Innovations
The old adage of "If you don't ask you don't get" has well and truly been utilised within our continuous improvement program and continues to be a major reason why Q-Pulse is the market leading solution in many sectors.
Technology also plays a vital role in being able to deliver these improvements in an innovative, elegant and user friendly way. The Q-Pulse development team are constantly seeking to utilise these advances in technology so you can benefit from them.
If you have any suggestions we'd be delighted to pass them on to the development team for formal consideration. All you need to do is contact us with a brief description of your suggestion and why you think it will add value to users.
Sneak Preview: What's coming in Q-Pulse Version 5.6
by Paul Callahan - Products Director @ Gael Quality
As we're now in 2009, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you some of what our development team have been up to for the last few months, namely Q-Pulse version 5.6, which is due for release at the end of March.
As part of any Q-Pulse release we always set ourselves a 'guiding light' where we ensure that changes and enhancements to the product are considered against criteria. Version 5.6's guiding light breaks down into 3 key areas:
* To refine existing processes (with consideration to customer enhancements)
* To improve Q-Pulse deployment and configuration
* To structure Q-Pulse for integration
Please note, the following information is only a limited introduction to the planned changes and my intention is to post regular updates on this release as we delve deeper into our development cycle and confirm implementation. Please also note that details are subject to change as the development cycle progresses, but this should provide a flavour of what is coming along:
1. iCalendar
New Feature:
Ability to attach an iCalendar to Training and Audit Q-Pulse messages.
ICalendar or "iCal" is a standard for calendar data exchange. In the context of Q-Pulse, this means, for example, when an Audit is scheduled in Q-Pulse, the Q-Pulse message can now be sent with an "iCal" file attached. This file can be saved to the recipient's Microsoft Outlook calendar as an appointment with the appropriate details of the Q-Pulse Audit. The appointment will also contain a 'Goto' link to the record in Q-Pulse.
ICal calendars are supported in a variety of applications, many of which are listed here.
2. List Views
Updated Feature:
Additional view types in most modules to provide greater targeting of a record's 'child' information. For example, you will be able to view a 'flattened' list of CA/PA actions, without having to navigate through the parent record.
3. Escalation and Messaging
New Features:
Set conditions to escalation messages (Available conditions will be the same as the conditions in standard message implementation).
Ability to escalate to a person's "Reports to" (manager).
Updated Feature:
Select from additional dynamic recipients to the appropriate reminder, escalation (and standard) messages:
CA/PA User defined 5 & 6 (People fields), Auditors, Auditees, Asset Activity Owner
4. Spell checker
New Feature:
Ability to check, highlight and correct incorrect spelling in Q-Pulse multi-line fields (memo fields).
5. Analysis (Both CA/PA and Incidents)
New Features:
Updated look and feel.
Introduction of "Top N" to allow filtering on the Top (configurable) number of items in your data set.
Analysis printing.
6. Analysis (CA/PA)
New Feature:
Introduction of Operational Data (as delivered in Incident analysis) to allow Q-Pulse data to be expressed in terms of operational data (e.g. Number of non conformances per Sectors flown).
7. Managed Lists
New Features:
Ability to print managed list content.
Ability to import items into Managed lists from other sources.
8. Document Searching
New feature:
Ability to search for text in Q-Pulse Embedded files (Document module initially) using full text Search (SQL Server)
You can read more about the technical functionality at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms142571.aspx.
9. LaunchPad
New Feature:
Ability for an administrator to configure a "default" LaunchPad for users to reduce deployment and configuration setup time.
10. ClickOnce Deployment
New Feature:
ClickOnce is a deployment technology that allows you to create self-updating Windows-based applications that can be installed and run with minimal user interaction. ClickOnce deployment overcomes three major issues inherent in deployment:
1. Difficulties in updating applications:
With Microsoft Windows Installer deployment, whenever an application is updated, the user must reinstall the entire application; with ClickOnce deployment, you can provide updates automatically. Only those portions of the application that have changed are downloaded, then the full, updated application is reinstalled from a new side-by-side folder.
2. Impact to the user's computer:
With Windows Installer deployment, applications often rely on shared components, with the potential for versioning conflicts; with ClickOnce deployment, each application is self-contained and cannot interfere with other applications.
3. Security permissions:
Windows Installer deployment requires administrative permissions and allows only limited user installation; ClickOnce deployment allows non-administrative users to install and grants only those Code Access Security permissions necessary for the application.
11. Occurrence & Incident Application Programming Interface (APIs)
New Feature:
As part of our Q-Pulse integration/API strategy, we will be providing key Q-Pulse functionality in the form of XML based web services. This provides an industry standard, standards-based, cross platform, flexible mechanism for integrating Q-Pulse functionality into third-party applications.
Using .NET WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) as our core platform, these services exposed by Q-Pulse are simple architectural constructs that follow the "facade" and "adapter" patterns. Through the use of service contracts, the scope of what will be possible for someone to programmatically achieve with Q-Pulse can be defined. Internally, the API will use the existing Q-Pulse Business Objects to move data to and from the database. This ensures that any supplied data will be subjected to many of the same business logic validity checks as would be applied to user-entered information.
What does this mean?
Simply put, where an organisation has a Development or System Integrator resource, they will be able to develop integration points between Q-Pulse and other existing systems.
The first phase will see us release services for the Occurrence & Incident functionality with a view to exposing the services in other modules over the course of 2009.
We're putting together some example uses of these web services. One example is an Outlook plug-in that allows a user to raise an Occurrence/safety event in Q-Pulse from an e-mail, passing through selected information on the e-mail into the Q-Pulse record.