Announcing the latest and most feature-rich release of eSearch for new installations and upgrades from the previous version.

v3.3 is the latest release of eSearch, Iron Mountain's asset management product. It offers a wide variety of additional capabilities to make the task of managing physical assets and their associated metadata and attachments (electronic documents) easier and more efficient.

This software is now commercially available for new installations and upgrades. Please contact your account manager at Iron Mountain or Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS) to obtain your software.

If you need technical assistance, please contact us.

LATEST: eSearch 3.3 Service Pack 1 is now available for download

Headline changes since the base release of v3.2 include:

GENERAL USABILITY

IMPROVEMENTS

General Improvements to Desktop

Application:

Count of selected rows on all grids

From this release onwards, every screen in the Desktop application where a grid is displayed will show a counter on the status bar at the bottom of the application, indicating how many rows have been selected out of all those entries being displayed in the list. This provides a quick and simple way for users to check how many entries they have selected. See the example below:

Consistent Use of ‘Cancel’ and ‘Close’

In previous releases of the product, there were some examples (particularly within the Data Designer functions) of popup windows and dialogs that could be dismissed with a ‘Cancel’ button and/or a ‘Close’ button. In order to make it consistently clear what the difference is between these two actions, the following ‘rules’ have been applied throughout the Desktop application: ‘Cancel’ is always used to stop or rollback the current operation, ‘OK’ is always used to dismiss a popup window that is displaying information which the user needs to confirm or accept. ‘Close’ is always used to dismiss a popup window that is displaying information where no acceptance or confirmation is required.

Consistent Use of ‘Esc’ Key to Close Dialogs

The Desktop application now consistently applies the behaviour that the ‘Esc’ key on the keyboard closes all popup windows in the same way as clicking the ‘Cancel’ or Close’ button.

IMPROVEMENTS TO SEARCHING

Datatype Query Screen

The following improvements have been made to the Query screen, appearing after a datatype is selected for searching.

Specify Sort Sequence for a Query

The options previously displayed on the top right hand section of this page have now been combined into a new ‘accordion’ type of control, where three titles are displayed (as shown in the screen shot below), such that clicking on each title opens up the particular options relating to that title. One of these sections is new, and entitled ‘Sort Options’. This section displays three drop-down lists that only be selected in order. These lists allow the user to specify, in sequence, how the whole search results shall be sorted by up to three fields. The real benefit of this feature is that it affects the sorting of the entire results set, not just a single page of records.

Loading and Saving Sorted Queries

This new option for pre-sorting search results is supported by the load / save query functions, allowing the sort settings to be stored and later recalled. Any query saved prior to this release is still compatible: the sort options for such a query will show the default sort field positions, as determined by the administrator for that datatype.

Consider the visual changes to the Desktop Application for this new feature:

This new feature has been equally introduced in the Web application, using the same kind of ‘accordion’ type control, as shown below:

Datatype Search Results Screen

The following improvements have been made to the Summary Results screen, appearing after a query is launched for a datatype.

Improvements to Paging

This release makes it much easier to retrieve and navigate through large numbers of records matching the search query, as described below:

Retrieve up to 10,000 records with one click

A new double-down arrow icon is introduced into the Desktop application only, which retrieves more records from the results set automatically so that the total number of records displayed on the current page of search results is 10,000. However, due to workstation memory limitations, the system prevents more than 10,000 records being displayed at once, and so for that reason this double-down button is disabled after its first use. All the page navigation buttons are available as appropriate with this feature.

Consider the following screen shots, showing this feature in action: Before the new button is clicked: 50 records retrieved, 12 records selected in the search results, as usefully indicated by the new selection counter.

After the new button is clicked once:

12 records still selected in the search results but now an additional 9950 have been retrieved and added to the bottom of the results, as usefully indicated by the new selection counter… all after just one click .

Scroll Down to Retrieve Next Page Automatically

Unless the above ‘Retrieve up to 10000’ button is pressed, then the next page of results is automatically retrieved and appended to the current page in the following two scenarios: Scroll Bar reaches the bottom of the search results grid by the Page Down key being hit, or by the Down Arrow key. The mouse is used to drag the scrollbar to the bottom of the results.

