New Features and Changes in vFire 9.9

This topic relates to vFire 9.9, first released in August 2017. You may also wish to view other new features or the release notes in full.

vFire 9.9 does not support Oracle installations. You should not install or upgrade to 9.9 if you are running an Oracle system.

The key new features in this release include:

  • Nano is GA ready. Nano has passed its beta phase of development, and is now GA status. See Introduction to Nano to learn more about Nano, and Nano Feature List  to find out about functionality that is added in this release.

    • Several features have been enhanced in the 9.9.1 release, and additional functionality added, including:

    Approve and Reject buttons have been added to the Approval task screens, making approving a task easier.
    Authorize and Reject buttons have been added to Request screens.
    Nano is now compatible with Integrated Security and SSO.

  • Alemba API is GA ready. The RestFUL Alemba API has passed its beta phase of development, and is now GA status. The Alemba API is documented via a wiki within the product. See About the Alemba API to find out more about this API and how you can use it.
  • vRO7.0 is now supported. See Connector for vRO for more details on how to install and use this connector.
  • Call Scheduling has been introduced, allowing analysts with the correct permissions to schedule calls, in much the same way as requests can be scheduled. See Scheduling Calls to find out more.
  • Service Actions can be configured to launch URLs or download objects from the Service Catalog in vFire Self Service. You can set up your Service Hub in a day using the Integration module to instantly create URL Service Actions for all your external digital forms and other web accessible services and resources. See Defining the Outcome of Selecting a Service Action for more details.
  • The Alemba Email Event Connector can be implemented to generate calls or requests in vFire from 3rd party event tools that send event notifications by email. Fields in the generated calls and requests are populated with data from the emails. A configuration XML file defines field mappings between the template and the contents of event emails. See Connector for Event Emails for more details.
  • From 9.9.1, the vFire app includes call logging. Users can log their own calls using the app. See About the vFire App for more details. It also supports windows authentication.

    • To view a PDF of the vFire App User Guide, including System Administrator Notes, click here.

Additional Features

The following features have also been introduced in this release.

Feature Description
Statistics Tool New sections have been added to the report: SQL Server Configurations, SQL Server Top 100 Expensive Queries, and SQL Server Currently Executing; and a section has been removed: Installed Software.
AI Ops Proactive Analysis has been renamed to AI Ops, in keeping with industry familiar terminology.
Screens Pre-upgrade This upgrade feature has been rationalized and enhanced to carry out more processes, making the subsequent upgrade time shorter. For more details on the screens pre-upgrade feature, see Screens Pre-Upgrade .
Overwrite locally customized system files

This feature was introduced in 9.9.4.

If you have customized files, select this option to move the customized files into a System\Customizations folder as part of the upgrade, and upgrade all of the files in the system to the latest version. You can then re-apply the customizations to the upgraded version of the files.

Prior to 9.9.4, all customized files were merged unchanged as part of an upgrade process. Customers with customizations were, effectively, running systems combining files with different release versions. A large number of files were upgraded in the base system as part of the 9.9 release, which could potentially cause problems for customers running systems with files from previous releases. For this reason, it is strongly recommended that if you have customized files, you select the checkbox and re-apply customizations where necessary when the upgrade is complete.
Support of HTML5 and CSS3 9.9.1 lays the foundations for further interface improvements by supporting HTML5 and CSS3. This will cause a longer upgrade time. There is an improved Screens Pre Upgrade Tool available as part of the maintenance pack and this should be used if upgrade times are high. Details of this are available in Screens Pre-Upgrade. Once the installation is complete, there will be no apparent impact to customers' installations. We have updated vFire Core to use HTML5 and CSS3 to support the Styling changes planned for future releases.

To view a PDF version of the 9.9 release notes, select the following link .