Early access to the upcoming Prolaborate 5.6 release, scheduled for the end of the year, offered another opportunity to test and share the upcoming enhancements:
- Ability to enable and configure a unified authentication for Prolaborate and Enterprise Architect.
- User activity auditing.
- Excel export based on the Reports Download Center.
- Enterprise Architect chat support to link EA and Prolaborate users.
Unified EA and Prolaborate Authentication
User authentication requires a separate configuration for each Sparx Systems tool i.e. Enterprise Architect and Prolaborate. To reduce administrative overhead, Prolaborate 5.6 introduces a new identity provider service (IdP) to authenticate users from Enterprise Architect.
Once the required configuration is set up in Prolaborate, OpenID authentication in EA can be configured directly with the Prolaborate server.
Having Prolaborate authentication set up with the enterprise SSO, it can be shared with EA clients by setting up a dedicated configuration in Prolaborate "Access Management" module.
In EA, a group must be set up and linked with an existing Prolaborate group.
With the OpenID authentication enabled in EA, Prolaborate instance details can be provided e.g. the url and security token.
The settings can be tested, opening the browser to authenticate the current session in Prolaborate. Results are displayed in EA with the list of groups assigned for the current user.
From now on, this EA project will start with the Open ID authentication.
Audit
A new audit feature provides access to all actions captured in Prolaborate. The following example illustrates an action involving a user modifying the description of an application.
These logs can be exported to Excel.
Excel export
Prolaborate allows generating and downloading an Excel file from a list of elements, for example a report linked to a chart:
Instead of triggering an automatic download of the Excel file, Prolaborate now generates these files in the background. The user is prompted to enter the file name.
A notification is available when the file is ready.
The link opens the “Reports Download Center” page of the resources manager.
EA Chat support
Previously restricted to Enterprise Architect users, EA Chat is now supported in Prolaborate as illustrated below.
In the following example, a test message has been posted to the SolutionArchitects group from EA.
In Prolaborate, the Chat module must be enabled on the repository to allow users access this feature, available from a link at the top of the screen.
Example of the message posted from EA in Prolaborate 5.6.
