7.0
24 min
Prerequisites
- .NET Framework 4.7.2+ is required
- The Microsoft Report Viewer control is now embedded into the Activate Install and a separate install is no longer required.
UI Styling Enhancements
- Microsoft Fluent Design (Similar to AzureAD and Office 365 2019)
- New Icons to match the Fluent design
- New Font
- New Tabs styling
- User Avatars
- Tooltips and quick links are available for most objects
- Redesigned default Homepage
Search Enhancements
- New Recently accessed items are shown when a user clicks in the search bar
- Dynamic results tabs for filtering search results
- Activate Select controls support recent and suggested items
- Enhanced search panel for dynamic searching (for example when logging a call)
- Generic Object tags allow multiple objects to be grouped and tagged together
User Properties Enhancements
- Simplified and enhanced views for most property pages
- New Graphical Organisational Chart
- Simplified Folder Access View
Object Browsing
- Folder icons removed to make it easier to provide icons for categories
- Users can change the number of items shown and the size of the items (similar to Explorer in Windows)
- Automatic mode to dynamically change views based on the number of items in a category
- Breadcrumbs now include Home to make it more obvious how to return to the top of the catalogue
Workflow Enhancements
- Consolidated view of all sub-requests workflows
- More targeted information for approvers
- Show requests that are about to escalate
- Requests > 50% of time to escalate are shown in orange
- Requests > 80% of time to escalate are shown in red
- New columns and colour coding of requests
- Any new Approvals since a user logged in are shown on the homepage
- Approvals that are due to escalate in the next 2 business days are shown as a warning on the homepage
- Ability to view Emails and re-send them from the Web Site
- New History view of request and approval history
- Weblinks in emails render differently than the Web Site. This removes unnecessary images for links when rendering for emails
- New Owner Dashboard to provide an overview of a user's approvals and owned objects
- Images are now automatically attached and embedded in emails to make it easier when users are off-site
- Simplified Email Approvals and ability to request more information via email
- Ability to mark specific text in an email as sensitive so that they are not stored in the database
Common Shopping Cart
- A new common shopping cart experience means that users can request different types of items and submit the requests in a single step
- Simplified Checkout screens that show items and workflow in a simpler manner for users
- Ability to update information like Effective and Expiry dates directly from the confirm pages
- Total Cost and Per Month costs calculated and shown
General Web Site Enhancements
- New Wizard Control for multi-step forms
- New Browse Instances page for enhanced Dashboards
- Update Article now includes an HTML diff of the changes when updating articles
- New FlowPanel and FlexPanel controls to make forms more responsible when viewed on mobiles
- Dialogs now nest rather than replacing the open dialog
- Enhanced Select User pages with recent users and more graphical view to make it easier for users to select a user
- New Simplified User Management landing page
- Simplified Create User/Suggest access screen
- New Service Update tasks to allow management of multiple approvers on services
- There is now a 'Copy Link' in the share menu
General System Enhancements
- New REST API with Swagger UI interface
- Services now have a permanent GUID associated with them so that external systems can link to them without using name or id's
- New Reporting View controls
- Updated to latest C# compiler to support the latest C# language features
Activate Administrator Enhancements
- New Visual Studio 2017/19 styling
- New Start Page
- Links to Common Items and Online information
- List of recent changes throughout the system
- New Job properties to maximum screen real estate for administrators
- New GUI Web Form Editor
- GUI - Drag and Drop interface to create forms
- New streamlined Toolbox
- Ability to automatically manage bindings
- Ability to preview a form directly in Activate Administrator
- Ability to browse Icons on the web site when setting URL's
- New Connector GUI Editor
- Enhanced Object History Views
- Show last change only
- Export to CSV
- Add Changes to a package for deployment
Upgrade and Known Issues
- The duplicate legacy .gif files have been removed (for example user.gif)
- These were a hangover from Activate 4.0 and have now been removed
- Any forms referencing these that have been customised will need to be updated to the .png version. In most cases it is simply changing the extension from .gif to .png
- These were most often used in SectionHeaders - the new styling has removed these
- The Activate Web Site in V7 should have 'Anonymous' access enabled
- This is automatically done for new installations but must be manually enabled for existing sites
- Images, Icons and Stylesheets are served without requiring authentication
- The ProvisioningCollection classes have been changed to System.Collections.Generic based classes
- This means that in most cases it is no longer necessary to cast items in collections for example Job.Children[0] will return a Job and not just a ProvisioningCollection
- This means that any customised scripts using ProvisioningCollection as a type must be changed. A verify of tasks should find these
- ProvisioningCollection should be changed to IProvisioningCollection<ProvisioningObject>
- In the default install there were two locations that this was done in 'Select Multiple Users'
- Activate 7.0.0 certificate checking is more strict than previous versions
- This means that certificates must be valid to be accepted.
