First up…

Yes, version 11 has taken much longer than we anticipated. This has been due to a stack of new inclusions, but also the need to totally update the mobile site and tightly integrate the upcoming Cloud version to maintain cross-interface compatibility. We would have loved to get it out earlier because frankly, development like this is not cheap, but it was simply not possible.

Anyway, the good news is that after more than a year of work, we are at the point that we can reveal what will be in the next major release of Civil Pro – the imaginatively titled Version 11.

The big news is the complete rewrite of the approvals system. First introduced in v9, we have seen this function adopted widely, and received plenty of feedback. The approvals you see now in version 10 were first expected to be a simple request-response system, but in the wild we have found the need for several changes to meet superintendent’s and contractor’s requirements including custom statuses, separation of HP and WP, related items and filestores, auto CC. Add to that additional requests for standing approvals, re-approval of conditional approvals, re-submission to confirm NCR actions, recorded CC for future correspondence, better handling of superseded approvals etc, and we ended up needing a complete re-imagining of how the system works.

So, we are pleased to announce that version 11 will see our new visual workflow system. At first this will be exclusively for the approval system, but may possibly be used in other parts of the application. We have started writing the Approval support section for version 11, so you can see how it works and what it does.

In addition, we have completely redesigned the user interface to introduce ribbon menus at the top of each page, and improved filtering in all registers. In addition, most registers now have separate detail pages for adding and editing. This includes NCRs, Test Requests, ITPs and checklists. It does not yet include lots, but that will happen in a future minor release.

Behind the scenes, we have started migration of our data model. While this means very little to the user directly, it means we can perform more complex data translations far more easily.

There has been a complete redesign of the security model giving far more fine grained control to the registers. More on this as we finish it.