Release 218 of the Bipsync Research Management System (RMS) is now available. This release makes it much easier for clients to manage single-sign-on configuration, adds a few other improvements, and addresses a number of other issues.
Federation Metadata Import
Bipsync supports single-sign-on (SSO) for any SAML-compliant system, which means users can authenticate with our apps using their domain credentials, e.g. those from Microsoft Azure AD, Shibboleth, or a host of alternative identity providers.
This feature is configured via our Setup app, where users can provide the information that we require to initiate the single-sign-on (SSO) process. Depending on the identity provider and the way it’s been configured, this can be complex: the relevant data is hosted within XML files and can periodically change.
To make this process simpler, in this release we’ve made it possible to automate the configuration of this feature, either by uploading the federation metadata XML file that can be exported from the identity provider, or by providing a URL to that file so Bipsync can automatically read it. Either method results in a much faster and less error-prone experience. We encourage all clients that employ SSO to use this approach in future, and if any clients not currently using SSO would like to explore setting it up, please let us know.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
- Note templates are no longer subjected to document completeness checks.
- Improved the way that grid widgets are rendered by ensuring that their height takes up adequate space on dashboards.
- The widths of grid widget columns are now persisted on a per-user basis.
- A new grid widget option allows the grid’s columns to be reset to the default set.
- Added a new rule condition to detect when a comment has been made by a user.
- Added a new rule condition to detect when a research document is or isn’t frozen.
- A new user preference allows users to specify whether the enter key creates a paragraph or a line break when writing a note.
- Fixed an issue which caused SQS messages to not include all expected field values.
- Fixed an issue which caused auto-assignation of tags to sometimes populate the wrong field.
- Fixed an issue which caused grid columns to show HTML tags for rich text fields.
- Fixed an issue which caused inline images to not appear in PDF exports of notes.
- Fixed an issue which caused some objects to be incorrectly reported as incomplete.
- Fixed an issue which sometimes prevented tags from being removed from notes.
- Fixed an issue which caused the home dashboard to occasionally show all available fields and widgets.
- Fixed an issue which could cause grid exports to XSLX to fail.
- Fixed an issue that caused comments sent to Bispync via email to be formatted incorrectly when displayed.
- Fixed an issue that prevented inline comments from being added when a full paragraph of text was selected.
- Fixed an issue which meant notes could not be shared to Slack when they contained specific characters.
- Fixed an issue that prevented tickers containing periods from being searchable.
- Fixed an issue preventing calculation fields from displaying a value when negative numbers were a factor in the sum.
Please get in touch with us if you’d like to discuss any of these changes in more detail.
