WhatsNew - 6.0

8/6/2019 WhatsNew - 6.0

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Agile Platform

Whats New in Version 6.0

OutSystems continues on its path of enabling IT to change at the speed of business with the latestfeatures delivered with the Agile Platform 6.0:

Ready-to-use apps to kick-start your projects and quickly address your business needs Platform-as-a-Service for you to focus on your app and not the underlying infrastructure Mobile Support so you can easily build applications that render beautifully on all devices Redesigned Service Studio to bring efficiency and joy to building and changing your apps Gorgeous look & feel for your apps with the improved and completely redesigned style guide Themes and Placeholders for small UI tweaks or completely change the look & feel of your apps Simplified User Management to make the life of developers and operators a lot easier

Over the next few pages we'll guide you through these new features and explain how you can takeadvantage of them in your next Agile Platform project. We're sure that with this information you'll be

ready to make the Agile Platform 6.0 work for you!

Deliver immediate business value with

ready-to-use apps

With the Agile Platform 6.0 you will gain access to aset of 12 carefully crafted applications ranging fromHR to CRM. Each app is made available through thenewly released apps@outsystems and found in theOutSystems tab of Service Studio. These apps weredesigned for change, with the goal of providing youwith the 80% functionality needed to get started,before craft ing the 20% which is specific to yourcompany. All that with a platform that was designedfor change, giving you the best of buy and build.To make this process truly seamless weve madeavailable the full list of applications in our website at

www.outsystems.com/appsincluding the ability toimmediately try out the running app in an isolatedenvironment created just for you in that instant.

When you know you want to keep a specific app andstart making it your own, you can either publish itdirectly to your environment or setup a 15 day cloudtrial to try the platform. After you do that, youll bepresented with a small tutorial that guides you on theessentials of how to change the app.

Dont let infrastructure hold you down

with our new PaaS offer

The Agile Platform has long been designed forworking in the cloud and on-premise, letting youmove between the two as you see fit. With the Agile

Platform 6.0 weve decided to make applicationdelivery in the cloud even easier with our newPlatform as a Service offering.

This is a great option if you took one of the apps fromapps@outsystems and made it your own and nowwant to take it online without the cost andcomplexityassociated with managing your owndevelopment and production infrastructure.All you need to do is subscribe to our PaaS offer righton our website and everything else will be handled byAgile Platform experts from OutSystems.

The cloud takes care of the infrastructure. The AgilePlatform takes care of the development, deployment,and runt ime. Everything is taken care of, you just need

to focus on building your next great web app.

Address your customers on the go and

empower your mobile workforce

For the last few years the number of smart phones hasbeen skyrocketing, particularly with the widelypopular Apple iPhone and Google Android. In fact,mobile phones already account for about 7% of thetotal number of web page views in the US, with everycompany feeling the pressure to directly support themobile devices that their prospects, customers andemployees use continuously every day.

Version 6.0 of the Agile Platform addresses this trendby providing everything you need to create yourown enterprise mobile web apps. All you have to do
http://www.outsystems.com/appshttp://www.outsystems.com/apps

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is specify that you want to create a mobile applicationand, from that point on, your screens will have anative like look & feel that fits beautiful in your device.Both when youre using IntelliWarpTM and when yourecreating your application from scratch.

To make things more interesting, weve included theMobile Sales application in apps@outsystems, whichserves as a great show case for the things you can dofor mobile with the Agile Platform while covering themost common use cases of Account Managers on thego. From a technical standpoint weve used a fairamount of HTML 5 and CSS 3 to maximize crossbrowser compatibility and provide an even morenative-like experience.

And to make sure your user base is well covered weveincluded support for iOS 4+, Android 2.1+,Blackberry 6+ and Windows Phone 7 devices, usingprogressive enhancement to adapt to the specificdifferences in web standards support of each device.

Give your developers a new life with

Service Studios revamped UI

The Agile Platform frees developers from concernsover all the low level plumbing thats required to builda typical enterprise application, and lets developersfocus on the business theyre supporting.

