We’re proud to announce the release of Connect 9.3, which will be rolled out to all customers within the following week. The following is a short overview of the improvements in this release.

Interactive Access Icons

Given the variety of audiences involved in a beta test, controlling access to resources and information can be a real challenge. While Connect has always offered granular access control for all of community and project resources, we’ve developed a new way to both review and modify this functionality at a macro level, in far fewer steps.

We’ve implemented this through a series of new interactive management level icons which are available across all resource types (feedback types, user forums, surveys, tasks, wikis, test platforms, user profiles, etc.) These icons quickly indicate which Teams have access to each resource. Clicking an icon will instantly toggle access to that resource.

Knowledge Base Improvements

A valuable feature in Connect is our centralized knowledge base, which provides access to all of a projects resources. This feature is valuable in a beta testing environment due to the variety of methods that information is often conveyed by beta testers. For Connect 9.3 we’ve revisited the knowledge base, and implemented improvements focusing on two aspects: (1) Making it easier to access key information, and (2) Making it faster to work with.

Improved Quick Search – To access key information we’ve greatly expanded our quick-search feature, which allows you to receive immediate results simply by typing in the search box. We’ve expanded this functionality to include all of the searchable project resource types (including distributed values, forums, releases, and more).

For example, typing a users name into the Surveys section will quickly display a list of all surveys that user has completed. Similarly, we can quickly access any forum topics by typing a phrase from a topic, or find out who’s been assigned a specific serial number just by typing a portion of it.

Standard and Comprehensive Search – Beyond the Quick Search we’ve also improved the way that normal searches work, offering quicker results for most queries. Beyond general query and code optimization, we’ve accomplished this be altering the set of fields searched by default to the things users search for the majority of the time, like feedback titles and IDs, forum posts, and basic user information. For deeper searches we’ve also added a new Comprehensive Search option, which searches everything in the project, including all custom fields.

External File Logging

While Connect has included detailed download logs for local files (builds, etc.) for a number of years, Connect now captures logs for files which are distributed via external CDNs, such as Akamai. This allows Project Managers to track downloads of builds and other files directly within Connect, without the need of external logins and tools.

Incomplete Resource Dashboard

The goal of the Connect Project Manager Alerts dashboard is to centralize information that Project Managers may need to be aware of throughout their beta tests. We’ve enhanced this dashboard by including a new section titled “Unpublished and Incomplete Resources”. This new section includes a list of any resource which has been created, but not yet published or activated throughout a project. Each resource is linked, allowing project managers to access it.

In addition to these changes we’ve continued to squash bugs, add visual polish, and improve performance across Connect.