• New release available now
• Seamless integration of XR and easybrowse thanks to hierarchical metadata
• Professional tracking of changes

Extended variant management, detailed tracking of changes, hierarchical metadata: gds GmbH, a leading competence center for technical communication and information management, presents the new release of their XR/engineering editorial management system. The editor component has also been extensively reworked and now offers an even higher level of user friendliness. Numerous new features ensure a higher level of efficiency and comfort when using XR/engineering.

“During the development of the new release of XR/engineering, we strongly focused on the support of hierarchical metadata,” says Tobias Kreimann, ECMS product manager at gds GmbH. It is important to be able to translate language-dependent metadata in XR, e.g. for publication in a content delivery portal. “When documents are published, the entire metadata can be transferred in iiRDS format and then be used for the faceted search and filtering in easybrowse. This, in turn, demonstrates the power of dovetailing the two systems, i.e. XR/engineering and the easybrowse content delivery portal.”

Another new feature is the tracking of changes. Changes are documented right where they are performed. The change descriptions of a document are aggregated and output as the revision history in the published document. The revision history can also be used to navigate to the changed passages. As a result, users can clearly see all of the amendments of technical documentation. In the document, the changes are marked with vertical lines in the margin.

Improved editor component
The editor component of XR/engineering has been extensively reworked resulting in a powerful tool for managing variables and applicabilities which can now be found and added in a particularly fast manner. Additional benefits: The new version of XR/engineering can display all of the possible assignments concerning the variable references, while the attributes editor can now remain permanently open depending on the user requirements. The ability to zoom in on content adds convenience and accessibility to the system.

In addition to these extensions, XR/engineering also includes numerous other new features enhancing the overall usability. For example, it is now possible to define fallback languages for modules and media. If there is no version of a module with the desired language, the selected fallback language will be used for the published document. The alternative languages feature enables the user to control the language independently from the media and modules. As a result, French language software documentation, for example, can be published for non-localized, English language software.

Additional features of the new release are the optional object preview feature in Explorer as well as an expert search dialog. The latter can be used to define complex search setups by way of logic links. These search setups can then be saved for later use.