Fluid Topics content delivery is undergoing a major technological redesign to meet the demands of changing business and research environments. Based on feedback and suggestions from our clients, we have modified the internal structure of Fluid Topics to integrate important new features. These modifications also prepare the solution for future innovations for spring, 2016.
Released in October 2015, Version 2.7 is a milestone on that journey, and even though we are working “under the hood,” the new version offers several new features and improvements.
Print your Personal Books
We believe that Personal Books (PBK) is a game changer with an incredible potential impact. For this version, we worked on export capabilities. For example, you can now choose to export a PBK as a local single HTML page (“Export as HTML”), which you can use for offline reading. You can also generate a PDF for printing. Our PDF generation engine leverages the Paged Media W3C standard, which means that the look and feel (fonts, titles, tables, page breaks, etc.) of your PDFs can be tuned through simple CSS files, just like a web page. And the output delivers high-quality PDFs.
Rights Management
Securing access to your content is critical. Ensuring people access only what they are entitled to see and avoid the use of misappropriate content can be very difficult to achieve rapidly while maintaining search flexibility. Why? Because content is typically not tagged with groups or users IDs when it is written. But how do you ensure proper access control?
Fluid Topics solves this problem in a simple yet powerful way thanks to its new rights management engine. The rights management engine allows users to create mapping rules between existing content metadata and security groups defined in an external security system (directory or SSO). This mapping capability creates a bridge between those two islands —content and security infrastructures— so that each one can evolve separately but still work together. For more information, you can read the blog post “How To Secure Access To Technical Content”.
Feature Flipping
The new Feature Flipping mechanism provides access to Fluid Topics features based on user profiles. For example, administrators can give access to the Personal Book creation only to partners or premium users, and block other users. Feature Flipping relies on the same rights mapping engine as content security, so it’s easy to define rules that associate groups with features.
Background work
The storage architecture for managing user related content and data (bookmarks, alerts, PBKs, comments, etc.) has been redesigned, simplified and optimized for speed and scalability. We eliminated the relational database and Fluid Topics now uses a high performance noSQL engine for user content.
Please give this new version a spin
and let us know what you think.
If you want to know the roadmap and participate to the choices of the next features, feel free to contact us.
We develop Fluid Topics for you.