Progress Indicator while waiting for search results

An indeterminate progress bar is now displayed at the top of the search results page while it is waiting for the first results to be displayed. This progress bar disappears as soon as the first record appears, and so it may only appear momentarily on fast networks or so simple, fast queries.

This section describes changes made to the areas of the product relating to loading and manipulating data.

IMPROVEMENTS TO EDITING

& LOADING DATA

Bulk Edit added to Web Client

The same facility provided in earlier releases of the Desktop application is now introduced into the Web application as a Flash-based component which requires the browser to support the Adobe Flash Player 9 plug-in. See section 6.1. This feature is initiated by clicking on the ‘Bulk Edit’ link added to the bottom of the Datatype Query screen in the Web application. Because it is a Flash-based component, it achieves the same level of dynamic interaction as the Desktop application itself, and as such the usability of this feature is significantly easy within the Web context. Note: this feature is currently limited to operate from the query screen only (not the search results). Therefore, the user must establish the correct query first, to identify all records to be edited, and by then clicking on the ‘Bulk Edit’ link, this will ensure all those records are changed as desired.

This screen shot shows a value being picked from the lookup list for a selected field on the Bulk

Edit screen:

The screen shot below shows the completed selection of new values for selected fields, and a scheduled time for the edit to occur:

Viewing Bulk Edit Job Status in Web Client

Because the capability has been introduced into the Web client to schedule bulk editing of records matching a specified query, it is consequently important to provide users with the ability to view the status of those scheduled jobs. Hence the ‘Job Queue Administration’ feature has also been added to the web application, but where it only displays Bulk Edit jobs.

This feature is accessed from a new option on the ‘Settings’ page as highlighted below:

Clicking this link launches another new Flash-based feature, as shown below. Because this Job Queue Administration screen is a Flash-based component, it achieves the same level of dynamic interaction as the Desktop application itself, and as such the usability of this feature is significantly easy within the Web context.

In addition, the displayed table of job queue entries supports multi-column sorting simply by clicking on the header of one column (a ‘1’ is displayed in it), then any other column (a ‘2’ is displayed in that column header to identify it) and so on. Additionally, this feature supports the expected capabilities of dragging columns around the grid to reposition them, and selecting multiple rows, but with a much better performance than these equivalent operations in the rest of the web application… all benefits of using Flash-based components.

This screen shows the Detail popup window that appears when the user double-clicks on an entry in the job queue list:

Improvements to Desktop Job Queue

Administration

The Job Queue Administration screen in the Desktop application has been enhanced in the following ways:

A new way of selecting and sorting between the different types of jobs is provided by means of a tab group, where each type has its own list. Consequently, each job type displays the most pertinent information for that type, and as such

the following additional information is displayed, as well as the common core information such as time scheduled and status: Bulk Edit Jobs now display the Datatype, Bulk Upload Jobs now display the Batch Reference and associated Customer (as highlighted in the screen shot below), Finalisation Jobs displays the Customer and User . All Jobs contains the full combined list of all jobs, where the common atrributes (including the Customer and Datatype) are displayed. This allows all jobs to be sorted by date etc.

See screen shot below…

Improved Editing of Multiple Value

Fields

Free Text Entry of First Value

The first value to be entered into a ‘multiple value field’ on a datatype is now considered as a ‘normal’ text field. This means that the Insert and Amend screens in the Desktop and Web applications offer a simple text entry box for the multiple field if there are no previous values in that field. This benefits the user by them not needing to click on any button to popup any window to enter the first value. As soon as one value is stored in the multiple-value field, the user needs to click on the button next to that field on the Insert and Amend forms to open the Multiple Field Editor, but note how the usability of that Editor has been significantly enhanced, as described next.

