change in the release number, but that should not diminish the amount of effort expended to improve usability, performance, and security.
One of the most noticeable changes for long-time users will be the new look of the DMS cockpit in the desktop and web client. There have been many minor changes in this area throughout the version, but this is probably the most significant change since this user interface was first designed. Our primary goals were to keep the look and feel as consistent as possible while refreshing the appearance and ease of use.
Colors have been carefully chosen from a small number of palettes and applied with consistency throughout the user interface. Icons have been refreshed to fit the color changes and enhance recognition and usability. More file type icons have been added for at-a-glance visual cues about their contents and the number of folder colors has increased by 200%. To top it off, one of our most requested features, scalable panels in the cockpit, has been provided. Now you can adjust the panels according to your screen real estate and resolution.
Dropdown menus have been with the product since day one, but they have not changed much since version 14 introduced arbitrary length external data sources, or alternate search fields in 15. Now we have introduced inactive menu items to solve the problem of what to do with old menu values that you still have attached to documents, but you no longer want to use on new documents.
Inactive items are effective both on the dropdown menus maintained inside FileHold and the menus with external data sources. You can now configure the external data source updates to make a value inactive in FileHold when it is deleted at the source but there are active documents in FileHold. When menu items are inactive, they are not available for users to select on new documents, but they can still search for them when they are assigned to existing documents. The inactive items will automatically be purged from the system when the document lifecycle rules delete the associated documents.
With all the user interface improvements, this change to the dropdown menu backend warranted a similarly powerful change on the frontend. Visually, editing the values reflects current menu values, inactive menu values, and user error. A clear mechanism is in place to make individual or multiple value selections, including cases where dozens of values are needed. To top it off, we have added the option to select values by typing any characters that exist or only starting characters. As a regular FileHold user, this is by far my favorite new feature.
There are a number of other ease-of-use improvements like new search highlight navigation, direct access to custom user views, a simplified anonymous portal, direct access to workflow approvals from email and the task interface, and access to embedded attachments when viewing documents like email.
The last major end user enhancement is automatic document watermarking. This is perfect for companies with ISO 9001 and other quality processes. Watermarking has been available in the product for a while, but you needed to apply it to each document individually. Now, all an administrator needs to do is set watermarks on the document schema. When a user views or prints the document, the watermark will be there. It cannot be removed by the user.
The automatic watermarks are defined in the same way as before, so you can take advantage of most of the merge tags available in FileHold to define a combination of static and dynamic content for the watermark. The watermarks are created on-the-fly, so if your process changes and requires new watermark content, you simply need to update the watermark template, and the new content will be applied automatically.
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Administrators will benefit from a number of changes to make their lives easier. Whether it is the little things like having the option to double-click to open user properties or the major change from option settings buried in configuration files on the backend to a managed options management screen with filters to quickly find the options you need.
They can now directly monitor document lifecycle processes to confirm that all jobs are running as planned and calculate expected demand. Behind the scenes, major enhancements were made to improve performance and scalability for document lifecycle processes to handle situations with very large demand.
IT managers will like that they can configure FileHold to communicate with their Microsoft 365 email server using modern authentication and the Graph API allowing them to turn off basic authentication and the old SMTP protocol in their 365 tenant. I predict dancing on desks when they hear that Microsoft Teams integration is now a part of the standard install instead of a second install. They will also like the new two-factor authentication options that do not require external services. This will be great for smaller customers that use FileHold’s built-in authentication.
There is still a long list of features, performance, and security improvements that I have not talked about here, but I will leave those for the release notes.
I know you are asking yourself, “should I upgrade?” and that is a fair question. For all customers with a current FileCare subscription, you are entitled to upgrade for no additional charge. A FileCare technician will help you through the process on your compatible server. But will it be worthwhile or should I wait for the next one. Well, here are a few simple points to help you decide.
- Did we add a new feature in 17.1 that will make your life better? UPGRADE.
- If you are on a version older than 17.0, there are release notes for each update since your version so check the full list of changes and if you find a new feature that will make your life better, UPGRADE.
- Did we fix a bug that is slowing you down? UPGRADE.
- Are you concerned about running the .NET 6 runtime on your server since its November 12, 2024 end of support? 17.1 uses the .NET 8 runtime so UPGRADE.
- Are you transitioning to Microsoft Office 2024? It has been validated on 17.1 so UPGRADE.
- For the handful of you out there still running FileHold 15.2 or older, you are now two major versions behind and that can affect your FileCare subscription service level agreement. UPGRADE.
You can see the complete list of changes in our release notes from version 14 on our web site. https://www.filehold.com/features/filehold-17-release
If you are wondering if your infrastructure is compatible with FileHold 17.1, check out our system requirements. https://www.filehold.com/how-to-buy/system-requirements
If your server is getting a little long-in-the-tooth, we have a full suite of fixed-price migration packages to help you move to the latest technologies for better compatibility, security and performance. We can even move you to the FileHold Cloud on Microsoft Azure and manage your FileHold system for you for a zero-obsolescence experience. Contact [email protected] or [email protected] for more information.