Weve been doing that with our visual developmentenvironment, with all the logging and reporting thats

automatically included in the apps, with the versioncontrol that happens behind the scenes, etc.

In version 6.0 we decided to take this one step furtherby improving Service Studio, our IDE, which is wheredevelopers spend most of their time. For that, we fullyrevamped the user interface with a gorgeous newskin and a full review of the location and structure ofthe operations available, making it even faster andmore intuit ive for both new and seasoned developersto build great web and mobile apps.

Weve taken as input all the usability tests andusability studies weve conducted and placed the

button or menu of each operation where it is mostobvious and easier to access for each use case,resulting in things like aclear separation betweenprocesses, interface, logic and data, and a big 1Click Publish button you just cant miss.Amazing usabili ty as the new default for

your enterprise web apps

At OutSystems were focused on making sure ITdelivers the best value to the business it supports. Assuch, for 6.0 we have conducted a thorough usability

study on how the applications built with the AgilePlatform are used and decided to fully redesign ourbuilt -in style guides for an awesome look & feel.

When you check the new styles out you will find fontsare bigger, theres a higher contrast between the

several elements of the screen, the colors workamazingly well with each other and, overall, theresult s are just gorgeous.To make your l ife even easier weve included a set ofthemes to more easily match your brand and added aspecial version, which was designed so that your logofits right in with no changes needed.

Centralize your apps look & feel with

Themes and Placeholders

Changing the look and feel of an application thatsalready done, or even half-done, can be a huge

challenge. Some aspects of design are hard tocentralize, which means you need to visit every screenof the application if you want to make the change.

In version 6.0 we wanted to make sure that changingthe User Interface can be done at the same amazingspeed as you can build and change your appl ication.

Themes allow you to centralize the things that arecommon in the UI and easily change them in asingle place rippling across all the screens in yourapp. That includes both styles and the structure of thepages themselves. As an added benefit , you can now

completely switch the look & feel of your app in asecond by simply selecting a different theme.

Placeholders are used when defining themes, allowingyou to specify one or more template pages whichcontain the common parts for your screens. . You canalso use placeholders outside themes, to createmaster pages that you can use to make it easier todevelop your application.

User Management, simplif ied

Our previous solut ion for managing users was goodbut a bit too complex for 90% of the IT teamsleveraging the Agile Platform. Therefore weve

decided to revisit the use cases for user managementand simplified them to make the life of bothdevelopers & operations staff a lot easier.Although it can sti ll be used, we no longer haveEnterprise Manager as the recommended opt ion foruser management. Instead, we have incorporated thecore user management concepts into the platformand provide a simple user management console toget the job done.

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Ready-to -use AppsWith 6.0 you now have at your disposal a set of 12ready t o use enterprise app lication s. You can findthem both in the outsystems tab of Service Studio anddirectly from our website at

www.outsystems.com/apps.

Having the apps accessible right from Service Studiomakes it really easy for you to install them. Just selectthe app and click publish, and you will have it up andrunning, with seed data and t rial user definitions.

If youre not sure if you want to install a given app youcan very easily try it out by just clicking try in ServiceStudio or on our web site. This sets up a sanbox in thecloud for you to t ry out the app in a way thatscompletely isolated from others.

Finally, after youve taken the step to install, you willfind an interactive tutorial that guides you thorugh achange so that you can better understand how theapp is built and structured.

With Agile Platform 6.0 you will find the followingselection of apps available:

Intranet & Human Resourceso Directoryo Documentso Expenseso Vacationso Timesheets

CRMo Saleso Campaignso Caseso Mobile Sales

Web Sites & Portalo Websiteo eCommerceo Customer Portal

All 12 applications weredesigned by stu dying th emo st com mo n use cases for each, with the realpeople that will use them every day. Our goal was tocover the 80% that really matter and are commonlyused. Because we know that every business has its

own specific processes, and because this really werethe Agile Platform thrives, these apps were design edfor chang e and we urge you to take these apps andmake them your own by changing them to reflect theexact way in which your business operates.

