Release Notes

Version 11.0 brings a complete rewrite of support for repeat bookings. Previously, there were limitations in how repeat bookings could be used. In particular, we did not support:

• Creating a linked booking from a booking that repeats.
• Recording actual usage related to a repeat booking.

Both of these had issues that made them unsuitable for use with repeat bookings, but both of these are now fully supported in 11.0.

Admins can now log in and then "switch user" to see how things look from the perspective of another user. If you change any data while in this state, it will record both the user you really are as well as the one you're "pretending" to be.

Further details are available in the release notes.

Version 10.2 is targeted specifically at the Clinical Trials Management System (CTMS) module, making it fully production ready. This version is not recommended unless you are looking for CTMS in particular.

Version 10.1 includes the following changes:

• A new module called Clinical Trials Management System (CTMS) which merges the functionality from Exprodo SDM into Calpendo and extends it, and properly integrates it into Calpendo. This provides support for managing clinical trials or research studies, typically where you define the tasks and visits required for each study and enroll subjects into the studies that undertake those tasks across various visits.
• There are now a selection of changes that help with compliance with some regulatory requirements that exist in some customers environments. This includes:
  • using a secure block chain on the audit log so it can be proven not to have been tampered with;
  • requiring a reason for deletion of any data;
  • preventing any change to the audit log and file attachments;
  • recording outgoing emails;
  • simple scripts that can export the audit log into a relatively human readable form so that somebody reasonably technical can confirm the content.
• The calendars have had quite a few changes to make them better in various ways:
  • The display of bookings on the calendar can now be controlled by creating a suitable layout. This means you can now configure bookings with many properties to display those properties in tabs if you want to. This is especially useful where there are many custom properties on a booking.
  • The month navigator on the calendar makes it easier to jump a long way into the future or past.
  • You can now set the colour of a booking's title bar to reflect the project's colour.
  • Where there's a link to a booking, it will now show an icon that will let you jump straight to the calendar to see it. For example from a service order, or from a booking to jump to any linked child bookings it has.
  • Bookings on the calendar can display custom flags to indicate whatever you need. For example, if you have a booking that involves a patient who is in a wheelchair, you might have bookings show a flag that is an icon of a chair or somebody walking.
  • The background of the calendar indicates whether and when you can book. You can now choose to make it show whether and when you can book for a particular project rather than any of your projects.
  • It's now easier to see which aspect of a template applies now. For example, when a template has different behaviour far into the future, or in the very near term, it wasn't always obvious which applied now.
• Bookings in a search page now use the same display method as is used on the calendar. This means you can properly create and edit bookings on the search page which has not been fully supported before now.
• The workflow debugger has received additional improvements.

Version 10.0 includes the following changes:

• A big step forward towards an Enterprise system in which separate instances of Calpendo can work together in a federation where reports can be aggregated across instances and control over all instances can be exerted from a central instance.
• Full support for linked bookings. This is where a booking can automatically generate an ancillary booking, typically on a different resource and either at the same time or a slightly earlier time. Cancel or move the original booking, and the ancillary bookings change as well. No longer are workflows required to do this, so they are much easier to set up and manage.
• Kanban style reports.
• Stepped-edit improvements. You can edit data in a sequence of pages where the user clicks a "Next" button between pages. Improvements have been made, so it's now easier to start and resume an editing session in this stepped fashion.
• Support for writing Agresso-formatted files for integration with Agresso (now called "Unit4 Business World On").
• Custom Tree Pages - this is a new feature of the menu editor that lets you create a page that automatically generates a tree of items. Read the full release notes for more!
• Support for storing system requirements. This is intended for use when we have new customers, so that we can gather and store their requirements directly in the database. However, you can use it for storing any requirements you might want to handle as well.
• You can now send SMS text messages from a workflow.
• There's now a workflow debugger. This lets you record a workflow, and then step through the recording to examine exactly what it did.
• Workflows have support for subroutines, constants, JSON and XML processing and some new actions for importing data and creating key-value maps of data.
• Projects now start their life with a new "Draft" status. This allows somebody to create a new project and be able to change it as they please without necessarily triggering the approval process. Changing the status from draft to requested triggered the approval process instead.
• Layouts now support radio buttons for selecting a value as well as drop-downs. In particular, this is good for multi-choice questions. This can be used, for example, with some sort of a training quiz.

Version 9.0 includes the following changes:

• It continues the speed improvements started in 8.4 and feels much faster.
• The communication between browser and server has completely changed, allowing us to finish the speed improvements and paving the way for version 10 (Enterprise) which will see inter-Calpendo communication.
• The menu editor has had a major overhaul and is now consistent with the way other editors work.
• The look and feel of all tables displayed has changed to be much cleaner.
• There is now support for themes that control the colours throughout the system. There are built-in themes and you can also design your own.
• We have added a new method of generating PDF files from within workflows. This uses an input text file that is in an XSL FO format and (unlike the previous PDF generation method) does not require and command-line utilities to be installed or called from Calpendo.
• We have added support for barcodes to be displayed both on screen and also within generated PDF files.
• Sample tracking is now much better supported. This involves two parts:
  • You can now enter an Excel-like table of data all at once. This is for entering details about the samples, and also for entering details of what you'd like done with each of those samples. This also supports copy-and-paste within and between such tables, and you can drag from the corner of one cell and it will auto-increment values like Excel.
  • When filling in an order and specifying what analyses you'd like done with each of the samples, it will only let you choose samples that have been set up for that order.
• LDAP authentication now has an extra method of working to better support some LDAP server configurations.
• When using Calpendo to store passwords, we now check that new passwords being used have not been exposed in a security breach anywhere globally. This uses the service at haveibeenpwned.com

This is the first version to require Java 8. Previous versions have been compatible with Java 6.

