Version 5.7 will be the next release of Q-Pulse and will be made available to customers in April 2010. There will be a range of improvements and performance increases included with the release.

To give you a taste of what is included, I’ve listed the features that have already been completed, without going into detail. There are more features planned for inclusion, but as with all releases, not all make the final release. We’ll announce any further improvements included in the 5.7 release when they have been completed.

The release features a range of major improvements to the Occurrence and Incident modules (part of Q-Pulse IMS) and gives Secondary Licence users the ability to do more by increasing the number of permissions that administrators can assign them. In addition, we’ve taken note of and implemented some of the most requested features from the Community forums, including the ability to directly hyperlink documents and the ability to reassign actions and owners. Any features added after the original publication date of this article are marked with an *

Occurrences

• Search Folders
• My Folders
• View Management (ability to save views)
• Occurrence “reject” command is now customisable and securable
• Quick Occurrence Accept/Close Process*
• Occurrence matching (allows users to view details of matching incidents)*

Incidents

• CA/PA style flattened Lists with stage and action registers
• Incident Export will now handle confidential fields (Permissions respected)
• Risk assessment summary on incident list view*
• Ability to associate an incident with a document*

Workload

• Ability to reassign actions and owners, for example, if an employee leaves your organisation. (Discussed in Community here and here)

Administration

• Ability to print a user’s effective permissions
• Active Directory integration for Q-Pulse Security groups*

Audits

• Ability to navigate checklist interface using keyboard* (as mentioned in the Community here)
• Default expansion view state for hierarchies*
• Added a “NOT closed” status filter to quick search*
• Added “multi-select” for Audit scope items* (as mentioned here)
• Ability to surface the Audit “Observation” collection on the Audit Details Form Report Designer to allow more comprehensive Findings reporting*

CA/PA

• Ability to surface Supplier and Customer contact and address details for CA/PA Letter Generation*

Documents

• Improved security in document approval process (removing the ability for users to remove approvers from a document, so that a document can become active without going through the approval process)*

Licensing

• Ability to allocate licences to individual databases in a multi-database Enterprise deployment
• Secondary Licence has been extended to include:
  • additional CA/PA Stage & Action commands (as mentioned here)
  • Incident functionality is now available for IMS users (as mentioned here)
  • ability to print documents*
  • access to Workload module*

Web Interface

• New controls for browsing and searching
• Ability to view, read only, summary Incident information against an Occurrence
• Token Based Authentication introduced

API/Web Services

• Ability to hyperlink to documents directly (mentioned by Community users here, here and here)

Miscellaneous

• Non-English spell checker capability*

Defects

• A variety of customer reported defects are in the process of being corrected in time for the release date.

SQL 2000 no longer supported

As mentioned previously, we are no longer releasing updates that support SQL 2000. Microsoft retired support for SQL 2000 back in 2008 and it’s no longer viable for us to release software compatible with it. If you do want to upgrade to Q-Pulse 5.7 (and future releases), your database platform should be SQL 2005 or 2008. The last version of Q-Pulse compatible with SQL 2000 is Q-Pulse 5.61, which was released in 2009.

 

On a personal note, I’d like to share my excitement that your suggestions in the forums are being turned into reality. Thanks to everyone who participates in the Q-Pulse Suggestions Forum and keep sharing your feedback and ideas with us.

As mentioned, this is a brief preview of the features already confirmed for 5.7. More features will be confirmed nearer to the release date and we’ll report on the final list of improvements and tell you how you can request an upgrade when 5.7 is complete. In the meantime, if you have any questions about Q-Pulse 5.7, please use the comment form below.