In case you were wondering, to actually deliver theapps we decided to go for something really differentand didthe full development with an enthusiasticgroup of 41 developers in a 2.5 day event. Withdevelopment sprints of just a few hours it was anincredible experience we called CodeJam!

CodeJam really put the the Agile Platform to the test

and was a great alpha test of 6.0. In the end we notonly delivered a set of gorgeous apps, but also a greatversion of the Agile Platform.
http://www.outsystems.com/appshttp://www.outsystems.com/apps

8/6/2019 WhatsNew - 6.0


Plat fo rm as a ServiceTo make it really easy for you to go to productionwithout the hassles of managing your infrastructurewere launching with 6.0 a full Platform as a Serviceoffer.

With it you can subscribe for you Agile Platform on the

cloud on a mo nth ly or yearly basis and with noconcerns over instalation, maintenance or evenlicensing of supporting software, like operatingsystem or database.

This offer is a great option if you are just gett ingstarted and do nt w ant t o invest in th e necessaryon site h ardware, softw are and infrastruct uremanagement skil ls. Its also a great choice if youvejust finished adapting one of the apps fromapps@outsystems to your business and just want totake it live.

Everything other than your Service Center and your

applications is fully m anaged by OutSystemsexperts and you can use these environments for bothdevelopm ent a produ ct ion p ayloads.And because we know you want true peace of mind

we even ensure daily backups (kept for 7 days) whichyou can use should anything go wrong.

If later in time you want to moveto o n prem ise, orvice versa, you can easily do that as the platformtargets both on-premise and the cloud.

MobileSmartphones are gett ing widely adopted these days

and, with 6.0, you can now fully address that new andexpanding market.

We have carefully designed every aspect of our mobile

themes so that the applications you create look andbeh ave as if t hey are native. Special care to ensurethe entire UI, including buttons, menus, lists, forms,animations, etc. f it p erfectely in iPhone and And roid devices with the goal of making your apps beautifuland truly usable for your end-users.

Also on the field of usability, we have revisedIntelliWarp so that it works great on Mobile.Lists areone of the things where its behaviour changes themost, with Intell iWarp only includ ing t he first t extfield in your entity; adding anyoth er fields belowthe first on e and with a subdued style and using verydifferent paging style; with long lists and a showmo re pattern . For this to happen you just have tospecify that the theme is targetted at mobile devices.

And because we know you will likely have a

fragmented target user base weve added off-the-shelf support for Blackberry 6 and Wind ow s Phon e7. For supporting all these devices weve gone for aprogressive enhancement philosophy that allows usto cope with the different levels of support for HTML5and CSS3. This means that, while the rendering mayvary slightly between these devices, we ensure thekey elements of the layout and the content will neverget lost.

While on the field of HTML 5, with 6.0 weve addedsupport for selecting theHTML 5 document t ype inyour applications. This enables you to pretty much use

any HTML 5 construct in your own widgets as wevedone in our own themes and apps. It also allowed usto introduce in Service Studio an option to specify the

type of input for the input w idgets.

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The exact input types you can specify are

Text --- the default Number --- smartphones will typically use a

numeric keyboard for this input type

Email --- smartphones typically use a keyboardwith the @symbol more visible for this type

Search --- smartphones and desktop browserswill typically add a reset crossfor this type

As for CSS3 weve used it extensively in our new off-the-shelf themes, especially on the mobile ones, toimprove cross-browser support for things like

rounded corners or implementing full page transit ions

in the iPhone.Note that, the entire mobile functionality isimplemented using themes and placeholders. Thismeans that you can easily take the themes we provideand adapt them to so that they fit in in completelydifferent form factors and styles.

Out of box we provide you with both a deviceagnostic theme, which is the default, and devicespecific themes for iPhone and Windows Phone 7.

The first one is the best option if you are targetting awide a set of devices or want the application to reflectyour own brand identity. In these scenarios youshould use th e default as the b ase them e andextend it to custom ize its colors or ot her elementsin th e layout you may want to change. The iPhoneand Windows Phone 7 themes are designed for when

you have a single corporate device or are targett ing aspecifc subset of your users.

