Milestone2 Details (Design and features)
The Matter Center for O365 project has been going through updates on the mattercenter2 branch with new features and capabilities for the Milestone 2 release, which is now merged with the master branch. This update focuses on feature enhancements aligned to configuration management and overall refactoring [Please see Web APIs and Re-Architecture].
Goals include the following, with additional details provided below:
- Enable configuration of UI labels for matter properties
- Enable configuration-based taxonomy
- Enable external sharing feature to share and work on matters with teams outside of the organization
- Simplify deployment
- Provide engineering improvements (builds and unit tests)
We look forward to sharing this with the Community, and want to thank everyone for their contributions!
The UI labels now can be configured by the Administrator during deployment. There is no code update or build required. All the UI labels for the matter center are stored in an Azure table storage called “MatterCenterConfiguration”. At run time, all the values from the Azure table storage are read and a JavaScript (uiconfig.js) file is created in the web app project. At runtime respective page will load their UI configuration labels and update the UI accordingly.
Architecture:
The below table summarizes the “MatterCenterConfiguration” schema:
The data from uiconfig.js will be read from each respective angular controller and the UI will be updated accordingly.
For example: For Matter Search, there is a controller called “matter.controller.js”. In that controller, all the matters UI labels from the uiconfigs.js will be read.
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Matter Center now supports a configurable five-level taxonomy hierarchy. In previous versions, the taxonomy had been hard-coded to a three-level set of terms: Practice Group, Area of Law and Sub-Area of Law. All variable names are now generic and can be configured according to requirements.
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The Matter Center UI will now respond / behave according to how the taxonomy is configured. For example, the taxonomy selection available in UI drop-downs will be based on the configured taxonomy hierarchies.
- If the administrator configured the term store level to 5, there should be 5 levels of selection in the UI; if the user configured the term store level to 4, there should be 4 levels of selection in the UI, and so on.
- At a minimum, there should be 2 levels of taxonomy selection
This feature enables users to invite team members outside of their organization to collaborate on matters. In previous versions, Matter Center administrators had to take manual steps to coordinate the process for associating an external email alias with a Microsoft Live ID, which is required to enable external sharing. The new design automates all steps for sending a sharing invitation to an external user, and creates a job in the background that will give proper permissions to external users once they accept the invitation.
The SPO feature of external sharing will be integrated into Matter Center. In the following UI the user should be able to add an external email ID.
- Create Matter
- Share a Matter
The feature will detect if the added user is part of the organization; if not, Matter Center will send an invitation to the external user, asking them to join the O365 asset. Once the invitation is accepted, the system will add the appropriate permissions for the user to work on a matter. For design details please read : this article
Improvements to the deployment process have been made based on feedback from Community members who actively helped to build and deploy Matter Center. The feedback and the contributions are now consolidated, making deployment easier.