Release Notes - 3.0
ReIntended audience: ALL USERS
AO Platform: 3.0
Release Date
29 March 2021
Overview
Release 3.0 is a major version of the AO Platform. The underlying infrastructure of 3.0 is very similar to 2.3.2. Most apps developed in 2.3.2 would work in 3.0 with very few modifications. We have also introduced many new features that would make the development and management of solutions much more effortless and be done mainly from the browser without any local installation.
New Features
MSO Composer
MSOs help convert business concepts into configurable components that will be used within the AO Platform in extraction, formatting, aggregation of data, curating the apps, answering questions from the user. Until now, we had to fill an excel template to create MSOs. MSO Composer simplifies the entire process by providing a browser-based tool that can create and deploy an MSO within an intuitive user interface. The MSO composer supports every feature in an MSO, as listed below.
MSO Properties: The list of properties that an MSO has.
Sourcing: The source of data for an MSO with the capability to define multiple sources.
Traits: Traits can be used to define the functional behavior of an MSO, which can be used by other modules to understand the data better
Linguistics: Helps define language characteristics of the MSO both at an MSO level and at each property level
Search: Define how the data is indexed for fast search capability
Statistics: The statistical aspects of the data for each property
Curation: Defines how the data will be presented to the user.
Ontology Viewer
The created MSOs have a relationship with each other that forms a knowledge graph of all the collected information. The ontology viewer helps provide a visual presentation for this data. The viewer can only be used to explore the ontology and not modify it in any way.
App Composer
App Composer is a browser-accessible tool to create an App using a WYSIWIG interface without having to install any software on your local machine. All UI components and properties are available in the tool to drag and drop and configure the properties. The app can be connected to a pipeline and previewed within the App Composer.
Below are few UI Components that App Composer makes available for use.
Tables: Includes Client-Side DataTable, Server Side Data table, and Tree Table
Charts: Support for different types of Charts (XY Charts, Pie charts, Heat map, Funnel, Pyramid, etc.)
Containers: Supports UI Container, Apps Container, Tabview, Carousel, Stepper, etc.
Dataviews: User can build Simple Data view, Collapsible Data View and Group Dataview
Cue Cards: Cue cards can be built using templates from the Template Composer and also using javascript
Form: User can build Forms using the UI Controls supported in the App Composer
Map: Supports different types of layers (Point, Polygon, LineString, etc.)
UI Controls : (Supports all Combos, Dropdowns, Radio Button, List, Label, Text, etc.)
Features
Annotation: Attach annotation strategy created using annotation composer to an app.
Versions: Never lose your development by saving them as versions that can be referred to, copied, or restored later.
Publish: All apps are created as drafts and will not impact the current production version until it is published.
Template Composer
Publish and Draft feature: An enhancement in pipeline composer to have a published mode or draft mode of templates.
Page Composer
Use apps created by App Composer with in solution pages created in page composer.
Tribal Knowledge Capture
Apps once deployed don't improve much unless there is feedback about the application or the information shown back to the development teams. There is not much collaboration about the data between the users either. The AO Platform supports collecting, sharing, and applying the knowledge that users have about the business, data, and the application using Tribal knowledge capture. Every app and solution on the platform will provide the capability to provide the user's perspective. The Annotation Composer defines the mode of capturing this information.
Annotation Composer
Annotation Composer helps create a user interface for users to add their knowledge and comments on the apps and solutions' displayed information. There might be different ways to capture an annotation like text-based description or tags or emotional reactions like smiley faces or thumbs up and down. The created annotation strategy can be applied to different apps based on what kind of feedback is needed.
Annotation composer supports the following features:
Tags: The user can add user-defined tags to annotate.
Text: The user can add descriptive text.
List: The user can select any item from the list of options displayed from the List Component
Emotions, Sentiments, Thumbs Up/Down: The user can add comments in the form of Simley faces by selecting an icon.
Dropdown and Annotation Button: Users can select an option from the dropdown as their comment, and Annotate button is used to save the annotation.
Custom Reaction.: User can build their custom reaction using Annotation Composer and provide comments for the information.
Features
Versions: Never lose your development by saving them as versions that can be referred to, copied, or restored later.
Publish: All apps are created as drafts and will not impact the current production version until it is published.
Security
Hybrid Authentication: An implementation can be configured to allow users from two different identity management systems, namely, OpenID and the AO platform's database-based authentication.
SAML Integration: support for the SAML protocol.
Question and Answer (Q&A) Framework
The best interface to interact with any application is to use spoken language to get the answers we need instead of learning which buttons to click on it. The Q&A framework lets the users type questions in plain English and get the response as different apps, which will answer the question. There is no learning curve to use this interface. The MSO configurations support the Q&A framework.
Smart search
Feature Enhancements
Pipeline Composer
Publish and Draft feature: Pipeline composer now supports a draft or published status. During development, a pipeline can be in draft mode, where changes to an existing pipeline or new pipeline can be made. Once all complete, the pipeline can be published and is available to be used.
EMR integration: Integration to Amazon's Elastic Map Reduce service.
Sharepoint integration: Can connect to SharePoint and access the documents stored on the cloud.
SAP Ariba: Integration to SAP Ariba cloud service.
Performance Improvement
The platform's overall performance has been improved with features like caching runtime MSO structure for re-usability in a pipeline.
Deprecated Features
None
Issues Fixed
Not Applicable
System Requirements
Operating System: Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 10, RHEL 7.1+
Database: PostgreSQL 9.6+
Distributed computing: Apache Spark 2.2.1
Big Data Platform: HDP 2.6.4
Distributed Search: Elasticsearch 7.4
Java: JRE 1.8.0
Browsers: Google Chrome V63+
Upgrades
None