- Self Signed Exchange certs are no longer accepted by default
- If a certificate has an issue you can force the certificate to be accepted within Activate by adding a new parameter 'Allow' at '//Resources/Configuration/Certificates'
- Format: Allow="hostname:thumbprint"
- Example: Allow="avmtest2012.activatetest.com:1b4f64171228f3514ebff8aca986f8801f681538"
- This will force any web service connecting to avmtest2012.activatetest.com to accept a certificate with the thumbprint above
Developer and Advanced Changes
- The internal Activate Parser has been enhanced
- In a similar manner to javascript, the parser now supports either a singe quote or double quote for strings
- For example XXX="=IsInRole('Administrators')" is now valid
- Expressions with numbers can now be used with quotes for example =//CurrentUser/Roles/Departments/0
- There are now Generic Evaluator.GetObject<T> calls so that casting is not required
- Services now have a GUID as a permanent id. =//Services/{Guid} can be used to access these from anywhere even if they are moving or renamed
- Grouped Services will now appear a leaf nodes in searches
- ServiceInstanceDetails control now renders the Service details (ie WebForm) automatically as required
- There is a new ProvisioningObject.Parents property that allows the objects parents in order to be obtains. For example, /Parents/0 will get the top level etc.
- There are new properties on a Job
- TotalWorkMinutes - The total work minutes since the job was submitted
- NextActionType - the next action
- NextActionTime - the time the next action will be taken
- JobAction.WorkMinutes
- A user has a new property 'AccessTo' that is similar to 'OwnerOf' that can be used to get a link of objects that they user can access
- The new Swagger UI can be accessed as /Activate/swagger. The user must be a member of 'Activate Developer' or a new role 'Activate API User' (this role does not exist by default but can be created)
- There are new FlowPanel and FlexPanel controls to make it easier for mobile devices
- This implements the CSS flex box pattern. More information on this can be found here - https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/
- There is a new Role Reference parameter type that should be used in place of plain References
- JQuery has been updated to 3.1.1.
- All JS and CSS files are automatically bundled and minified by .NET
- There is a new SelectOU control
- There is a new ability to provide a join in CommonProperties for Services and Assets. An example of joining to ADCache to object some user information is below:
<schema table="Asset_Phone">
<property name="PhoneNumber" type="System.String" sqlType="varchar(20)">=/data/phoneNumber/StorageValue</property>
<join to="left outer join ADCache on OwnerGuid = ADCache.Guid">
<property name="OwnerTitle" type="System.String">ADCache.title</property>
<property name="OwnerDepartment" type="System.String">ADCache.department</property>
</join>
<index name="Asset_PhoneIdx2">AssetInstanceID, PhoneNumber</index>
</schema>
- % =sensitive("=/expression")% can be used to encode data that should not be stored in the database
- After an email is sent this value will be replaced with '*************'
- The value will still be sent in clear text in the email
- Controls that are not visible are no longer bound into the job
- Previous versions bound the value of a control into the job regardless of whether the control was visible or not
- It is unlikely that this was used, however, to standardise how binding works there values are not bound
- The mostly affects ListPanel/OptionalPanel
- NOTE: 6.5 also introduced another change that can affect users upgrading from previous versions
- Previous to that version of a control was bound to an empty value - then the existing value was kept
- The means that a control like <SelectUser User="=//CurrentUser" ActivateBind="user"> would default to the current user if the user element in the job was blank
- In 6.5+, the value in the binding overrides the default and the user value will be cleared. The fix for this is to set the default value in the job arguments
- <user>=//CurrentUser</user>
Activate 7.0.0a - 27th May 2019
- Added additional index for TrusteeSid for FolderAce - Speed up Suggest access on sites with a large number of folders
- Activate Anywhere
- Updated jQuery version to match main Activate version
- Added ability during install to specify that SSL only should be enabled. This enables production installs without requiring the web.config to be changed
- Fixed an issue where ANR searches for custom properties for assets and services where case sensitive - reverted to being case insensitive
- Fixed an issue with ServiceInstanceQuery generating an incorrect join
Activate 7.0.0b - 10th June 2019
- Fixed upgrade issue where ResponseMsg on JobActionUser table was not changed to nvarchar(max) on some SQL installs
- Removed error when adding an invalid group to a list. This fixes an issue when DL References are no longer valid
- Added missing ticket status icons
- Fixed SelectAssetInstance issue with the default service form not being visible and therefore SearchDefaults not being bound correctly
- Fixed SharePoint Admin issue where nodes under WSS could not be seen
- Update SharePoint Request Access to match Folder access
- Added Tags to Activate Administrator for Articles
- Passwords generated by Resources.Passwords.GeneratePassword will not automatically ensure that the password is complex based on standard Active Directory complexity rules
- Fixed an issue where the system.log file was not under LogFiles
- Fixed an external Azure User import issue
- Fixed issue where Activate Administrator enforced 'Delete' rights to delete a parameter but it should have been write access instead
- Added header when adding Notes to jobs to reflect who was notified of the new note
- Fixed CSS issue with rendering Service Instances in some browsers
