NEWSLETTER

SpecLink-E Enhancements for Spring 2011

The Spring release of BSD SpecLink-E includes performance improvements to both the Professional and Corporate editions and two brand new features in the Corporate edition.

Audit Trail: This feature, new for spring 2011 in the Corporate Edition, is in its infancy but will evolve over time. In fall 2010, SLE began storing the user name of the editor in your projects database each time you edit a paragraph. In this release of SLE, Corporate Edition users will be able to begin taking advantage of this information. Two new buttons, Show All Editors and Select Editors, have been placed on the Documents tab. Show All Editors will display the user name of the last editor and the date and time of last edit for any paragraph that you have added or edited in SLE since the 2010 fall version (2.3.6.3). The section is “read only” while the editor information is displayed.

The Select Editors command will display a dialog listing all users who have edited the current section. You can select one or more editors from the list. Checking the box at the bottom of the dialog and clicking Close will display the editor information described earlier in the document panel for the selected users only. Clicking the List Edits button will display another dialog that lists all of the paragraphs edited by the selected users. All columns in this dialog are sortable, so you can organize by editor, by time of edit, by sequence number, or by text.

Designating an Office Master: Beginning with the spring 2011 release of SLE, Corporate Edition users who are assigned the System Manager role can designate a project as an office master. Only a System Manager may edit a project that has been designated as an office master. Any user other than a Reviewer can copy the office master or import sections from it into another project. The main SLE window title bar indicates when an open project is an office master by appending [[OFFICE MASTER]] to the project title displayed there. To designate a project as an office master, a Project Access Level selection has been added to the Summary Info dialog. This selection is set to "Standard Project" by default.

Performance Enhancements: Many editing actions in SLE require the document panel to be refreshed, which slows overall software performance when these actions are invoked. BSD has been developing procedures to eliminate the need for refreshing the document panel wherever possible. We recently released SLE interim version 3.0.6.0, which implemented a major speed improvement by eliminating the need to refresh the panel whenever a paragraph was manually selected. For the spring 2011 release, we have completed similar major performance enhancements for the following additional actions:

• Adding a new paragraph
• Deleting paragraphs
• Cutting, copying and pasting paragraphs
• Promoting and demoting paragraphs
• Toggling between master and user-edit versions of a paragraph
• Toggling no-auto number on and off

You will notice that these actions can now be accomplished significantly faster than in previous releases. This improved performance will be extended to additional actions in future releases of the software.