When designing screens for mobile devices, gett ing aWYSIWYG preview of what youre doing includesseeing things with the same size theyll have on thedevice. As such weve set the canvas size to reflect thesize of the actual device and added the capacity tospecify the orientation of the device so that you canpreview your screens in both portrait and landscape.

As a final note, some of the r ich w idget patterns,such as the feedback message, the autocomplete andthe input calendar have been revised to make surethey work flawlessly on mobile and a new pattern wasalso created to guide the users in adding your webapplication t o their iPhones hom e screen.

Service Stud io UI & Product ivit yImprovementsProbably the first thing youll notice after you installversion 6.0 is that Service Studio has been fullyredesigned. Weve done this because this is weredevelopers spend most of their time, so we wanted itto be easier t o use, and we wanted the overallexperience to be a true joy.

Some of the highlights are the new big 1 ClickPublish button and a clear separation between theseveral application layers by placing the elements ofeach layer in separate tab.

To further improve the organization of your eSpaceyou can now group act ions into folders, allreferenced items are automatically grouped, and youcan create mult iple ent i ty diagrams in your eSpace.Overall every single icon and menu operation hasbeen revised so that its look is improved and itslocation best matches the way it is used.

With 6.0 we have also introduced the ou tsystem s tab ,with direct access to apps@outsytems, and aserverview , which provides you with instant visibility over

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what applications you have installed in yourenvironment, and a one click access to create newweb or mobile applications.

Speaking of applications, you can now specify that agiven eSpace is actually the main eSpace for anapplication. When you do that, you can choose a labeland an icon for it and, if the current eSpace is themain eSpace but the backoffice screens are actually ina different one, you can also specify that here.

Additionally, you now have the New ApplicationModule operation whenever you are working in anApplications eSpace. When you use it , a new eSpacewill be created with references to all the comm onapplication elements, such as themes and menus,and IntelliWarp wil l know how to use them.

Overall weve also made it easier to work withreferenced stuff in Service Studio. You can now opena web blo ck in its producer by just right clicking itand you can dow nload all consumers of a giveneSpace in one go. More important, after you do thatyou can refresh all op en consumers with one click.

Because we know that precisely selecting orpositioning an element in your page can be a pain,

you can now do that in the new widget tree availablefor every page.

Syntax hig hlight ing in expressions has also receiveda set of improvements with entities, structures andfunctions now all receiving differenciated colors.

To make it easier to track who did what, and so thatyou to know who to ask when youre not sure aboutsomething, weve added to all top level elements thethe tracking of wh o created that element, wh o lastchanged and, when th at h appened . Best of all, thisinformation is also show n wh en you are merging your version of the eSpace with another version,making it much easier to solve any conflicts that

occur.

1 Click Publish has also undergone a couple of smallperformance improvements by streamlining the waycommunication with the server is handled and by notpublishing personal areas unless you explicit ly use the

run operation.

Finally, IntelliWarp is even smarter by now havingimproved type inference, by creating mailto : and tel:l inks depending on the underlying data type and, byautomatically setting the correct HTML 5 input typ esdepending on the underlying data type.

Gorgeous Default Them eIn addition to providing an amazing experience for

developers using the Agile Platform we also want toprovide an amazing experience for those that use the

resulting applications.As such, and in preparation for building the 12applications in apps@outsystems, we have conducted

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extensive design and usability research to ensure theywere bot h pretty and high ly usable. This involvedfollowing a set of usability best practices and a seriesof usability tests to make sure we got it right.

The outcome of that work is a set of them es thatcapt ure t he essence of t he resultin g d esign .Furthermore, Intell iWarp uses th ese them es with noeffort on your side.

Bottom line:your apps wil l come out lookinggorg eous right after you create them !Of course the tough work of capturing and reallyunderstanding the use cases to be solved doesnt goaway but a big part of the design is pretty muchhandled for you.

