Development of Gutenberg, Part 2

MidPoint 4.0, code-named Gutenberg will be major milestone in midPoint evolution. Version 4.0 is a major release and it will also be our first long-term support (LTS) release. Therefore, there is a lot to do about internal quality. But in addition to this we are also planning a bunch of new features.

There is one feature that midPoint users desire for many years: thresholds and limits. But it was only now that we were able to secure a funding for this feature. The problem is that midPoint information sources are not reliable all the time. Sometimes the sources get all messed up. Garbage in, garbage out. Therefore, also the output from midPoint is wrong. That is usually not a big problem if just a few accounts are affected. But there may be a huge problem if most of the input data are wrong. In the past midPoint did what it was programmed to do. But that might have made the problem worse. Therefore, midPoint 4.0 will have capabilities to limit potential damage. There will be limits and thresholds that could be specified for midPoint synchronization processes. The thresholds will limit the number of changes that midPoint can do automatically. If the input data ask for suspicious number of changes then midPoint will stop the process and wait for an administrator to examine the situation.

As all the releases, we plan more gradual improvements to midPoint user experience. We will be improving some parts of midPoint user interface, most probably the panel that displays “projections”. This is quite an old part of midPoint code and it deserves revision. We also plan smaller improvements to various parts of user interface. It is also likely that we will start work on archetypes, but the precise scope is yet to be determined.

We will also likely focus on better visibility to midPoint operations. It is likely that there will be new page or report that will show midPoint status, recent activity and outline the errors that require administrator’s attention. Precise scope of this effort is yet to be determined in next couple of months. And there are few more features that are still taking shape. I will try to provide more details about those later.

In addition to that we plan one big change to the way how approvals (a.k.a. “workflows”) are implemented in midPoint. Although this change should be almost completely hidden from the view of midPoint users, it is still quite substantial. And it needs more space to explain. More on that in my next post.

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