Highlights

• WordPress now allows for the management of multiple sites from one WordPress installation.
• New custom menu management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.
• Custom header and theme background customization via APIs.
• Ability to set a custom admin username and password during installation.
• Bulk updating of themes with an automatic maintenance mode during the upgrade process.
• Bulk updates of plugins so you can upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click
• Support for shortlinks – but still requires a plugin or theme support to fully realize this feature.
• Improved Custom post types and custom taxonomies including hierarchical (category-style) support.
• Allow “No role for this blog” to be chosen in Users->Add New panel
• Help text on every screen

Naturally, as with any major software upgrade, a number of upgrade issues have been encountered by users of various themes and certain plugins including the podcasting plugin by TSG, HeadSpace2, and Event Calendar. WordPress has a sticky post detailing answers to most problems. It would be advised to wait to upgrade your installation until plugin developers have time to provide updates for the new version and the majority of bugs that are encountered by early adapters are resolved.

The WordPress development team will not be starting work on the next version for at least three months, instead they are delving into updating the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org and so on. These supporting pieces have been longing for attention!

As always, our Small- to Mid-Sized Business Solutions staff is here to assist you with upgrading your WordPress installation, plugins, and theme. Please contact Chuck Snyder at 402-391-9200 to discuss your needs!

The formal name for taking control of business processes is Business Process Management. When we think of Business Process Management, the first things that generally come to mind are the reductions in costs and risks, improvements in productivity, increased compliance, and enhanced business agility that result from making improvements in your processes. There’s a critical one missing from this list though – improvements in customer service.  Formalizing and automating processes enables business to put an end to lost or misplaced customer orders and requests, provides a trackable path of processing through the business so you can let the customer know where their order or request is within the process.  This can also alert staff to any hold-ups in the process, and allows the business to save information about each instance of process in their company database for future analysis and access.  Whether your business processes customer orders for physical goods or you’re in charge of approving requests for the use of assets, implementing Business Process Management with Agility BPM™ can help you improve your customer service.

Agility BPM™ offers a simple and efficient way to establish, operate, manage, and monitor business processes in a web environment and/or as a Windows desktop application. It takes you from a graphical process map to a working application so you can get up and running in weeks, not months. Plus, it gives you the ability to make changes to the processes you are controlling as needed using its “edit and execute” capabilities and without having to start from scratch.  Best of all, Agility BPM™ will keep pace with your growing business.  It is designed for use in all sizes of businesses, so if you have enterprise size goals, it will be there with you every step of the way.

Want to know more?  Let’s talk!

You can read about the new product at www.qat.com/agilitybpm.asp

1. Automated Document Generation and Preview – This is a new feature that makes is simple to generate multiple PDF Documents from the data collected by your work flows.  The documents can also be previewed from any step within the workflow and/or directly from the work queue.  (Look for Microsoft Word document support in an upcoming release!)
2. Enhanced Web Queues – We’ve added powerful new search and organization features to the queues.  The new management queue provides the ability to monitor and manage the active work.
3. Design Import / Export – Import and export workflow designs.  This is a great feature that allows us to share and migrate work flow designs.
4. Data Warehouse and Archiving – We’ve included and embedded data warehouse for easy reporting.
5. Email Links – Automatic emails with links to directly open the workflow step.
6. Long Text – This is a new type of parameter for long text entry.
7. Interface Enhancements – We have a new look that is designed to make using the product more intuitive.

Do you have a feature wish list of your own for QAT Flow?  If so, please let us know!  Our product development path is strongly influenced by customer requests.  Add a comment here or send us an email to sales@qat.com.

Web Service Bindings

• Change or update the wsdl for a binding by right-clicking on it and selecting “Update Binding”.
• Double-click on the binding to open its properties. Here you can add more endpoints (urls pointing to other instances of the same web service) and assign them to requests. This is useful if we for example wanted to build the test suite against our development instance but then run the actual load test against a special test setup. In this window, you also can test your service for WSI-compliance.
• Add another binding by right-clicking the project and selecting “Add WSDL”.
• When having troubles with the WSDL import (especially if complex types are used by the service), try saving the wsdl to the file system and pointing the “Add WSDL” dialog to the file rather than using the “?wsdl” option on the live web service. The bindings endpoints may have to be updated afterwards (see above).

Load Tests
Once you have Test Suites like I’ve shown in the previous examples, you can use them to run load tests. Simply add a Load Test to the Test Suite via the context menu. This will open the Load Test screen where you can start your load test immediately.

Finally: For more details and ideas, look at the soapUI documentation at http://www.soapui.org/userguide/index.html.

Anke