Dear AODocs Users,

We’re pleased to announce the release of AODocs version 63.

This release focuses on user experience improvements and security enhancements:

• Revamped views are now out of beta
• A smoother experience when using the document page
• Major focus on bug fixes

Find out about the new release: 

Automatically generated table of contents

Launch details

Rollout pace: From 11 to 12 December 2023.

Revamped views out of beta

We’ve finished rebuilding AODocs views, and the new page now presents all the features of the legacy one, and more. The latest additions are:

• Ability to resize columns
• Right-click a document and open it in a new tab
• Open a folder by clicking it in the Folder column (when displayed)
• Filter by file type – this was the last filter type to be ported to the new views
• Create a folder from the top action bar
• Pre-filter folders in the Browse by panel (NOTE: this will be available a few days after the release date) – learn more: Pre-filter documents in views
• Focus is now in the input fields when you open filters, letting you type right away
• New views can now be embedded in external websites (for example, Google Sites, Lumapps pages). The procedure is the same as for legacy views. The user preference of legacy or new views is applied to embedded views as well.

Learn more:

• Insert a view into a Google Site
• Create and manage views in your library

In addition, we fixed several bugs in the new views:

• The button to export the document list via Bulk Updater was not displayed for Microsoft users.

• The option to open the first attachment in Google Drive didn’t work in the new views. Learn more: Configure the layout of views.

• Deleted reference catalog values appeared as non-deleted ones in the new views.

• When downloading attached files in bulk, some users got one of the following errors: “Cannot get the URL for the bulk download” or “No access token with needed scopes found”.
• The feature for downloading attached files in bulk has been updated to fix failures when downloading a large number of files and to proceed even if some files cannot be processed.
• Partially fixed: error message randomly appearing when performing actions in the new views: “This request is not the same as the request used to obtain the provided pageToken”. We fixed some cases where this occurred, but it might still happen and we are working on fixing the remaining cases.

For which users?

All users

Why it’s important

Views help users organize and browse their documents, so it’s important for these functionalities to be efficient. Our aim with the revamp was to:

• improve the user experience
• enhance performance and search capabilities
• provide end users with customization options so they no longer have to fully rely on library administrators to configure views
• improve the overall display of views to fit with the previously revamped AODocs interface

Additional details

With release 64 (the next after this one), the new view page will be set as default for everyone. Users will still be able to switch back to legacy views for at least one more release. Your feedback is still welcome, the feedback form is still available next to the button to switch versions!

Availability

All AODocs customers.

Note: To activate the new views by default for your users, or to opt out of deploying the beta version of views on your domain, contact our support team at: support@aodocs.com.

Updates to the document page

We made several updates to the document page:

• It is now possible to copy and paste a list of emails into a Person property. Emails can be separated by commas, colons, or even be in the Google calendar format. For example:

Jane Smith <jane.smith@email.com>, John Doe <john.doe@email.com>

Learn more: Edit custom properties.

• When copying emails from a Person property, they are now separated by commas (previously it was simple spaces).
• Decimal and Integer properties can now contain numbers between
  -9,007,199,254,740,992 and 9,007,199,254,740,991 so 53 bits (formerly -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647 so 32 bits).
• When a Person property has a validation rule, the values in error are now visible.
  Learn more: Data validation on Person properties.

In addition, we fixed several bugs on the document page:

• Names no longer overlap on pictures in Person properties.
• Several fixes were made on the Category property selector.
• The disabling of the Edit, Workflow, and Viewer action buttons when an action is in progress on a document has been improved: sometimes the buttons flickered.
• You can now paste a value in a multi-valued category property.
• You can now empty a reference catalog property after saving a document.
• Using the mouse scroll in a numeric document property used to increment or decrement the numeric value instead of moving up or down the page.
• The warning dialog was no longer displayed when closing the browser tab while editing a document.

For which users?

All AODocs users.

Improvements and bug fixes

• Library administrators can hide specific document classes from the New button menu, even for users who are document creators in these classes. This can be set through the API only.

This can be used, for example, to ensure that documents in a given class can only be created via the Gmail add-on. Hiding the “Email” class from the New button menu ensures users can’t manually import emails via the AODocs user interface. Learn more: Use the API to hide document classes from the "New document" menu.

• There is now a scroll bar for templates in the New button menu when there are many templates to choose from.

• The Bookmarklets are now available for customers using the European instance of AODocs.
• The Go to document button when trying to perform a workflow action from a notification did not open the document.

• When a user changed their displayed name or thumbnail from their Google Account (or from a corporate Google directory), the change wasn’t reflected in the AODocs interface.

This is now fixed: after a simple sign-out/sign-in from the AODocs application, the details are seamlessly updated.

• The last sign-in date on the Licenses domain administration page appeared as “a few seconds ago” for external users having never signed in to AODocs. Now it indicates “Never signed in the application”.

• Documents couldn’t be created in AODocs from an incoming email in some cases (for example, when the email didn’t contain any text in the body). This issue is now resolved.
• Improved: in a library containing many views (typically hundreds), it could prove impossible to reorder them. We optimized this feature, so reordering is now smoother.
• We fixed several bugs in workflow transitions:
  • It isn’t possible to create a new version of an AODocs document containing an attached file from a Google Drive third-party application (such as Lucidchart). Previously, a cryptic error message appeared when using the workflow transition route. In addition, it sometimes resulted in inconsistent results. 
    This operation now fails gracefully with an explicit error message, so users are immediately informed about the cause of the issue.
  • When a new version of an AODocs document is created through a workflow transition, we now make sure that any subsequent custom script execution consistently waits for the new version to be fully created.
  • In libraries using Google Cloud Storage or Azure Blob Storage, in documents containing many attached files (typically 15 or more), the following operations sometimes failed with a cryptic error message – we made the operations much more resilient:
    • check-out (manually or through a workflow transition)
    • create a new version (manually or through a workflow transition)
    • restore an old version of a document
  • Some users faced an error when trying to open a file in AODocs from the Google Drive interface. This issue is now fixed.

And there’s so much more brewing…

• We’re working on a new search engine that will improve responsiveness and relevance of results, as well as allowing for new ways of searching for documents and attached files.
• We’re adding user-friendly support in AODocs for Google attachments which are Client-Side Encrypted, so the user experience is smoother when working with these sensitive files.
• We're working on new artificial intelligence (AI) features in AODocs, leveraging large language models to automatically tag documents with metadata, and to search information in AODocs libraries in natural language via chatbots. Contact us if you want to know more! You can contact your AODocs sales representative or send an email to sales@aodocs.com.

Would you like to meet our product team to discuss your needs? Join the AODocs research group! Join the AODocs research group!