SpringCM version 5.3 contains 36 new features and enhancements designed to improve the speed and visibility into your content-centric business processes and also to enhance the ability of partners to package and deliver great new Solutions Central applications. Major new features introduced in this release of the SpringCM platform include:

Custom Dashboards – This feature adds new graphical reporting capabilities and enables SpringCM users to configure the SpringCM dashboard contents and layout to match the needs of a specific application. Any SpringCM custom report may now be displayed as part of a dashboard and users may choose from several different layout options for how these reports are displayed on the page. Together these enhancements provide new real-time insights into content processes and the status of individual or group metrics.

Enhanced Document Rules – Document Rules, introduced in 2008, have been a popular feature for rapid automation of document processes. New rule types introduced in this release, allow a document rule to notify another system of changes to documents in the SpringCM repository.  For example, an ERP system can now be notified when an invoice is approved for payment or a CRM system can be notified when a new customer fax or e mail is received, etc.  Rapid configurable integration between SpringCM and other systems enables a new level of cost effective process automation without the need for custom programming. 

Solution Packaging – SpringCM introduced application cloning in 2008, which enables entire configured applications to be duplicated and distributed to new customers or to divisions within a company. With this release, SpringCM takes this capability to a new level with solution packaging. Users may now create custom "packages" of specific features – for example, two reports and an associated workflow - and package those features so that they may be imported to any other SpringCM application. This new level of granularity allows for existing applications to be updated with new features, for users within an organization or between companies to share best practice "applets" for small processes like document matching, industry specific metadata models, routing, workflows and much more.

Access Justification – this is a feature that helps monitor how and why users access documents in the system. It requires a simple text string to be entered as a reason for access to any given document. This justification is a free-form text field but will be tracked as part of a document’s audit trail and, when enabled, will be required any time any document is either viewed or downloaded. The feature can be enabled or disabled on a per account basis and is off by default.

PDF Split improvements - The process for splitting a PDF document into multiple documents has been dramatically improved.  This process has been reworked so that the modal dialog is no longer necessary.  Page splits can be entered while continuing to be able to scroll through the document itself.

Advanced Workflow improvements - Two changes were made to Advanced Workflow steps in order to improve the implementation of specific applications:

• The Send for Electronic Signature activity no longer requires that the recipient be present in the SpringCM address book.  For example, new hire forms can be sent to people without them needing to already be users in the SpringCM system.
• The Create Folder workflow activity will now allow folder descriptions to be set.  This allows an application to display a folder description for folders that are created automatically by the workflows.

User Creation Improvement - In many cases customers have a desire to populate the address book with users before actually bringing the system live.  This is a very common practice for larger deployments where some testing of the solution is required before opening the system up to the general user population.  There is now an option to create a user without having that user receive email notification of their new username/password.  This way the user database can be populated with activation emails sent at a later date,

Preview Page Improvement – An improvement has been made to the Save/Save&Next buttons on the document preview page:

• In keeping with common UI standards, the Save button has been renamed Apply
• A new account setting has been added which allows the Save&Next button to be toggled between Save&Next and Save&Close.

Performance – Several improvements were made to improve backend and database performance in SpringCM 5.3, including:

• A variety of changes have been made to the database indices in order to allow for more efficient queries.
• A number of database triggers have been reworked for improved performance and reduced database locking.