We provide 6 base themes for web applications: 4 arecolor variations over the base theme; another is awave theme, specially designed for easily insertingyour own logo and, the last one is a theme thatmimics the style guide of versions 4.2 and 5.x of theAgile Platform.

An important detail of the new default themes is thatthey include an application switcher which isautomatically filled in with the list of eSpaces definedas applications or their backoffices.

Themes & Placeho ldersThe new base technologies that weve introducedwith 6.0 and that really made it possible to deliver onmobile and on the new look & feel for the apps werethe themes and placeholders.

Placeholders appear as anew widget which isavailable whenever you aredesignin g a web block.Prett y much like any other widget you can simply dragit from the left toolbar to any location in the canvas ofyour web block and define a set of properties for itsuch as its name and style. What is really different is

that 1) you cannot place anything inside it and 2)whenever you use the web block in one of yourscreens the p laceholder w ill app ear as an emp tyspace for you t o fi l l in .

In essence, placeholders are really great for when youhave parts of the UI that change from screen to screeninside parts of the UI that are always identical.

Themes define essentially two things: aCSS stylesheet and a set o f layout w eb b locks. Specifying theCSS style sheet pretty much defines the look of yourpages in terms of colors, fonts and fine styl ing. Thelayout web blocks work as master pages and definethe overall struct ure and location of the commonelements of your pages.

In practice these layout web blocks are automaticallyadded to any new screen you create with this theme.They must include one or more placeholders and, for

the layouts which are used by IntelliWarp, they shouldhave specific names which are used for i t to know howto fill in the screens.

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IntelliWarp automatically uses the layout web blocksList Screen, Show Screen, Edit Screen, Info Balloon andPop-up Editor when creating screens of that type.

The Blank Screen and Email layout web blocks areused when you create screens and emails by hand in aweb flow.

The Menu entry simply specifies which web block inthe eSpace contains the menu.

An important note regarding themes is that theysupport inheritance and, when you say your basetheme is some other theme, everything you dontexplicitly fil l in will keep the values of the base theme.

This isgreat for both when you are taking one of thedefault themes and just changin g some colors in t heCSS and for when you have standard corporateintranet theme and you just n eed to change thelayout o f particular screen type in your app.Finally you can specify if your theme is for mobile andwhat is the exception flow that handles theexceptions of screens using that theme. As anexample this allows for you to have both a mobile and

normal web theme applied to different web flows andthat they have different login pages.

Simpl ified User ManagementUp to version 5.1 user management for the

applications delivered with the Agile Platform washandled through Enterprise Manager.

While it was functional, it was also a bit too complexand incorporated a lot of functionality beyond usermanagement that was not used very often. Also, itssecurity model was done as an add-on to the platform,with additional concepts on top of users and

permission areas, which made it overly complex andhard to maintain.

Because of all these issues, weve decided to movethe core user management function ality inside theAgile Platform . We replaced the concept of

Permi ssion Areas wit h that of Roles and added theconcept of Groups. The change to roles has the goalto both force the developers to really think about whothe applications are targeted to and designaccordingly. This will also improve knowledgetransfer between developers. Groups are defined at

runt ime, usually correspond to organization groupssuch as a department and can have a set of Rolesassociated to them.

All this can be managed using thesystem application Users which is installed with the platform andincludes the common integrations with LDAP andIntegrated Authentication. A key thing is that thearchitecture was really setup so that, if you want toextend it further, you can easily replace Users wit hyour own appl icat ion on t op o f the core conceptsprovided by the Agile Platform.

All these changes make the entire access control anduser management process much easier for both

developers and operators.

As for Enterprise Manager, we are making available aversion for 6.0 that uses the Agile Platform 6.0s newcore functionality so that you dont have to gothrough the cost of migrating your apps. As a longterm strategy we do advise that you plan adiscontinuation of Enterprise Manager in your factory.

Down load the new Agile Platform 6.0 today andcheck it o ut f or yourself!Clickhereto d ownload i t .
http://www.outsystems.com/downloadhttp://www.outsystems.com/downloadhttp://www.outsystems.com/downloadhttp://www.outsystems.com/download