Release 200 of the Bipsync Research Management System is now available and is packed with new features, improvements and bug fixes. Hitting the two-hundredth version milestone has taken just over eight years, at a rate of roughly one release every two weeks. In that time we’ve delivered a host of groundbreaking features that have fundamentally altered the RMS software market; an achievement we intend to extend across the next 200 releases and beyond.
IP Access Lists
It’s well understood that Bipsync’s security features are plentiful, because the platform has been engineered to keep clients’ data incredibly well protected.
One method we employ to prevent unauthorised access of Bispync is to restrict communication to only those clients whose traffic originates from approved Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. This has been supported since launch, and typically we’d request a list of approved IP ranges from our clients and then configure this for them on our servers. It proved effective but unwieldy, because any changes to the approved ranges required us to make changes to our infrastructure configuration.
In this release, we’ve introduced a new feature to the Setup app which allows clients to take control of their IP address restrictions. It’s called IP Access Lists and it looks like this:
Using the Setup app to configure IP restrictions.
Though this interface, clients are able to specify the IP ranges from which internet traffic to Bipsync is allowed to originate. This makes it a straightforward task to add and remove approved locations such as offices, employee homes — very useful given the increase in home/hybrid working — and cloud services, for example.
This feature is available to all clients with Pro and Enterprise subscriptions. Please let us know if you’d like more information on how you can take advantage of it to further secure your Bipsync installation.
Improved Grid Widget Performance
Our grid widget has been rebuilt from the ground up to ensure that it is able to scale to accommodate the largest of datasets. We’ve also taken the opportunity to address a few of our clients’ feature requests, and have generally improved the way that the widget functions.
Firstly, let’s consider performance. Here’s a visualisation of how, for a particularly large data set, performance for key tasks has improved between the original grid widget and the new one:
Performance has improved for key tasks.
The chart illustrates that key interactions such as scrolling, sorting and filtering are many times faster when applied through the new widget versus the old. This leads to a slicker experience in which data can be retrieved almost effortlessly.
Secondly, we’ve also added these features and improvements:
- It’s now possible to filter a grid by a given column where that column has either any value set, or no value set.
- Column grouping has been expanded to support all instances of grids, including contacts, companies, fund managers and the like. A wider variety of column types can be grouped.
- All field types are now supported when exporting a grid as a CSV file, and there is no limit on the number of records that can be included in an export.
In summary: this overhaul makes grids much more responsive and powerful, and users should find them much more pleasant to interact with. We’ll soon begin to replace instances of the existing grid widget with the new on all our clients’ environments: if you’d like to learn when this is likely to happen for you, please get in touch.
Improvements and Bug Fixes
- User groups can now be associated with one another. When a user is added to a user group which has one or more associations with other groups, they are automatically added to the associated user groups too.
- Aliases can be defined for additional types of content, such as funds or investments. These aliases can be referenced in search queries.
- It’s now possible to use research lookup fields within a grouped field set.
- Scheduled work can now be timed to run using a cron expression.
- Expanded the list of field types which can be edited for events that have been imported from an external source, such as Microsoft Exchange or Outlook.
- Improved the rendering quality of resized images within notes when viewed in the Chrome browser.
- The introduction of several new URL schemes allow clients to navigate directly to a list of search results within Bipsync.
- Improvements were made to the dashboard UI to make it easier to browse greater numbers of dashboards.
- Emails sent as a result of a triggered rule can now include information from data lookup fields.
- The “v1/event” and “v1/task” API endpoints now include information which indicates which users and groups an event/task has been shared with.
- The “v2/category/withContent” API endpoint now includes any configured group fields.
- Search results can now be boosted by an arbitrary field value on each matched document.
- The Bipsync search index can now be rebuilt with no impact on system usage.
- Improved the performance of the note editor when editing notes that contain a significant amount of content.
- Fixed an issue when exporting documents with HTML fields to PDF.
- Fixed an issue with entity lookup fields on some documents which could cause performance to be negatively affected.
- Fixed an issue which could cause the “v1/fieldhistory” endpoint to not return results.
- Fixed an issue which prevented notes from matching correctly when filtered by a date field.
- Fixed an issue which in come situations could prevent documents from being merged.
- Fixed an issue to ensure that the width of the note list column persists after a reload of the app.
- Fixed an issue which prevented saved searches from being combined with additional keyword searches.
- Fixed an issue which caused checklist fields to renderer incorrectly when editing events.
As usual, please contact us with any questions about this release, or if you have any feedback or suggestions about the Bipsync platform.