Improved Editor for managing values in a Multiple Field

This release provides a much easier way to enter values into a multiple-value field, as shown by the screen shot below. Values can be typed in or picked from the Lookup List of current values in that field (if one is to be re-used). Also it is easy to rearrange the position of values in the list or paste new values from the clipboard (for values copied from another source such as a column of a spreadsheet). Instances of this type of field that are also validated (such that the entries in the list must appear in a pre-defined list of valid values) have additional capabilities as follows:

A ‘Validate All’ button on this editor can be clicked to immediately identify all those values that are invalid (by seeing them highlighted in red) .The main Insert / Amend form shows a drop-down list of values in this field. When ‘Save’ or ‘Save & Exit’ are clicked to store the changes, then if any values in this field are invalid, the form cannot be exited, and each individual invalid value is highlighted in the dropdown list, thus easily identifying the specific corrections needing to be make.

Enhancements to ‘Batch Reference’ in

Data Loader

Auto-Generated Batch Reference

The Input New Batch and Load Data Wizard features of the Data Loader tool have been enhanced to support the option of an automatically generated Batch Reference sequence, which offers a guaranteed system-wide unique value for each new batch, where the generated reference is in the sequence ‘AA00001’ through ‘ZZ99999’. The automatic generation of this reference is activated or de-activated in the ‘ dataload.properties ’ file on each deployment of the Data Loader (where it is ‘on’ by default).

Increased Size of ‘Batch Reference’

The batch reference column has been increased in size to 30 characters in all appropriate places in the database, and the main Desktop and Data Loader applications changed to allow input of 30 characters into the batch reference field.

Less Steps in Data Loader ‘Load Data Wizard’

Due to the introduction of support for SKP Account Hierarchy into the Load Data Wizard (see 5.3), the number of steps in this wizard has been reduced to simplify the process by combining several related steps into one step with more than one question on the same screen.

IMPROVEMENTS TO

ADMINISTRATION

FUNCTIONALITY

Improvements to User Administration

Enhanced Display Profiles

In this release the Display Profile has been be enhanced to store all the same settings as appear on User Preferences (under ‘My Settings’) except for File Viewers (because File Viewer settings are shared between workstations by means of the ‘mime types’ file, not by these profiles). Note that each Display Profile is given its own identifying name. The clear advantage of this improvement is to allow different users to be assigned the same settings for these features.

Notice the following differences on the Display Profile screen compared to the ‘My Settings’ screen:

1. The root node allows for the inputting of a mandatory name, which must be unique within the scope of the Customer. So, when a new display profile is created the user cannot move away from this node until a valid name has been input.

2. The 'File Viewers' node under the 'General' node is intentionally absent, as explained above.

3. The 'Security' node is intentionally absent, as it is only relevant to a specific user so the settings under this ‘branch’ have no purpose for display profiles.

When an individual user logs in, first their own user preferences are checked for the various attributes. If they do not have such specific settings themselves, then the attributes from their associated display profile attributes are used. For attributes that may or may not be present on a user preference or display profile (e.g. field positions), if the user’s preference has a field positions setting for the datatype then that is used, otherwise if the user’s display profile has field position settings configured for the datatype then that is used. Otherwise the standard field positions are used. When the display profile assigned to particular users is changed (by amending it in the Display Profile Management screen), then any user preferences the users may have that are different to the display profile are kept by the user. This means the user can override the settings from their assigned display profile. However, when the administrator reassigns the user to a different display profile (either via User Management, or by assigning users to different display profiles in the Display Profile Management screen), then any user preferences the user may have are removed. Then when they next log on, their user preferences will be automatically updated to match their new display profile settings. This feature allows the administrator to distribute the same set of preferences to one or more users at once.

Cascading Field List Changes

When a new field is added to a datatype it is added to all existing display profile field positions for the datatype in the same way as it is added to all user preferences field positions. This means that as an administrator adds a new field to a datatype, then it is automatically added to the list of fields all assigned users are able to see.

Resetting User Preferences Back to Default

In this release, a feature is added to the My Settings screen of every user, to allow them to reset some or all of their settings back to the default configuration in the following three ways: resetting the field lists of a specific datatype back to the default settings resetting all field position lists back to default settings (for all datatypes) resetting all preferences back to the settings of the Display Profile assigned to that user . Note that this feature applies to the user’s preferences only, not the Display Profile.

Security Enhancement for URL Attachments

A new System Setting option is added for administrators as shown below. This option allows the location of URL attachments to be hidden from all users who do not have permission to Manage Attachments.

