Isode R14.4: New Features in Sodium & Sodium Sync

This one of a series of a messages describing new features in Isode R14.4, scheduled to ship in April 2009. You can see all of the messages on this blog relating to R14.4 by clicking on this link

We've made a number of improvements to Sodium and Sodium Sync for R14.4, which are described here. New features common to both Sodium and Sodium Sync:

1. Allow locking of the entry view and current tab, to make it more convenient to navigate around a group of entries whilst maintainingthe same information view.
2. Various new templates and template improvements.
3. Enumerations in templates can be set case-insensitive.
4. A manager mode is introduced, giving additional control over availability of advanced features and display.
5. Subentries may be viewed (in manager mode), and subtree specifications may be edited to control administrative areas.
6. Collective attributes may be added and edited within the collective attribute subentry. Collective attributes allow values to be set for entries that are common over an administrative area. 
7. Arbitrary attributes may be added to any entry, both user attributes and operational attributes.  This supports extensible objects.
8. Access control may be viewed and edited in the ACI tab (when enabled). This has been described in more detail in an earlier blog post.
9. Search results may now be refreshed.

New Features in Sodium Sync include:

1. Options to easily integrate with the File Transfer by Email channel in M-Switch for incremental synchronization over email.
2. Synchronization to Microsoft Active Directory (AD).  AD's LDAP access has some interesting special characteristics. A functional goal of the initial Sodium Sync release was synchronization from AD.  R14.4 adds synchronization to AD. Caveats:
   • X.400 Addresses are not synced to the AD format (this could be added). They can be pulled from AD.
   • Passwords are not synced (this could be added).  Note that it is possible to push passwords into AD using a special mechanism but they cannot be pulled out.
   • AD requires that attributes of Directory Name syntax point to local AD entries. Data synced must comply with this, and must not contain loops or forward references.
3. Paged results are supported in the sync, which removes restrictions on DIT fan-out when syncing with AD.
4. Entry filtering may now be done with a true LDAP filter in additional to the hierarchical filter previously supported.
5. Attribute filtering now supports filtering of individual object class values.
6. Dereferencing alias entries is supported as an option.
7. Applying a complete update from a change-LDIF is now optimised to make the minimum possible changes (similar to a sync-from-LDIF).
8. Merge syncs are better supported through a safety check that forbids addition and deletion of entries.
9. GUI changes make it easier to enable/disable scheduled syncs, and to force a complete update on a cached sync.
10. Scheduled sync from a queue now flushes the queue.
11. Now checks for existing entries in the target subtree, to reduce risk of destroying data by configuring a sync in the "wrong place".

We welcome feedback on all of these improvements as well as suggestions for future development.