We are pleased to announce the release of AppM v4.6. This release delivers several improvements and bug fixes to packaging and smoke testing capabilities, as well as minor UI updates to simplify the overall user experience.
With this release, we are also very pleased to announce that after several months of effort to improve accessibility, AppM is now WCAG 2.1 AA compliant, and you may obtain the VPAT for AppM here.
Find a summary of release notes and related plans below, or view the details of all that has been included with AppM v4.6 here in the release notes.
Improved quality of generated Windows Installer packages
AppM packages are increasingly robust - there were 9 problems identified and corrected to improve the quality of the Windows Installer packages generated.
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We now exclude firewall settings, have addressed some problematic ICE warnings, and extended our analysis of MSI installers to support additional log formats.
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Changes captured with a vendor MSI are now made available only as an MST to be deployed with the vendor MSI in support of well-established best practices.
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Next, we will be introducing a number of improvements to our exclusion support with a new optional exclusion list that has been cleaned up and leverages environment variables and wildcards for better support in non-standard environments while reducing the size of the overall list of exclusion items, making it easier to manage.
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Simpler user experience for non-technical users
This is the first of many iterative updates you will see aimed at reducing the complexity of AppM and making it easy for non-technical users.
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You can now upload single-file setups without zipping them first.
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We've made several improvements to the VM Wizard to streamline and improve the user experience. Instructions have been simplified for clarity, and the complexity of "cloning" a VM has been addressed. The setup process includes automatically pre-populating some fields, and form validations have been implemented to prevent misconfiguration.
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A couple of menu items have been renamed for better clarity;
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We no longer refer to "testing" as "evergreen" throughout the product
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The “snapshot” menu now reads “exclusions”
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Next, we are improving the upload process, supporting the automatic smoke testing of new packages, and will refer to "Builds" as "VM Groups" while removing the limitations of the current parent/child relationships they have today.
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Security improvements
Continued efforts to enhance security and address related bugs.
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FIPS compliant encryption
Accessibility improvements
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Our VPAT document is now available.
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The effort to achieve this was significant, with over 550 related development and QA tickets closed. We will work to maintain this level of support and will perform annual updates to the VPAT from now on.
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To view the details of all that is included with AppM v4.6, see its release notes.