This past March, Mike Ruane, president and CEO of Revelation Software embarked on a trip to New Zealand and Australia for his nearly annual visit to customers and developers from "Down Under". There has been a plethora of development going on behind the scenes at Revelation, and this trip presented an excellent opportunity to let the folks know what is going on.
The first stop of the trip was Auckland, New Zealand, home of Revelation Software’s new Asia-Pacific representative, Mr. Richard Bright. At a day-long meeting, Mike gave presentations on some of the new modules that will be included in OpenInsight release 10.0.
After introductions of all the attendees, Mike discussed some of the features to be found in OpenInsight 10, including both 64-bit and 32-bit versions, new compiler, new Form Designer and Presentation Server, and new IDE, just to mention a few items. After a quick break for tea and coffee, the new OpenInsight Authentication Module (OAM) was discussed and demonstrated.
The OAM provides a standard interface to create and modify user login and security policies. It is designed for those sites where additional security is required. It can be used in conjunction with existing OpenInsight login security, and in conjunction with Single Sign On (SSO). While Mike was demonstrating the software, the attendees had a number of questions and suggestions, many of which were added into the software later that same week!
After a break for a tasty lunch, the presentations continued – this time showing Revelation’s connector to cloud-based databases: the CBBFS. The CBBFS allows the OpenInsight toolkit to use the high availability, NoSQL databases in the cloud. Currently, in testing, the CBBFS now works with Couchbase Server, with plans to connect to MongoDB and Azure.
Next to be demonstrated was the OpenInsight Git interface. Git is a free, open source, Version Control System, originally written for Linux. It provides a backup of your source application components, offers version control, change control, and more. It has been tightly integrated into OpenInsight’s repository, and can be turned on or off through an environment setting. Mike showed the attendees how changes were tracked in a program and a window, compared them in a difference viewer, and then moved the changes from one copy of OpenInsight to another.
That took the better part of the day. There were lots of questions, and some other demonstrations of OpenInsight for Web (O4W) functionality, and the Banded Report Writer (BRW), and pretty much whatever the attendees wanted.
After a few days of meeting with individual clients, and in some cases their customers as well, the meeting was repeated in Sydney, Australia, with software updated based upon user suggestions made in Auckland. The Sydney show was so well attended that we needed to contact the hotel staff to get more chairs and tables. The Sydney attendees liked the CBBFS so much that a number of them asked if they could beta test it – now!
There were some more customer meetings, and then the long flight back to New Jersey. All in all it was a great trip, with lots of good ideas, suggestions, and feedback from our customers. Hopefully we will see many of those same people at the 2015 Revelation Software User’s Conference, in March of 2015.
The Sydney Meeting