- Fixed an issue from 6.5.1f where RunAsJob could sometimes clear the current Job. This causes an issue in 6.5.1 where Grouped services where not rendered sometimes
- Added ability to display the stack trace during an error if the user was being impersonated by someone that is an Activate Developer or Administrator
- Fixed SelectAssetInstance issue with custom query when there are URL reserved characters
- Enable Request Validation for .NET 4.5
- Enable events/onValidate on GenericConfirm
- Fixed issue with client scripts in Web Portal WebForm Editor
- Fixed Service export/import issue where the GUID was not kept
- Fixed parameter Type change issue keeping ValueGuid
- Activate Anywhere
- Fixed issue where referrers were not passed through. This broke some functionality to ensure the user returned to the correct page when clicking Cancel
- Fixed issue with no session being available during startup causing event log entries that are not required
Activate 7.0.0c - 8th July 2019
- Fixed issue with closing dialog where the page was reloaded sometimes - Performance improvement
- Fixed issue with Dynamic Tabs rendering sub controls sometimes when they shouldn't - Performance Improvement
- Speed up WorkflowSummary/JobDetails/JobActionsFeedControl by preloading User records
- Optimised JobEmail to never attempt to load parameters
- Optimised performance for loading properties for Draft jobs that are not required
- Fixed an issue when Deleting Draft jobs from JobList.aspx returning to the home page
- Fixed SelectMultipleUsers.aspx issue with selecting users from the autocomplete
- Fixed issue with Service.ServiceInstances.Count not working correctly
- New Activate Anywhere Anonymous External User Registration process (not enabled by default)
- Added missing Icon for UserNoUpdateL.png
- Mailbox Office 365 - new Sync process to batch and speed up process by detecting changed mailboxes
- Fixed IE11 issue with disabled tables
- Fixed issue with DateTime Picker where Min/Max date was not honoured
- Fixed issue with ServiceReference where an invalid entry could not be deleted
- Fixed issue with Connnectors.UserChangeHandler where if an event was not specified the event was not marked as complete
Activate 7.0.0d - 21st July 2019
- Allow multiple OverrideUpdatableOU separated by a ";"
- Search Enhancements
- Fixed issue where partial words in names was no matching sometimes (fixed issue with user names)
- This requires an index update. So should be done manually on upgrade or will take affect the next day
- Fixed issue where if global AvailableObjects was set you could not search for job numbers
- Allow AvailableObjects to have "-" in front of RefTypes to exclude these rather than needing to include all valid options
- Allow wildcard search within Text/Keywords etc for words of length 4 characters and more
- Improved search document scoring to adjust relative level of objects within the search results
- ImageUpload control
- Show KB rather than MB if max size is less than a 1MB
- Fixed issue on initial load where the image size was the ImageSize rather than DisplaySize
- If the image size uploaded is within 8pixels of the ImageSize, don't rescale - this stops double rescaling and potentially making the image bigger
- Fixed rare case with BrowseObjects where could show the root of //Resources if the root was set to the Child which was a Leaf (meaning it had no children)
- Added SQL functions to support improved Analytics
Activate 7.0.0e - 2nd August 2019
- Fixed MailboxResource issue introduced in 7.0.0d where a Mailbox Resource could not be created manually
- Fixed issue with Escalating to Roles
- Fixed issue with Connector workflows notifying a role
- Fixed Activate Administrator issue duplicating bindings when creating a new Arguments parameter
- New File Upload Control that supports chunking large file uploads
- Fixed issue with displayColumns from SelectUserFromList.aspx not being used
- Fixed refresh issue when editing services on an approval screen
- Added //Resources/Users/AvailableUsers
Activate 7.0.0f - 12th August 2019
- Installer enhancements
- Auto run Activate Administrator at end of install
- Error if not running as 'Administrator' under UAC
- Fix issue if Config Wizard is cancelled
- Fix a SQL issue on new install
- Record the Install Directory and reuse on reinstall
- Fix SQL install issue some recent versions of dbo is the service account
- Misc Administrator fixes
- Fixed issue with bindings not being renamed correctly
- Added UPN to the user properties page
- Other minor fixes
- Fix Web Grid issue in Edit mode with double click removing the row
- Added template for app_offline.htm
- Allow ConnectAs for Exchange Resources
- Fix Role Member vs Role properties issue
- Fix issue with relative paths and embedded base64 encoded images
- Fix an issue with deleted users on being loaded if a domain was specified on the path
- Temporarily hide a job that has just been approved or declined from the JobList to allow the server time to process the request.
- Change Rest API Post to allow naked body rather than just a JSON string
Activate 7.0.0g - 9th September 2019
- Added ability to add AvailableUsers for External Web from 6.5.1h
- Updated RequestValidation to allow TextBoxes to support HTML if AllowHTML is enabled.
- This disables the standard .NET validation and is now done by Activate.
- Automatically encode RequestReason in job views
- Fix missing icons for ticket and running runs when searching
- Fix job search issue when searching for 'SELF'
- Fix ParameterList issues with deleting newly added rows
- Fix issue with updating Service approvers where groups where not binding
- Fix admin issue where scroll bar was missing when editing messages
Activate 7.0.0h - 4th October 2019
- Fixed issue with CreateMailbox in Exchange Online
- Fixed routing issue with POST to api/Job and allow the content to be raw XML rather than JSON string encoded