Version 8.4 includes the following changes:

• It provides for additional authentication options, including making it much easier for us to offer Shibboleth single sign on and also to allow one Calpendo to provide authentication services for another.
• A new option for suspending users.
• You can now show pictures of your instruments in the bookings calendar.
• When cancelling bookings, there is now the option to provide free-text comments to explain why it is being cancelled, as well as the existing facility for choosing from a customisable drop-down of reasons.
• You can add messages directly onto templates in the template calendar. This allows for custom messages delivered to users just for that particular period on the calendar.
• Support for "tags".
• There are further improvements to workflows. In particular:
  • You can send emails and choose the to/cc/bcc recipients separately. Previously, all recipients were in the "to" section of the email.
  • There is a new event, triggered when a user logs in. This allows you to customise things about the user's settings at login time, and perhaps do custom checks about whether you want to allow them to log in.
  • You can listen to database events after they have completed. Currently, you can only have workflows that run while the event is in progress, which means you can veto the original event. Sometimes this is useful, such as being able to prevent a booking, but it's also sometimes undesirable if you don't want the chance of an error in your workflow preventing something being saved.
  • It's now easier to see the information output from each workflow action and which actions use information from which other actions.
• Some messages sent from the browser to the server will be handled completely in JSON format. This is a step towards version 9.0 where all messages will be JSON formatted.

Version 8.3 includes the following changes:

• Native LDAP authentication. We still support LDAP authentication configured in Apache HTTP Server, but native support makes it easier to configure.
• Synchronisation with an LDAP server so that you can use an LDAP server to keep user information (or anything else) up to date.
• Workflows can now send emails in HTML format as well as plain text.
• Audit log information is now saved very differently from how it was in earlier versions. There are three major things this affects:
  1. Writing out the audit log is now much faster than before.
  2. The audit log is compressed and so takes up much less disk space than before.
  3. The information stored in the audit log is now a complete record of the data, whereas previously some information could be missing.
• System events are also much faster to write and stored compressed so they take up much less space in the database. The System Events page is also much faster than before for viewing events.
• Lots of other things have been optimised to run much faster. In particular, older Calpendos that have collected a large number of users and projects would generally run slowly. It now feels very fast.
• Additional support for generating PDF files in a workflow (but only when running Java 7 or later). The methods provided previously may be removed in a future version because they are quite cumbersome.
• Forgotten password automatic reset via email (users can help themselves now)
• Calendar now shows an indicator of the time for the mouse's current position.
• Workflow changes:
  • The workflow manager displays a little differently - making much better use of space on the screen.
  • A new workflow action to calculate an expression. For example something like (4*x)/y where x and y can be replaced with values taken from the output of earlier items in the workflow. We could do this previously, but it would have required multiple actions for each part of the expression.
  • Some new workflow functions (more on business day calculus, adding and removing users to/from projects, formatting numbers and dates as strings)
  • Added support for running command-line utilities from a workflow. This allows us to access things like PDF file generation via groff and anything else that might be required.
  • Create a calendar invitation (ics) as an attachment that can then be attached to an email.

Version 8.2 provides a large number of improvements to workflows, in particular with many new functions being added. It also includes support for business date calculations so you can, for example, send an email 2 business days before a booking.

We also introduce the concept of "Activities". This will be expanded in future releases, and forms the basis of a means of defining a more intuitive manner of interacting with the system, in particular for a mobile app which is currently in development.

Calpendo Projects can now be rendered using a custom layout, defined in the Layout Editor, so that you can created nested tabs of data to display if you want to.

The memberOf and containsMember condition relations now work with Calpendo Resource/ResourceGroup and Project/ProjectGroup as well as working with users and user groups.

See the release notes or full documentation for details.

Version 8.1 introduced the ability for bookings for last for any length of time, where previously they could not go beyond midnight. To support facilities that have bookings which may last for years at a time, there are now infinite-scroll calendar views where you can choose the resolution so that you can see whatever period of time is appropriate in a single page.

We also introduced a TV Bookings Calendar which is the ability to display a calendar on a screen, such as in a facility foyer, which does not require anybody to log in to see, and can automatically display bookings for particular resources.

Instrument actual usage can now be gathered from PCs that drive each instrument. Previously, actual usage was designed only for situations where an operator would always be presented, such as with MR, MEG, PET and CT scanners.

Version 8.0 saw the introduction of Workflows. These provide a means of automating many things. They take on the Unix utility philosophy of providing many simple tools, each of which can be joined together in a pipeline that together can produce complicated results.

The system of Automatic Emails is now completely replaced by Workflows. A Workflow ties together any one of a number of triggering events to any one of a number of possible actions. Each action can also have child actions. An Automatic Email is now replaced by a Database Workflow Event that triggers a Send Email Workflow Action. These changes happen automatically when 8.0 first boots. /> Upgrades to 8.0 may require configuration changes after the upgrade. When first booted, the system will check for some situations which can't be automatically upgraded and so require manual assistance. This applies when you have advanced rules or custom report types, and could affect some formulaic properties.

Version 7.0 saw many improvements and was also the first version that provided for automatic database upgrades that could be applied at boot time. As a consequence, many features were added during the lifetime of 7.0 and 7.0 lived for a long time. This policy changed starting with 8.0, from which point there were fewer changes in each release and they occur more frequently.