Aproove 2022/R6 Announcement

The R6 release offers many user enhancements across the entire platform. Dashboard improvements feature heavily with useful new display filters added to the task list, a new timesheet report, and advanced form grids.

The R6 release also adds another file storage connector driver to Amazon Work Docs, an updated Photoshop Extension, Project and Task chat enhancements, new actions, improvements inside the administration interface, and a first beta look at the new Project and Planning features that will preview in 2023/R1 coming soon! 

See below for further information on the R6 release!

New Task Display Filters!

Aproove users love the Task Dashboard!

In its simple form, the task dashboard is your personal dashboard where you see and manage any tasks that are assigned to you!

The task dashboard can also display unassigned "team tasks" (team tasks are tasks that can be picked up by anyone in your team or assigned by a manager). You can also view tasks assigned to other users with the appropriate permissions.

Aproove already had some fantastic filters, such as "show late tasks", or "group tasks per project" (in case you have been assigned multiple tasks in one project), etc. now we have added ...

• Group by My Contact Groups
  This view will display any tasks broken down per contact groups you have set up inside your personal contact list alongside the grouped "unassigned" tasks.
  

• Group by Team Contact groups
  This view will display any tasks broken down per contact groups set up by your system administrator at a team level, e.g., you may have a Marketing, Legal, Account Manager, etc. team already defined in the system alongside the grouped "unassigned" tasks.
  

As shown in the videos below, users can also hide or reveal relevant groups, and those preferences are saved for when they use the filter again. 

Timesheet Report!

If enabled, the timesheet allows you to capture any time spent on tasks. 

The timesheet is popular because it can be activated at any appropriate step in the workflow. Upon completion of a task, the timesheet will automatically appear and already be populated with the duration making it easy for the user to complete timesheets in real-time without having to navigate to a 3rd party system. 

As part of our "out the box" reports available in the user interface, we have added a timesheet report that will extract your timesheet data into a PDF format that is delivered to your desktop upon demand. The video below shows the timesheet report. 

Advanced Grids in Forms!

Aproove already has a powerful forms capability, and those forms already supported "Grids" (A grid is a form component that is comparable to an excel spreadsheet with rows and columns) 

We have added another layer of advanced functionality that allows data to be extracted from the grid (the grid data could be populated manually or by a 3rd party system). Selected grid data (rows and columns) can be automatically extracted based on custom logical rules and used as individual metadata anywhere in the workflow.

A real life use case can be found with Aproove's Armani case study. Armani use grid metadata to automate photography shoot instructions to dynamically drive product shoots. Case study found here.

File Storage Connector Driver to Amazon Work Docs!

A significant challenge for mid to enterprise-sized companies is the management and federation of cloud storage.

Aproove overcomes this huge obstacle by uniquely adding the ability to monitor low-level storage used by most Enterprise clients today, such as Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blobs, and Google Cloud Storage.

Not only will Aproove index the storage, but we also give you a direct management layer allowing you to apply additional control permissions and rights from within Aproove (on top of the Amazon rights). Moreover, you can connect multiple storages from multiple regions and see it all from within the Aproove interface, with users only having the permissions you grant them from within Aproove. This is especially powerful considering that storage will also be available inside Aproove's Adobe Extensions. Users can be anywhere in the world using files stored within your cloud ecosystem/s. The user does not need to know or care about the location of the files they want to use, and you do not need to move or duplicate files.

This R6 release created the driver to Amazon Work Docs, expanding our existing support for Google Cloud Storage. 

The file storage bridge allows us to continue connecting to 3rd party storage, DAMS, PIMS, etc. 

Chat Function!

Small enhancements in the chat feature: 

The administrator now has the option to hide any previous messages if a new guest is added to an existing chat room. This can be controlled on a project-by-project level.

Adobe Photoshop Extension!

A new version of the Adobe Photoshop Extension is now available. Many enhancements have resulted in better stability and XMP support along with several new features, including the ability to click on a note and be "zoomed" into the same level as the note creator, giving you the same conditions as the user who created the note. 

Administration Interface!

The Aproove Administration interface has been enhanced with many small tweaks to aid administrators in configuring and maintaining the Aproove platform. 

These tweaks are leading to a much more significant announcement during Q1 2023, when we will be releasing a new HTML5 browser-based administration interface.

Actions!

New projects can now be created with the "create project action" by looking for specific proof tags. (previously, it only used the filename). Inside the action, you specify the relevant proof tags, and they become the marker for the action to reuse those proofs inside the new project. (We do this with regular expressions that can be used to capture one or many proof tags or the filenames)

The same action can also be configured to transmit existing metadata or even the existing proof tags from the current project into the new project created by the action. 

This is a valuable feature for companies wanting to kick off additional projects when an existing project concludes or reaches a particular stage in a workflow. 

Planning and Project Management!

Aproove will launch our Planning and Project Management tools in the next version of Aproove (2023/R1). This major release will allow our customers to add project management, resource capacity management, and project budgeting capabilities. 

Unique to Aproove, any planned projects can then be mapped to your existing Business Process Workflow. 

More information will be announced when we release (2023/R1). Inside this R6 version, we announce that Aproove has added all the back-end administration functionality enabling admins to evaluate and plan for the upcoming new planning and project management features. 

Summary

Aproove R6 contained over 100 new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. The summary above highlights some interesting points, but not everything. Please get in touch with us if you would like access to the full technical release notes or to discuss any topics related to the R6 release.