CCR Application Improvements for Best Practices

Over the last year, the CCR development team has prioritized changes to the CCR application to better expose and encourage best practices for using CCR. This article will highlight some of the areas that we've focused on:

• Organization Dashboard
• System Alerts
• Branch Hygiene

In each of these areas, we have increased the visibility of potential CCR usage issues and given users tools to proactively address them.

Organization Dashboard

We have continued to build out the available information on the Organization details page

The overview is a great place to get an overall sense of your Organization's CCR usage. It now includes more KPIs highlighting various concerns and linking to the pages in the CCR application where you can address them. 

The Systems tab includes detailed information about the state of Client Tools across all Environments as well as System Architect information. The alerts here highlight missing information, inactivity, and out of date Client Tools, with links to the corresponding Systems.

Other tabs on the Organization details page have been enhanced with additional details to make your Organization's CCR usage clear at a glance.

System Alerts

Another area of improved visibility is the System details page, where we now have alerts for many CCR usage issues.

Environment alerts have been added for unset URLs, insecure URLS, and detected Client Tools issues. Details are displayed on hover:

When CCR detects that the Client Tools are out of date for the System, an alert will appear to encourage the use of the update button.

Systems that have had no activity for 6 months will now display an alert.  Such a System can be deprecated if it is no longer in use, or the snooze button can be clicked here to count this as an active System for the next year. This is appropriate for some types of Systems that rarely need to receive updates.

System Branch Hygiene

System Branch Hygiene is a powerful tool for understanding existing issues in a System's Perforce branches. It is available on the System details page for each Tier 1 or 2 System.

Core functionality of the tool has been in place for some time, but recent enhancements have improved detection of some edge cases.

Running this check on a mature System is a great way to identify any items that may cause problems in the future.

Conclusion

In these areas and across the CCR application, there have been many changes this year with the goal of promoting the best usage of CCR. Future improvements will focus on further exposing information and developing tools that help users of CCR to better understand their Systems and address issues proactively.

If you have any questions or suggestions for ways that the CCR application can encourage best practices, please let us know at ccrdev@intersystems.com.