2004
In 2004 IFS started the Edge project which was to be a longer-than-usual development project for the next core version of IFS Applications. Where this project was largely about vertical industry functionality, a key theme for Foundation1 was to be usability and user productivity.
The goal was to achieve a leap forward and deliver a level of user productivity never before seen in business applications. To this end IFS started serious research and prototyping into everything from user centric design methodologies to new ways of visualizing information.
The result was a series of prototypes demonstrating new concepts. Taking this one step further an application project called "1st Solution" was started.
The mission for this project was to put the new innovations and techniques into use in a real application. After a first approach to build a complete business solution the scope was changed to deliver a new version of the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and System Administration modules.
In parallel with the work devoted to usability research and development of new client technologies, a lot of time was also spent defining the second generation of the services layer in IFS Service Oriented Component Architecture.
In particular the logical model was being extended to provide a closer alignment with BPEL concepts, as it was becoming increasingly clear that BPEL would become the de-facto standard to describe processes oriented software components. Further enhancements were also made to the storage model to enable more flexible and efficient reuse of and integration with the application core layer. IFS Developer Studio saw significant improvements, in particular to make the RAD process more productive as well as improving the support for development teams.
Because of the longer than usual development cycle, a fair amount of time was also dedicated to improving IFS Applications 2004. Work on supporting high availability, scalability, and secure deployments continued with new product certifications and support for more advanced deployment topologies. Significant updates were also made to the two newest components in Foundation1, namely IFS Report Designer and IFS Mobile Client. These updates incorporated feedback and improvement suggestions from early adopters.
The highlight of improvements on IFS Applications 2004 was however service pack three, which in the fourth quarter brought new possibilities for configuring the screen layout.
Now it was possible to move and hide fields, as well as changing the tab order and marking certain fields as mandatory or read only. With the possibility to adjust screen layout to specific user groups and the task at hand, user productivity could be increased and training costs lowered.
For the existing customer base this functionality was the first clear result from IFS' increased investment into usability.
