Novotis supports the NTP project

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Novotis has made on of our servers available as a time server for the Swedish NTP pool. Read more about the NTP project here.

New build of SPICE Vision 2.6

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Some user of 2.6 have experienced an issue on Windows 7 on first use of SPICE Vision after a reboot. The issue is related to a bug in Windows closing of the splash-screen that shows during loading of SPICE Vision. Build 2183 fixes this issue with a work around. You can download the latest version form the download page.

SPICE Vision v2.6 now released

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We are proud to announce the release of the new version of SPICE Vision withs lots of new features like a document window, the ability to comment on findings, filtering and configurable color coding of findings and much more.

Download the new version from this page and read more about the new features here.

SPICE Vision – ability to record documents

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In v2.6 of SPICE Vision a new document window has been added. This allows you to record evidence on work products for a process. The following information may be recorded for each work product:

  • Id may be used for a document acronym of unique identifier
  • Name is used for the full document name
  • Version is used for the revision of the document reviewed in the assessment
  • Comment may be freely used for notes on the document

Document information may be output in the assessment report. Follow this link for more information about the document window.

SPICE Vision – ability to comment on findings

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Some times you need to follow up on an assessment to discuss possible improvements or evaluate changes to the process.

To handle this there is a new comment feature in v2.6 of SPICE Vision. This allows you to add comments to individual findings or sub-practices.

Each finding or sub-practice will show an icon next to it, click the icon and you get a comment window where you can track status of the finding or record improvement actions.

Follow this link to read more in the online help.

SPICE Vision help online

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The SPICE Vision Help file is now web based and available online. Follow this link to watch the new and updated help for v2.6.

To watch the videos you will be prompted to download Microsoft SIlverlight if it is not already installed on your computer.

Help has been written using the Madcap toolchain: Flare, Mimic and Capture. A powerful toolchain for authoring help and creating content for help files. Recommended!

SPICE Vision 2.6 preview

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After a lot of testing and some additional tweaks comes here a pre-release of v2.6.

A link to the exe version and a link to zipped version if your firewall prevents you from downloading an exe file.

Check out some of the cool new features:

  • document window to record documents reviewed
  • new wizard to configure the assessment editor
  • filtering of findings by type
  • configurable color coding of findings
  • ability to comment findings
  • locate search hits by clicking in search window
  • auto scroll of framework viewer to keep current practice in view
  • reduced size of installer

Some additional testing and updates to the help file are planned before the final release. If you have any comment please let us know.

Any customer with a valid license key for v2 can download and upgrade their current installation with the pre-release. You current license key will be picked up automatically and not registration is required.

SPICE Vision 2.6 functionally complete

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We have now been completed functional development of the next release of SPICE Vision, v.2.6.

We are focusing this release on adding new functionality for the assessor. Some of the upcoming features are:

  • Ability to add comments to findings and sub-practices, e.g. to track improvement actions
  • A new document window to log the documents (id, name and version) you have assessed
  • A new 4-state rating control for sub-practices, to provide F, N, not applicable and not rated states
  • A new wizard to more easily configure the assessment editor
  • Ability to filter findings based on type
  • User configurable color coding for findings
  • Improved layout for sub-practices
  • Framework viewer now auto scrolls to keep current practice in view
  • Moving to WebHelp and .Net 4 reduces the size of the installer by a factor of four

We will provide a some more information on the new features in upcoming blogposts and plan to publish a beta once we have completed basic regression.

New servers at Novotis

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We have been running our development environment, web, mail and ftp servers virtualized on a group of three old DELL servers running Citrix XenCenter. As the servers where maxed out on RAM already at 4 GB we decided to upgrade.

We are now running a DELL 710 server with, dual 4-core Xeon processors, 32 GB of RAM and an IDRAC card for remote management.

Together with the DELL server we also added an 8 TB iSCSI arrray from QNAP and a new firewall from CISCO.

The new server currently runs 12 virtualized machines in a VMWare VSPhere environment. We currently have

  • Debian DNS server
  • Debian mail server runing Dovecot
  • Debian CM server running Subversion
  • Windows XP running Teamcity and build tools
  • Windows server 2003 running WordPress for this website
  • Windows server 2003 running Jira, Fisheye and SpiraTeam for issue management and testing
  • Windows server 2008 running the VMWare vCenter administration console
  • And six different test systems for various projects

The vCenter environment is very nice to work in. It is easy to manage the VMs, there are good monitoring tools and it is easy to migrate VMs between servers or set up a new test system from a template.

The DELL server provides us with lots of capacity for future growth and will make it easy to try out new tool chains.

SPICE Vision 2.5 available

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The new 2.5 release of SPICE Vision is now available. Check the download page for information about what is new in this release and to download the update. The update is free for all customer having a v2 license.