AppEnhancer has gone through some phenomenal innovations in 2024, and with the release announcement of 24.4 just completed, its time to summarize what these innovations bring to the end user.

This year saw the release of 24.2 and 24.4, each with their own release announcement led by product manager Cody Campbell and complete with feature demos. During these sessions, Cody shared with customers and partners the product strategy, crucially tied to six directional themes.

Let’s take a closer look at what 24.2 and 24.4 contributed to each theme for the end user.

Figure 1: The six directional themes for AppEnhancer in 2024 and beyond

Modern User Interfaces: AppEnhancer goes fully web and redesigned

2024 saw AppEnhancer as a fully web offering. This provides customers with a lower product cost of ownership, and security benefits. Users also benefit from a more modern and intuitive user experience. This fully web interface is reflected in the theme of “modern user interfaces”. AppEnhancer being fully web allows the next step of integrating project JATO, an OpenText-wide initiative to rebrand with new and modern design interface components. Thus 2024 had the AppEnhancer team working with our UX team to deliver customer design surveys to gather concrete responses upon interaction with various design options for the product, to be implemented in 2025. Here’s our latest UX survey if you’d like your feedback to build 2025’s interface.

Although AppEnhancer is fully web, this does not mean that desktop users who don’t wish to familiarize themselves with a new web interface are left with no options. To make the end-user experience as comfortable as possible, end users can still add information to AppEnhancer via their desktop, without even knowing about the AppEnhancer interface. Thus 24.2 saw the Virtual Printer feature to allow passing documents to AppEnhancer via the “print” option in native apps.  24.4 goes a step further and offers a new desktop connector for indexing content into AppEnhancer.  Users can index new or updated metadata, as well as classify documents locally, using the desktop connector. This marks the return of a new and improved “desktop connector” to AppEnhancer, which had existed until 16.3 in a more primitive format. The new desktop connector is much improved in terms of performance (REST vs SOAP), taking the user indexing experience from minutes to seconds.

The modern interface theme also focuses on tighter integration with key applications like O365. 24.4 paves the way for this with a read-only O365 integration, demoed with OneDrive in the release announcement. Users can view their data in the native application, preserving format integrity. This first step will be further developed in future as a read/write integration that will allow for multi-edit real-time collaboration.

Intelligent Indexing, Viewing, and Rendering: IDOL replaces Xplore

One of the biggest innovations of 2024 for AppEnhancer was the introduction of IDOL technology in 24.2, replacing the out-dated Xplore. IDOL is an intelligent and powerful indexing engine that has been powering the world’s largest companies for decades.

IDOL technology comes with many intelligent features, and in 2024 the focus was on intelligent indexing as well as Viewing & Rendering.

Firstly, for Indexing, Viewing, and Rendering: IDOL works with a larger variety of document formats. For Indexing, IDOL offers Full Text indexing. For Viewing and Rendering, OCR technologies allow for features such as rubber-band OCR in 24.4. Users can draw a rectangle around data on the screen and “grab” that value to index as a metadata value for their document.

The integration of IDOL is promising to the future of AppEnhancer, as more features await to be tapped into. The roadmap for AppEnhancer talks of leveraging IDOL for barcode support. More strategically and also on the roadmap: IDOL has the capability to bring AI to AppEnhancer via its Eduction functionality. Eduction allows documents to be summarized and key data to be extracted and added as metadata. Read also "Introducing OpenText IDOL 24.1".

Simplified Workflows: Introducing Flowable

Flowable is an open-source solution that offers a lightweight workflow solution for customers with simple “document routing” type of workflow requirements. Strategically, flowable exists as an alternative to AppWorks for different use cases. Depending on customer requirement, customers will be better served by either AppWorks, Flowable, or potentially a combination.

Tighter integration with Flowable is number six on the strategy list, and the first part was done with the 24.4 one-way Flowable integration. This first step in what will become a two-way integration in 25.2 roadmap, will lead to a lightweight solution for document routing type scenarios such as checking that various users have read and approved a document.

The 24.4 integration allows the AppEnhancer Workflow Integration Manager (WIM) to send content from AppEnhancer to flowable. This first step will most likely be primarily leveraged by partners, who can then work magic using flowable functionality, and will need to get the data back into AppEnhancer.

Governance and Retention:  Building the Foundation

The strategic element of “governance and retention” aims to enable dynamic and event-driven retention rules in 2025. 2024 was about finishing the foundation for this work.

In 23.4 the retention management components were brought to the web for the first time. The policy engine is the same, but configuration and management are now made easier by bringing this to the web. 24.4 resolved technical debt by migrating the retention service from C++ to .Net.

Enterprise App: Hello Cloud

The Enterprise App directional theme focuses on Cloud and Security, and is all about making AppEnhancer scalable and manageable to the large enterprise. Many of the improvements in these areas have been “back-end” and kept more quiet in the release announcements. We just wanted to highlight a few of the Enterprise improvements from 24.4:

• Admin API enhancements​
• OT Process Automation Multi-tenant support​
• OTDS Multi-tenant support​
• AWS Support (VM)

Series 25 and Beyond

The year 2024 has been so productive for AppEnhancer that it has successfully closed off many of its original six directional themes. 2025 will see the remaining themes pushed further, but also promises the introduction of new directional themes. Join the 25.2 release announcement to find out more!

Be sure to connect with OpenText on LinkedIn.

Keep up with the latest Tips & Info about AppEnhancer. 

Do you have an idea or Product Enhancement request about AppEnhancer? Submit it in the Idea Exchange. 

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this blog. Comment below.