1 bxp Release 9 Service Enhancement Release 1

As part of our ongoing development of bxp there are some system wide changes coming that will be rolled out in a package as part of our continuous program of improvement.

This document allows you to see what changes will be made and if you have any queries to raise them before the go live date.

Most of these changes are technical in nature and should present technical change to our users.

2 Primary Details

Roll out date and time in testing : 2016-06-03 Roll out date and time in production : 2016-06-09 22:00

From this point, database tables may / may not be available to access as the content is converted. (Details below).

3 System Wide Engine Change

3.1 UTF-8

As bxp is used more and more for mailbox content retrieval and is being used to facilitate more and more languages globally including operations now in Chinese, the support for a greater set of characters is required.

bxp currently supports iso-8859-15 [1] which has support for the Euro character.

bxp is going to change the front end web pages to UTF-8 AND will also convert the database table storage to be able to store the characters natively. This should not affect any reporting or content delivery. Earlier browsers will have challenges delivering full character sets but there are direct fixes for these browsers and the challenging languages.

The primary reason for this change is:

Multilingual content support for bxp users in China
Data import from international APIs such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
Email retrieval causing green hamsters with Chinese spam mail

There will be no visible change to the front end of bxp. There is no roll back on this operation. Backups will not be affected in any way.

3.2 HTML5

The new features of HTML5 allow for enhanced interfaces and greater browser capability. Unfortunately HTML5 is not completely historically compatible and never will be. In fact it's not yet totally modern browser cross compatible either! Rather than battle with continued cross browser compatibility issues we are going to split the capability of accounts.

Using a user level flag a user can be XHTML 1.0 or HTML 5. If a user is set to XHTML 1.0 they will be historically compatible with everything. If they change to HTML 5 though predominantly identical in appearance, new features will be available in a growing number of areas.

The official line on HTML5 [6]

The new elements allow for nicer presentation of code [7]

There are numerous examples available of fun stuff including [8]

Drag and drop file upload
Browser video file playback support
Local storage
Offline Detection
Canvas (for signatures)
Geolocation native support

The challenge with HTML5 at the moment is that it is not universally consistent across all browsers YET! bxp will be ready for HTML5 as it comes together. This change allows clients to experiment with capability but revert for compatibility.

This will be a System Access Management flag at a user level.

4 New Features

4.1 Presence

As part of the Gamification modifications being developed this feature is being added. We will add a new optional turn on feature to bxp to allow detection of a user up to the last minute. This small code change simply update your presence information.

This is a system level option. i.e. You can turn in on for your bxp or not. The setting will be in System Settings in SAM. It will be turned off by default which means current system operation will not change.

Every user will have presence setting on their account (a last seen date time field). When you submit a page it will update your presence. For pages left open, i.e. waiting for something to happen, there will be a chunk of hidden AJAX on the page. Every minute it will update bxp to say (page open... doing nothing at the moment).

The status will be

Active (submit within the last minute) - Dark green
Waiting (submit from AJAX engine within the last minute - Light green
Gone away (No AJAX submit or activity within 2 minutes) - Orange
Inactive (No AJAX submit or activity within 5 minutes) - Red
Logged out (Logged out) - Black

This engine will help in a number of ways, if not all implemented in this SER:

Security visualisation of proper log out
Conference centre presence capability
Enhanced Contact History to show if user available today

4.2 Further features planned

There are a number of other features planned which are dependant on time whether they will be included or not in the release. Development up to 2016-06-03 MAY include:

Security : Native password hashing for all password fields
Time Tracker : User activity line graph over time
Information Centre : Company blog capability
eCourse : File drag and drop for upload
Form Management : Contacts configurable object for quick AJAX contacts setup, like Shopping Cart.
Database : In place upgrade to latest version of Db software

5 Client support

During roll out if any client wishes to between the 3rd and go live of the 10th test their instance of bxp, All n One can create your instance on the testing infrastructure to explore the changes.

Bxp Release 9 SER 1 - Release Notes

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