The following screen shots show the effects to such users of activating this option:

Improvements to Data Model Designer

Easier Identification of Applied Shared Fields

In the list of fields for a selected datatype, the Shared Field for each datatype field is now included as the last column, as shown below. Hovering the mouse over a value in this field displays the id, type, length and case-sensitivity of that Shared Field.

Notice also how the count of selected entries of this list is displayed here, as it is for all lists and grids in the Desktop application (see section 1).

Add Several Datatype Fields in Same Wizard Session

A new option is added to the final step of the ‘Add Field Wizard’ to allow for another field to be created without leaving the wizard, as shown below.

Improved Export of Datatype Structure

This release now adds support for re-using the same Shared Fields, Expansion fields and Validation fields when a datatype is exported. The system achieves this by checking all the existing Shared Fields when an exported datatype is then imported into an eSearch system (whether it be the same instance or a different one). If a Shared Field already exists that is genuinely identical to the one used for the exported field, then it is re-used and the new datatype field is constructed with dependence on that existing Shared Field. This eliminates the significant hindrance found by users on earlier versions where numerous duplicate Shared Fields may have been created when an exported datatype structure was imported into eSearch. Furthermore, with the equivalent support for Expansions and Validations, this means an exported datatype structure is now imported into eSearch with exactly the same structure, unless Dynamic Element Fields and Hierarchies are involved.

IMPROVEMENTS TO INTERFACE

WITH SAFEKEEPERPLUS

New Search: Statistics of SKP Files

Processed

This release introduces a new main option for searching and browsing the records of all files from the Iron Mountain SafeKeeperPLUS system that are processed by eSearch each day. The screen shot below shows the query page for this type of information. Note how the type of statistics (one of four options as shown) can be specified here, as different information is shown on the search results for each type.

The screen shot below shows an example of the search results, which includes the SKP filename with processing timestamp, and counts of the records updated, and exceptions.

The ‘View Errors’ button can be used to display all the exceptions raised for a selected entry from this log.

SKP History Information on eSearch

Item History

When files are processed from SafeKeeperPLUS containing status updates for barcoded items, the status of that item in eSearch is correspondingly updated. Additionally, when eSearch is used to order items in SafeKeeperPLUS, the corresponding SKP Order Number (and Date and SKP Contact) is then stored against the Item History of that item in eSearch. This is displayed as an additonal tab on the View Item History window, as shown below.

Additional Information on eSearch Order Activity

The Order Activity part of the Item History view has also been enhanced to include the eSearch Order Number and type of order, as shown below. This means it is now easy to cross reference the eSearch order with the SKP order for a selected item.

Data Loader Support for SKP

Information

The Data Loader tool now supports the entry of values into attributes used as part of the interface between eSearch and SKP. The supported attributes are listed below:

The SKP Account Hierarchy attribute is only visible in the above functions if the system has been configured to use the eSearch-SKP interface. All of these SKP-related fields shall adopt the same business rules as for the rest of eSearch, for example: the SKP Account Hierarchy is affected by the selection of Storage Location (in that a SKP Account hierarchy value can only be assigned when the Storage Location is set to an Iron Mountain type of location).

Input & AmendBatch and Batch Summary

These screens display the required SKP attributes as additional fields within the Physical Item field List.

Load Data From File (wizard)

The capability to load records from a spreadsheet-based text file has been enhanced to display a new step in the wizard for mapping values in the data file to existing entries in the SKP Account Hierarchy. This operation is closely based on the equivalent step for mapping to Location Hierarchy values. There is no option for adding new values to the SKP Account Hierarchy by this process. Other new SKP-related fields are included in the list of mappable fields in the Load Data Wizard as expected.

IMPROVEMENTS TO ESEARCH

INSTALL TOOLS & DEPLOYMENTS

Support for Installing Flash Player

As described in section 3.1, eSearch now contains some Flash components as part of the Web application interface. This requires the Adobe ® Flash ® Player to be installed for the browser using the eSearch Web client. To support this pre-requisite, the eSearch Software Installer now bundles the licensed distribution of the Flash ® Player installers as shown below, thus allowing the Flash ® Player plug-in to be installed with eSearch.

