New Major Release: AB Suite 6.1

Exciting news: the much-awaited release of Agile Business Suite (AB Suite®) 6.1 has arrived!

This new release is all about enriching the development experience through greater ease of use and increased flexibility. To that end, it offers new wizards that guide the creation of outbound Web Services in AB Suite on ClearPath® MCP environments. It boasts new DMSII features that maximize data availability while providing added flexibility. And new XML and DevOps capabilities in the AB Suite on Microsoft® Windows® runtime help you greatly increase business agility.

Let’s take a look at some key new capabilities included in this major release.

Enabling Ease of Use with Intellisense

Enhanced in AB Suite 6.1, AB Suite Developer now includes many of the powerful features included in the Microsoft Visual Studio® Editor. With the help of Intellisense capabilities, such as live assistance and dynamic validation, you’ll be able to develop with confidence and minimize errors. Likewise, improved auto completion features increase the speed of your development process.

Understanding Your Code Base’s “Big Picture”

In AB Suite 6.1, features like code definition and peek definition give your developers the ability to maintain code development context while exploring their code base. Peek definition helps them view and edit code without switching away from the code they’re currently writing. They can move freely around the document in different ways, such as Navigate Backward to previous locations and Navigate Forward to recent locations. They can also use an enhanced scroll bar to get a bird’s-eye view of their code.

Managing Your Application’s Lifecycle

In addition to existing integration with Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2012 and 2013, AB Suite 6.1 is now integrated with Microsoft TFS 2015. With the help of this new integration, you’ll become better able to manage your application’s lifecycle, while reducing risks and improving efficiencies.

Driving Interoperability

When you’re operating heterogeneous, distributed applications, using Web Services to integrate and enable dynamic interaction among these applications has the potential to streamline and automate many critical business processes. The MCP WebAppSupport feature supports this goal by making it possible for applications to handle outbound calls to Web Services. In AB Suite 6.1, you can seamlessly take advantage of MCP WebAppSupport libraries with the help of a new wizard that guides you through the process of creating an AB Suite class using an easy-to-modify example.

Increasing Availability and Flexibility

When you’re able to maximize application and data availability, it leaves you well positioned to increase productivity, boost customer satisfaction, and improve revenues. AB Suite 6.1 features new DMSII capabilities that help you work toward these goals by reducing operational downtime and adding more flexibility to large systems. For example, the new DMSII Migrate Database (MIGRATEDB) feature allows you to add or delete DISJOINT data sets without shutting down the database.

And to help you overcome limitations on the number of database structures that can be reorganized, AB Suite 6.1 on MCP now supports automatic Staged Reorganizations. These allow an almost unlimited number of user and “fixup” structure changes in a single application deployment. To learn more about these and other database-focused features included in AB Suite 6.1, be sure to check out the DMSII article later in this issue.

Enhancing Business Agility

It can be difficult for IT to tie together the data generated by applications from different vendors and different domains. In AB Suite 6.1, we’re addressing this challenge with the XML Framework, a new model type that supports XML processing in the AB Suite on Windows runtime.

With it, you can avoid the need to use third-party tools for XML processing in AB Suite. When XML messages are submitted to an AB Suite on Windows system, the XML Framework will parse, interpret, and process them, then return the appropriate response, including an output XML message if necessary.

Like XML, DevOps can help your organization become more responsive and agile, while equipping you to bring higher-quality releases to market faster. AB Suite 6.1 extends these concepts by giving AB Suite on Windows users new features that enhance build automation across different environments. With them, you can set the location information for different environments without rebuilding the Model. And, you can automate the build process from one Model to different environments, like test, acceptance, and production, by leveraging the Team Foundation Build function.

We Couldn’t Have Done it Without You

A sincere thank you to all who participated in the AB Suite 6.1 beta test. The release is better and richer because of your time and input.

We hope you’re as excited as we are about this release, and are eager to use its new features and realize the benefits it promises to deliver. We encourage all users – beta testers and otherwise – to share their experiences with AB Suite 6.1 by emailing us at ABSuite@unisys.com. We’d love to hear from you!

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