CMDBuild Newsletter nr. 100

We completed the development of the CMDBuild 3.4.3 version in recent days, and the preparatory activities for the release have now begun: automatic tests, manual tests, bug fixes, collection of localizations from contributors, preparation of the final package.
Barring last-minute setbacks, the new version will be released on SourceForge next Friday 15th December.
For a summary of what's new in CMDBuild 3.4.3, please refer to the September newsletter.
We remind that the next minor release will be CMDBuild 3.4.4, whose release is scheduled for about mid of next year.
Continue in parallel the design activities for the new CMDBuild 4.0 version, the new platform that we plan to release by the end of 2024 and which will then accompany us for the next few years.
In the latest news below, you can find the link to listen to the webinar held on November 16th, in which we presented the main news.
Each of them will then be explored more in depth in a news item in the CMDBuild newsletters, in September we talked about Security by design, this time we will talk about the new Plugin Manager component.

One of the main new elements of CMDBuild 4 will be the new component called Plugin Manager.
The current architecture of CMDBuild, although open, flexible and configurable, is in fact monolithic, made up of a single centralized application that performs all the functions.
It is true that this is the most widespread architecture and that it has advantages in terms of lower complexity, speed of implementation, testing methods, overall performance, etc. On the other hand, it also presents numerous disadvantages, both in terms of scalability and maintenance, given the greater dependency between the components.
CMDBuild 4.0 will be a first step towards the decoupling of some components, which will be managed as external plugins.

The Plugin Manager will manage such plugins in multiple aspects:

• communication between application and plugin (currently hypothesized via IPC - Inter Process Communication);
• dynamic configuration of which plugins are active and inactive;
• management of plugin configurations.

The configurations will be carried out by a specific new functionality of the CMDBuild Administration Module.
Plugins will be able to implement both features executed in batch mode and features with a user interface.
The new visual Workflow Editor foreseen in CMDBuild 4.0 will be developed as a plugin, the Waterway connectors will probably be managed as plugins, and in general the new components that implement non-core functions of the platform may become plugins.
Plugins managed via the Plugin Manager may require the Subscription.

To increase its diffusion, let's take a look at some case histories of the last CMDBuild DAY 2022.
Here below there is a summary of the ‘Comunità di Montagna della Carnia’ case history, you can find here the complete intervention.

The “Mountain Community of Carnia” provides services to around thirty municipal entities in the area (Carnia is a historical-geographic region of the Italian Eastern Alps, in the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region).
The Organization has been using CMDBuild for about 13 years, mainly in the ICT context but not only.
In the first years the objective was solely to manage the IT assets of the participating Municipalities, also using OCS Inventory to keep the information updated.
Then Service Desk processes have been activated, in order to manage the tickets opened by the Municipal Bodies and also to monitor the level of service provided by external suppliers.

The following step has been to use CMDBuild as a support to achieve economies of scale on IT purchases, that is, having the CMDBuild reports and information available, propose to the affiliated bodies renewal plans on the basis of which preparing budgets and activating tenders.
Having started with CMDBuild in one of its initial versions, we then requested customizations to integrate some features of the CMDBuild READY2USE and openMAINT applications released by Tecnoteca in subsequent years.
In the last period we have then requested further implementations, to manage specific needs of some offices, with the advantage of reusing and sharing the information already present in the system.
For example, thanks to the flexibility and interoperability of CMDBuild, we have integrated the tool with “FVG Pay”, the interface service with national platform “PagoPA” made available by the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region to manage online economic transactions, thus allowing the offices to manage the issue of payment notices and collections relating to rental contracts and other agreements.

We have carried out an initial census for the “Single Desk for productive activities” and the management of the archive of licenses and operators, which is also useful in communicating with the Police who contact the office to find out related information.
We have developed an integration with georeferencing applications, integrating CMDBuild with the “Io segnalo” (I signal - city care) app, made available to citizens to report maintenance requests in the area, and then managing the related processes in CMDBuild.
We would then like to use CMDBuild also for booking IT and non-IT assets, including rooms or entire buildings.

Further developments will go in the direction of personnel performance management, with objectives, KPIs, indicators and dashboards that become management and decision-making tools for us.
We would add that, to allow us to be increasingly autonomous in the use and the configuration of CMDBuild, we have requested to Tecnoteca training sessions for our staff.

Ultimately, the CMDBuild platform ensures us a large degree of freedom in being able to model our information, ease of consultation with transversal navigation on the data, integration capacity through the APIs exposed that are used regularly. The degree of satisfaction is therefore very high.

This is the hundredth newsletter of the CMDBuild bimonthly newsletter.
It is a “round number” that testifies to the maturity and longevity of the project.
The first issue of the newsletter was published seventeen years ago in October 2006, version 0.5 of CMDBuild had just been released, and we were already announcing our participation in fairs and conferences.
Rereading the newsletters released so far is a journey through the history of CMDBuild, in the sequence and contents of the releases, in the events we have organized, in the case histories published thanks to the availability of the users.
Here you can find all the publications of the CMDBuild newsletter.

A webinar dedicated to providing some initial general information on the new CMDBuild 4.0 project was held on November 16th. The video is available here.
The recordings of the webinars already held remain available to interested people; here you can find the links to access.