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UNICOM® Systems, Inc. has announced the release of Focal Point version 7.5. Focal Point is a comprehensive portfolio planning solution that market-driven teams can use to make collaborative, objective decisions to deliver products, projects and services, offering the highest customer and business value. Focal Point reduces the complexity of managing information from various sources such as emails, documents and spreadsheets and provides a collaborative centralized environment for requirements, products and project data.
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Focal Point 7.5 - What's new in this release? |
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Focal Point version 7.5 introduces key functionality and usability improvements for analyzing, visualizing and reporting data.
Take a look at some of the major enhancements in this release. |
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Enhanced Kanban Board |
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Focal Point 7.5 comes with a revamped Kanban board that improves the visualization and usability related to agile work state management. |
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Users can now customize the width and height of the cards as well as the grid layout in which the card attributes are arranged. |
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The new board provides the capability to limit the Work in Progress (WIP) by displaying the statewise roll-up totals along with the threshold based warning indicators.
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JSON based REST API |
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Focal Point 7.5 introduces a new JSON based REST API to enhance the integration capability. This is functionality equivalent to the existing XML based API, but offers the following additional benefits: |
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Lightweight, less verbose and easier to transmit and parse. |
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POST/PUT payload will have a format similar to the GET response.
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Provides an easier integration end point with improved performance.
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Multi-Module Tree-Table |
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Working with the parent-child relations (Example: Epics→Capabilities→Features→Stories) contained in multiple views can be time consuming since the users have to switch between these views. The newly introduced multi-module tree-table capability can be used to address this problem. Users can now display, edit and create information belonging to multiple modules using a single tree-table view. |
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File Attribute Security |
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Focal Point 7.5 enhances the security of the file attributes by providing a mechanism to restrict file uploads based on the MIME types. The first setting provided at the global security level can be used to specify a permitted list of MIME types that are allowed to be uploaded into Focal Point. The second setting provided at the individual file attribute level can be used to specify a restricted list of MIME types that are not allowed to be uploaded into Focal Point.
These restrictions work for the GUI based as well as the REST based file uploads. |
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Reporting Enhancement |
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Focal Point version 7.5 introduces the ability to embed JasperReports® into Focal Point. JasperReports is an open source Java reporting tool that can write to a variety of targets, such as PDF, HTML, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, RTF or XML files.
Report templates can be designed in the Jasper Studio using the Focal Point REST API and later uploaded into Focal Point to schedule reporting within Focal Point. |
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New Home Page Editor |
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The new user interface delivers usability and performance gains including easier in-line editing of all home page widgets, with fewer mouse clicks. This ensures a rich experience to usual operations associated with the home page like adding a new window, changing the widget type, changing the display type and selecting the display elements or attributes. |
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Save/Retrieve Attribute Statistics Settings |
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The new capability improves the usability of gathering analytics information on Focal Point entities. The settings used in the attribute statistics view can be saved under a user defined name, which can be later retrieved to create charts and reports. An administrator can also create predefined global settings and share it with other users. |
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Additional Enhancements |
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Focal Point version 7.5 provides the following additional enhancements: |
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Added the ability to group bars in a Gantt chart based on any single value attribute available in the elements. The users can also download the Gantt chart as an image. |
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Added the ability to maximize the view port in all the common display and prioritize views. |
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Added the ability to display only those elements, which have links to other axes in a parallel coordinates view. |
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Implemented a new template based setting to define the individual row and column header cell styles for a matrix attribute. |
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Focal Point users can now send multiple elements as links in an email by multi-selecting elements in the tree view. |
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Added the ability to copy & paste data from excel into a matrix attribute. |
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Upgraded the application server support to Tomcat 9.0. |
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Added support for Postgres13 and as an application database. |
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Added support for Windows Server 2019 as an application platform. |
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Focal Point, along with System Architect®, is a key player in the Enterprise Architecture and Product Portfolio Management domains, helping customers make strategic decisions at the enterprise level and providing increased business value at delivery. Additionally, UNICOM has the Universal Gateway (UniGW®), a management dashboard designed to provide real-time views into operational business performance that will complement Focal Point. This approach enables strategic decision making and correlates the massive amount of data erupting from new technologies such as big data, video analysis and IoT.
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