The January release of ARMATURE Fabric is here — and so are a host of new features to help you better collaborate with your external stakeholders, create reports, and enable users to access the information they need more effectively. We focused this month's enhancement efforts on the process management and reporting tools, and I'll share more details with you below.

 To take advantage of these product enhancements, you will need to upgrade your solution. Contact me to discuss your upgrade options — our goal is always to help you take advantage of the latest tools and features with minimal disruption to your day-to-day operations. We recommend that you upgrade quarterly.

Fabric Enhancement: Process Management Horizontal View

The new horizontal process view, shown below, provides your external stakeholders with the context they need in order to see what came before, and what will come after, the process stage they're on. For example, when your external users are on their fourth step in a process, they can easily reference a document that was uploaded back in the first step in order to answer a question or complete a task more efficiently.

The high-level stages in process management are now called Navigation Stages. Staff can choose user-friendly names for these Navigation Stages that make sense for all users. Example Navigation Stages are shown below:

Processes are broken into these broad Navigation Stages (which update automatically to reflect where you are in a process), and steps in the process are organized into Groups and Activities. This structure makes your processes easier for users to follow.

Fabric Enhancement: External Access

When you're setting up a process definition, you can select none, read, or write for each activity, which determines your external stakeholders' level of access. When you select none, external users will not see the activity. Read allows users to see completed activities and any related artifacts, in read-only mode. Write means that if an activity is in progress, external users will be able to see any completed activities that they have read and/or write access to, as well as make edits to the activity they're on. We made this change because there are times when external stakeholders need to reference a document or information from a previously completed step in order to complete an activity, and/or make changes as applicable. These external access settings are easy to configure while you're building a process definition, as shown below.

Global View

Read and write icons display on the process instances themselves to provide users with greater context. Global view helps all users understand what activity is required in order for a step to be completed, without needing to go into the weeds.

Fabric Enhancement: Split-Screen User Interface & Consistent Views

For any activity that your external stakeholders are on, the actions they can take are on the right. This split-screen view represents best practice in contemporary design and helps users stay on task as they're moving through a process. This new design allows staff and external stakeholders to understand the process in the same way, as both parties have the same activity-level user interface. This common UI facilitates teamwork and allows staff and external users to communicate clearly about what they're looking at as they move through a process.

Fabric Enhancement: Report Templates

We've heard from many of you that you would like to see some enhancements made to our reporting functions. To improve your experience, we've developed a number of out-of-the-box report templates. You can use these templates to access the data you need without having to configure your own shaped data sources and reports. Report templates include:

• Active Reviews
• Assessment Response Report
• Blackout Dates Report
• Complaints
• Completed Reviews
• Conflict of Interest
• Education History Report
• and many more

To access the new report templates in the latest version of ARMATURE Fabric, navigate to to Reports in the main menu and click the blue plus button to add new. You'll see a list of options, as shown below:

Bug Fixes...

Some of the main bugs we tackled this month:

• Fixed person info report only pulling 100 results
• Fixed issue with missing "cancel" button on repeatable tables
• Fixed issue with exporting large Instrument Reponses to PDF

 Fixed filtering issue on reports

To see all of the product enhancements and bug fixes for December 2018/January 2019, view the full attached release notes.

Join Our Process Management Feature Demonstration

If you haven't signed up already, please consider joining our First Look Feature Demonstration to see the new process management tools in action. The virtual demo is on Wednesday, February 13th from 3:00-4:30PM EST. Contact Emma Chavez to reserve your spot.