Version 3.5 is out! This major release mostly redesigns the user experience and increases findability of content. The main new features that are visible to users are:
Version 3.5 also brings more security and compliance, new connectors and enhanced data processing capabilities:
A new user interface for the web app
Version 3.5 brings a major refresh of the turnkey portal to make it more usable, integrate new features, get closer to full accessibility compliance (WCAG), offer better navigation on all devices (including mobile and tablets), and also make it easier to customize.
Search results clustering
When a topic exists in multiple variants, Fluid Topics dynamically groups search results corresponding to the same element under a single cluster (this can be due to multiple product versions, or to a topic that is reused in multiple maps, etc.).
The clustering mechanism has been fully redesigned, functionally and visually, to provide better readability and to address complex situations more efficiently.
Search in document
Searching inside a book has never been so efficient and elegant: spot instantly the matching topics or sections and jump directly to the content that matters.
Editorial home page
Version 3.5 introduces a visual environment to design rich home pages that mix advanced search capabilities and editorial content through a tile system:
- Create lines with one or multiple columns of tiles to design a personal layout.
- Include content in the tiles, including images and videos.
- Move tiles around using drag and drop.
Each language interface can feature its own set of tiles.
Multi-portal
With multi-portal, a Knowledge Hub can be shared between different environments: manage one central Knowledge Hub gathering all your content, and publish securely to different portals or environments (inline-help, helpdesk tool, …). Each portal can give access to a designated set of documentation and have its own visual identity, security rules, users, etc.
Typical use cases are distinct brand portals or building specific integration – for example one sub-portal could be dedicated to the integration inside Salesforce Service through the add-on.
GDPR compliance
To help customers comply with the new data protection regulations, and particularly with Europe’s GDPR, version 3.5 adds specific features:
Consent collection: users can be asked to validate legal terms, either the first time they authenticate, or every time you update your legal terms.
Transparency for the user: dump all information for a given user. This capability provides the mandated data reversibility.
Audit trail: tracking of every action an administrator performs on users, such as updating user data, changing role, deleting a user, dumping user info, etc.
New admin roles offering fine grained privileges for managing content, users and the platform.
Map attachment and ControlFile
Version 3.5 brings a full redesign of the Map Attachments feature – files attached to structured publication, also known as contextual downloads.
The UI has changed, including the possibility to set the order of the elements. The mechanism for setting these attachments has been fully redeveloped to cover more use cases and to facilitate the process of uploading and attaching documents to books. It is now part of the ControlFile mechanism, and some formats such as DITA and FTML allow the declaration of attachments inside the map itself.
Metadata traceability
Metadata is central to efficient content delivery and therefore metadata values must often be normalized, reorganized and even generated (AI makes wonders!). To keep track of provenance and of any modification, Fluid Topics introduces a Metadata Journal appended to each piece of content, down to the topic, bringing traceability and compliance to metadata management.
The metadata journal is visible to Knowledge Hub administrators in the turnkey portal:
DITA 1.3 enhanced support
Fluid Topics v3.5 now embeds DITA-OT 3 (alongside with different versions of DITA-OT 1 and 2) in order to provide support for DITA 1.3 format. It also adds specific pre- and post-processing steps to leverage specific capabilities of Fluid Topics such as content clustering.
API authentication
Fluid Topics provides web services that let you enrich your own applications and tap into content. For instance, content can be integrated to an existing support portal or maintenance apps.
New web services and protection mechanisms have been added so that API calls to Fluid Topics are not only protected, but authenticated as well (enforcing user access rights and profile), without users being asked to enter their credentials again if they previously signed-in to your app. These web services support two situations:
Direct login with credentials for internal, static, root and LDAP realms: new web services to login, logout and get information about the current session.
Authentication in an SSO realm (SAML, Google, Twitter or OpenId Connect compliant) in the context of a browser-based application.
Email customization
A new Admin menu called Notifications is now available, through which you can configure how emails are sent when users create feedback items:
- List e-mail recipients.
- Enrich e-mail subject with metadata, for instance for routing purpose to automate the creation of a ticket in a system.
- Preview feedback mails.
And more
Version 3.5 brings many more improvements such as:
- Better usability of My Library with enhanced search and sort capabilities of Bookmarks, Alerts or Personal Books.
- Features toggling: when Fluid Topics brings a feature that would change the user experience, you can control if and when that feature is made visible to users.
- Increased OpenSearch protocol with the addition of Atom as an output format.
- Security is strengthened against brute force attacks by adding a latency after each failed authentication attempt.
- Enrich & Clean adds the possibility to enrich several metadata items by using the same output metadata element.
For more information, check the release note
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.
