Release 6.10 - Final - Release Notes Publishing & Approval

With this version, Publishing offers Excel support for your digital assets. Download all digital asset information of your articles, modify the data contained in them and upload the articles again into the system.

Downloading Digital Assets

The Download dialog for Excel, which can be accessed from the article hit list, now offers a new checkbox that allows you to include all digital assets that have been linked to the data you selected in the hit list.

If you check this box and start the download, you will find two new spreadsheets in the Excel file. One sheet contains all linked digital assets and their metadata at a glance and another sheet contains the links to your items.

Please note that this option is only available if the Digital Asset Module is activated for your company.

Management of digital asset data

Digital asset metadata can be edited and managed just like article attributes. Instead of GTIN, GLN and a target market, a column containing the URL to your digital asset in combination with an information provider is available. After uploading a URL in combination with a specific GLN, this information provider can no longer be changed.

Use the remaining columns to edit and update the metadata of your digital asset. This can be done just like in an Excel spreadsheet to update the data of items, including repetitions and language-dependent attributes.

You can also link your digital assets to items that are included in Excel (or not, but at least available in WS Publishing). Just switch to the Sheets Digital Asset Links and define your Digital Asset Links. The mechanism works very similar to the mechanism for linking items within a hierarchy.

The spreadsheet also provides a view of articles on the digital assets, i.e. you define the articles to which you want to link the assets by specifying a GTIN, a GLN and a target market. You also add Associated Media Item columns (each with an index in square brackets) and specify the URL for each asset you want to link to.

Uploading your data into the system

To upload the articles back into the system, simply use the upload functionality available in the article hit list again. The system automatically detects whether digital asset data is included and processes it correctly.

You can upload any combination of Excel sheets: Only articles, items and media data, also in combination with links, or only media items or even only the Digital Asset Links sheet if you only want to combine digital assets with items. The content is automatically recognized and processed.

A pre-check mechanism informs you of any problems with your digital asset sheets and missing mandatory data prior to upload processing. When you receive these messages, correct your worksheet by following the instructions and uploading it again.

Restriction of functionality

The algorithm that places Excel upload jobs on one of the four available waiting lists to be processed in parallel has been optimized.

While the old algorithm did not use all four waiting lists equally and some waiting lists always had a higher capacity than the others, the new distribution method ensures that all four queues are used much better.

We have made several adjustments and improvements to our Excel upload interface in terms of pre-checks, usability and performance.

Advanced pre-screening before uploading

There is a new pre-validation that prevents the upload of article data with an invalid status of the articles (allowed values are ADD, DEL, COR, CHN).

There are also new pre-check messages before uploading Excel sheets containing digital asset data, such as checking for a referenced file type code or whether the information provider matches the digital asset identified by the URL.

New layout of the Excel upload report

The format of the Excel upload has changed. It now not only provides information about all uploaded digital assets (see above), but the layout has also been changed considerably. The optimizations should make it easier to filter out useful information about the uploaded articles and assets.

Reduced upload time for item release

The upload time when releasing articles by activating the corresponding checkbox in the user interface has been significantly improved (~35-40%).

This was achieved by optimizing the validation behavior. While a pure storage of data only requires a basic set of validation rules, the extended validation functionality is triggered, which is necessary to send a data element only when the data is to be released.

Optimizations for file upload

The Excel upload dialog opens in a larger format and offers more space for the pre-check messages.

The precheck message area is only visible after triggering an upload and can now be scrolled. Precheck messages are now fully visible.

The entire dialog can also be resized to the desired size as required by the user.

As in most of our releases this year, Release 6.10 also includes the continuous optimization of digital asset management. Although these are more or less minor improvements, they will simplify the application and provide more convenience when working with digital assets.

Digital assets can now be linked and separated from the Digital Asset Editor

Until this release, the user always had to go through the Item Editor to link (or disconnect) an asset to a trade item.

With the new version, a digital asset can be linked to any item directly from the Digital Asset Editor. When unlinking an article, it is even possible to unlink it from the Digital Asset Editor.

Digital assets can now be validated from the Digital Asset Editor

Digital assets have always been automatically validated when saved in the Digital Asset Editor. It was not possible to explicitly trigger a validation, as is the case with trade item data in the Item Editor.

With this version, the Digital Asset Editor has a new toolbar button that can be used to initiate a validation of digital asset metadata at any time.

A click on the image opens the image in the browser instead of downloading it

A click on an image in the Digital Asset Editor resulted in the asset being downloaded to the user's computer. We have changed this behavior so that the image now opens in a separate tab in the user's browser.

Here are some small but important changes to the software documented. We have raised the limit for activities on the hit list and removed the possibility to download empty Excel templates.

All operations of the hit list can now be performed for up to 100 articles.

Hit list actions that were available in the hit list toolbar were often limited to a certain maximum of selected items. With the new release, all actions in the toolbar are available for a maximum of at least 100 selected entries.

No more support for Excel templates

The Excel template function provided has caused more confusion and annoyance than added value for our users. Creating new articles with a blank Excel template is difficult to manage and users have regularly had many problems with it.

For this reason we have decided to discontinue support for empty Excel templates. The focus of using Excel is in most cases to use it as a mass update functionality for existing item data, but of course new items can be created by downloading existing data and modifying the GTINs / GLNs.