Auto-Update of Desktop Applications

from Server

A facility has been introduced in this release to allow all eSearch Desktop applications connecting to an eSearch Application Server to be automatically centrally updated as soon as they connect to the server. In this way, all the desktop clients can be upgraded when a patch or update becomes available without any manual intervention.

Changes to Desktop Application Startup

From this release onwards, a small ‘bootstrap’ utility is inserted into the eSearch Desktop launcher mechanism so that it runs first before the Desktop application, every time the ‘eSearch Desktop’ program is started. The purpose and behaviour of this utility are described below.

Supported Operations

The ‘Patch Updater’ utility supports the following types of action: Add new files to the eSearch deployment ,Update existing files to a new version of the same file , Replace existing files with different filenames, used when version specific files are to be updated, Remove files that are now redundant, Updates are only carried out once for the same defined update files.

The screen shot below shows the behaviour of this Update utility when there are appropriate update files made available on the Application Server.

This allows all networked deployments of the eSearch Desktop application to be upgraded automatically from the next update released after v3.3.1, thus saving significant time and effort of eSearch administrators.

Centralised Localisation File

Prior to this release, all the localised tokens used in Data Loader tool were defined in a separate file called ‘ bulkcomponentlocale.properties ’. As eSearch gets translated into more languages, it becomes more important to support the users who will translate the 'componentLocale' files. Therefore, the previous two files used to store the token/value pairs for Gui/Web and Data Loader separately have been merged into one file as much as possible, with the sections clearly differentiated in the main file for each product. A few tokens directly specific to Data Loader only still remain – these are located in the original file which has now been renamed to: ‘ dataloadercomponentlocale.properties ’.

Technical Changes only

This section describes ‘behind the scenes’ changes that are of interest to administrators and support staff.

Oracle 10g Only!

This release drops support for Oracle releases earlier than v10.1 (such as all 9.x versions), therefore only Oracle 10.2 is supported. Databases must be upgraded to Oracle 10.2 before upgrading from a previous release of eSearch.

Support Added for Oracle Standard Edition

This release of eSearch supports Oracle 10g Standard Edition (SE) being used as the database server, in addition to Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition. Certain alterations have been made to eSearch to support the functional differences between these two editions as follows:

eSearch Feature Support for Oracle 10g Editions  

eSearch Functionality Impacted by Oracle SE

The above table highlights the two features in eSearch that are only available in Enterprise Edition: Row Level Security and Bitmap Indexes . The implication of the lack of these features in the other Oracle editions (such as SE) is explained below:

Using eSearch Without Row Level Security

Installing eSearch on an Oracle Standard Edition database means that row-level security features will not be available in eSearch. In particular, the following features are consequently disabled in eSearch:

Affected features:

eSearch Desktop Application _ ‘ Manage User Security Profiles ’ _ Adding and Amending

User Security Profiles

There is no 'Shared Field Filters' option.

This means it is not be possible to restrict users’ access to records within all datatypes using certain Shared Fields where those Shared Fields contain specified values. If you require this feature in eSearch, you will need Oracle Enterprise Edition.

eSearch Desktop Application _ ‘ Manage Datatype Security Profiles’ _ Adding and Amending Datatype Security Profiles .There will be no 'Record Level Filters’ option. This means it is not possible to restrict users’ access to certain records within the selected datatype by means of filtering out all records containing specified values in certain fields. If you require this feature in eSearch, you will need Oracle Enterprise Edition.

Using eSearch Without Bitmap Indexes

Installing eSearch on an Oracle Standard Edition database prevents bitmap indexes being added to datatype fields. This will result in a reduction in the performance of indexed searching compared to Enterprise Edition, but only in those specific situations described in the Appendix where bitmap indexes are advantageous . Hence for some customers, this lack of bitmap indexes might not result in any impact. Consequently, in eSearch the list of available indexes in the ‘ Add Field’ wizard and ‘ Amend Field’ dialog in the Data Designer module of the eSearch Desktop Application does not include the option for ‘ Bitmap ’ index, when Oracle Standard Edition is being used. This implication has no other effects – all other features for indexing and searching are still available with both editions of Oracle 10g.