I’ve kept rather quiet lately as I’ve been working hard on this new version of Document Exchange. But just now I feel this is now at a stage where it can begin being released in the wild. DMX 6 builds on the strong features of DMX 5 and adds a bunch more. While at the same time effort has been devoted to try and slim down where possible. I feel any major upgrade is not just about adding new features but also examining what is there and if things can be trimmed. If you disregard the latter your product just bloats with features and risks sinking one day due to its own weight. You have to spend time on finding little tweaks that either reduce the amount of code or make the application run faster. In terms of new functionality I will highlight a few here.
Thumbnails
In DMX 6 any item can have a thumbnail. For image file types these are automatically generated. For others you may upload one. It is quite possible that in the future we include other thumbnail processors to include more file types.
Mailing
You can now send emails to others with documents from within the system. These can be sent as attachment or as a link with a unique key. You can send to users and/or roles.
Document Manager permission
You no longer need to give someone administrator’s privileges on the portal to allow them to manage all aspects of DMX. You can grant one or more roles the permission to manage all content related aspects of DMX. Only technical aspects remain the domain of Admins and Hosts.
New upload control
A new upload control based on Silverlight is included. This allows you to select any number of files in one swoop.
Complete change list
New Feature: Files can have thumbnails
New Feature: Ability to specify people with Document Admin rights which gives them almost all admin capabilities
New Feature: Subscription manager allows admin to examine and control subscriptions to items and hence notifications
New Feature: Language files can now be downloaded directly from Bring2mind without the need to go to the site.
New Feature: New upload control using Silverlight allows multiple file selection
New Feature: Integrated mail application allows users to mail documents to others with many options
New Feature: New default view UI now only shows 2 panels. The old 3 panel UI is optional.
New Feature: The details of a file can be seen by selecting "properties" from the context menu
New Feature: Doc Admins can recover hard deleted files from the "Graveyard"
Enhancement: Revised view template management allows template sharing across the portal
Enhancement: Revised view template syntax to allow for more powerful and complex templates (incl. Javascript)
Enhancement: Search engine revision should make it less prone to errors
Enhancement: Revision of the way content localization is implemented in the database
Enhancement: Improvements to IPortable should make it less prone to errors when used in portal templates
Enhancement: Lucene search engine update to 2.9. Supports highlighting as well.
Change: Code namespace reorganization
Change: Dependency to DNN 5.2.3
As mentioned before code efficiency has also been improved and a number of changes were made to the data model to enhance performance. This means that existing extensions will not work in all likelihood.
And all the help files have been edited and updated for this version …
Download
You can find the beta version here:
http://www.bring2mind.net/Downloads.aspx?EntryId=4338
A couple of things to note:
- Note this version no longer works on DotNetNuke 4! The minimum version is DNN 5.2.3.
- Most existing extensions will probably not work with the new version due to data model and API changes
- Keep in mind this is beta. Although we don’t expect any more changes to the data we cannot guarantee it so please don’t use in production.
- This is a time-limited (until November) version which does not need activation.
Let us know if you find anything.
NB. DMX 6 is FREE for all existing customers with a valid subscription period. If you buy DMX 5 now, DMX 6 is free.