A busy bank holiday was spent by the team here at project-extranet upgrading our hosting infrastructure and putting the latest version of the core project-extranet software into production and deployed across all hosted extranets.
Increasing demand for our extranet services has meant we have been keen to ensure that we have the backend scalability necessary for both demand today and the future. To this end in the latest update (project-extranet v3.6) we have re-architected large portions of the core document storage framework as well as improving the extranet’s ability to scale on web farms. The results of this work are mostly behind the scenes and, apart from some small necessary changes and usability tweaks, so you should not notice many differences.
New Url
One of the necessary changes made was to update the Url of the software from ‘cloud9’ to ‘we’, with ‘we’ standing for Western Europe (in case you were interested). Cloud9 was the entry point for our old hosting platform which has now been put out to pasture. We have put auto-redirects in place, so any links to your extranet login should automatically go to the new extranet url. We don’t anticipate many issues with this, but if you find you need help, please get in touch the usual way via the contact pages.v3.6 lays the foundations for the next couple of updates, already well into planning and development, which includes some exciting new features.
It’s not all infrastructure stuff though. We have put three new Extranet Apps up into the Account App Store.
Search
Install this app into your Extranet and give your users the ability to search projects, documents, folders, the calendar, contacts and tags all from one handy location.Results are customised to each user, so the results set only contains items they have permission to view and our built in relevancy ranking feature should mean the item you are looking for is right at your fingertips.
Tagging
The Tagging App creates a whole new way to organise the information contained in your Extranet. For each project you can specify a collection of tags that can then be applied to items within that project; documents, folders, calendar items, contacts etc...You can then use the tags to find and filter all the items in your project.
e.g.
Show all items that are relevant to the tags ‘New Build Plot 34’ and ‘Invoices’ and ‘Plumbing’.
or
Show all items that are relevant to the tags ‘New Build Plot 34’ and ‘Ground Floor’ and ‘Blueprint’.
GPS Tagging
The third new App allows you to use a GPS enabled device (iPad/iPhone/Android/Windows Mobile/Blackberry for example) to add GPS data to your Tags creating Locations.Extranet Assets (Documents, folders, calendar items etc) can then be tagged to these Locations (using the Tagging App), then when your team is out in the field all they need do is open up your extranet and see all items that are tagged to their current location.
Accuracy is around 5 meters, meaning you can create locations close to each other, then as you wonder around, have the extranet filter the results accordingly.
The example we like to use when describing this feature is a new build housing site. Each plot having a house built has a location based tag stored in the Extranet. The site manager can walk around each house on the plot using his iPad (other tablets are available) and the Extranet will automatically show the assets specific to the location where he is currently standing.
This is a new feature to project-extranet and as such we are really interested to see how it works out in the real world. So if you plan to use the GPS Location Tagging, or would like to trial it, please let us know and we will do our best to make the feature work well for you.
