Release 173 of the Bipsync Research Management System RMS is now available, including a new feature which improves Zoom video conferencing workflows. In addition, we’ve added a method for securing webhook requests along with several other improvements and bug fixes.
Launch Zoom Meetings
Many of our users make use of Zoom to facilitate meetings, especially during times like these when many offices are closed and remote working is prevalent.
Recognising this, in this release we’ve added a feature which detects links to Zoom meetings within notes or fields associated with notes, and makes it easy to launch Zoom for those meetings when links are detected.
Since lots of our users forward their mail and events into Bipsync as their central repository, this allows them to easily catalog these important meetings and share them with other users on their team.
When Zoom links are found within a note, a menu appears in the metadata toolbar which lists them:
Simply tap on a link to launch that meeting in a new browser window.
Webhook Authentication Tokens
Bipsync can notify external systems when certain events are triggered in the system, such as the creation of content like notes. This is achieved via web hooks, which is a convention whereby a request is sent from Bipsync to another system. The request consists of a JSON or XML payload that holds data relevant to the event; the title, content and author of a note, for example.
In this release we’ve allowed custom headers to be added to these webhook requests. While there are many potential uses for this feature, we’d like to call attention to one in particular: authentication tokens.
In this scenario, we want to ensure that the receiving system can trust that the message originated from Bipsync, and not some other, potentially malicious, third party. We can achieve this by placing a prearranged secret token in the headers of the webhook request, a token that is known only to Bipsync and the receiving party. This allows the receiving system to determine whether the message is to be trusted or not.
In short, webhooks offer our clients a secure, reliable way to integrate Bipsync data in to their systems to create dynamic workflows. If you’d like to discuss them in more detail, please get in touch.
Improvements and Bug Fixes
- API: Tasks can now be marked as completed via the v1/task endpoint.
- API: Categories’ Bloomberg ticker fields can now be managed.
- API: The v3/ingest endpoint now supports upsert requests.
- The Desktop App supports the quick insertion of currency symbols via Shift-4.
- Completed tasks are now always shown on the notes that they are associated with.
- Added a location property to users which can be used to store where they are based.
- Improved the authentication process of the Setup app.
- Fixed a bug which caused an unrelated project to be created when clicking the add button on the related project widget.
- Fixed an issue which could cause the search to sometimes not return all matching results.
As usual, please contact us with any questions about this Bipsync Research Management System RMS release, or if you have any feedback or suggestions about the Bipsync platform.
