Business Rules are a powerful and flexible way to automate the management of your content and metadata in Picturepark. With this release, we introduce schedules for Business Rules that enable you to trigger Business Rules at predefined date and time intervals. Previously, Business Rules could only be triggered by user activities such as a user importing or updating content.

Scheduled Business Rules open a new array of automation possibilities, for example:

• Informing teams such as sales e.g. every Monday about available new product literature.
• Hiding content that is nearing license expiry dates, and proactively informing the content owner.
• Publishing content to select stakeholders based on predefined schedules and other criteria.
• Archiving content by a predefined end-of-life date of e.g. your products.
• Tagging content “New” when it isn’t older than a few days, or as “For review” when it’s years old.
• Reminding content suppliers to complete their tagging, if not properly done after import.
• Sorting out content that needs a check e.g. when faces are detected without consent data.

To create a scheduled Business rule that e.g. “locks” content on the day of expiry and informs the owner of the content, you need to do the following:

1. Create or reuse a Business rule that changes the content permission by adding a permission set which makes content only accessible to certain users. Use “Schedule” as a trigger point.
2. Create or reuse a Notification based on an existing or a new email template, describing to the owner that content has expired and was consequently locked, so he might want to check this manually.
3. Now, Create a Schedule by defining the time intervals of execution, a search string for querying all content items which are expiring (based on a corresponding expiry date field) and assigning the Business Rule (from step one) which should be executed each time the interval occurs.
4. Test the Schedule by triggering it manually and applying it onto a test Content Item only (e.g. by filtering for that item for test purposes only).

The above Schedule could also be used to trigger other Business Rules at the same interval time. For instance, if the schedule is set to every day at 7 AM CET and you also wish to release certain content by then, this can be done by assigning another Business Rule to the same Schedule.

Additional options and best practises for creating Schedules, Business Rules and Notifications are made available with the updated Administration manual. Especially noteworthy are:

• The minimum accepted interval time is 15 minutes. The powerful cron job syntax is used for scheduling e.g. jobs to execute recurrently every hour, every Friday, first day of the month, and more.
• Schedules are executed at an approximate time. If you set a schedule to 07.00 AM CET then it will be executed exactly at this time but the Content Items might be changed with an offset, depending on the defined search query, the number of Content Items that need be processed and the general load on the system.
• If processing of the items takes a long time and overlaps with the next interval; then the execution of that next interval will be skipped. For instance, if you are using 15 minute intervals and the processing takes 20 minutes then the next execution will happen 30 minutes after the one that took longer. Filters should be used to narrow down Content Items for preventing overload and long processing times.

Unique IDs enable users and integrated systems to quickly identify a Content Item. Picturepark uses GUIDs which are globally unique but therefore rather lengthy. For quick reference, a shorter number will usually be enough, which is why this release introduces new sequential numbers which can be created and applied using a Business Rule action. Applications include:

• Easier referencing of content for users and machine processing.
• Counting up new content and ranking content in the order it was added to Picturepark.
• Automatically generating new product or content codes, when creating a new item.

For creating a new sequential number, that e.g. counts up content and makes it identifiable as “Picturepark” content, the following steps are required:

1. Create a new sequential number by defining the start number and format (e.g. “PP-” for Picturepark, used as a prefix).
2. Create or modify a Business Rule by adding the corresponding action to retrieve a new sequential number and then assign that number to a metadata field of a Layer.

Best practises for creating sequential numbers and Business Rules are made available with the updated Administration manual. Especially noteworthy is that for now, sequential numbers can only be assigned to Content Items (and e.g. not List Items).

• Several small bug-fixes were applied for improving the usability.

• Business Rules can now be triggered by multiple trigger points such as when content is created or updated, the assigned file is replaced or triggered by a schedule (see Scheduled Business Rules above). This greatly reduces the amount of Business rules; which before needed to be created separately.
• Caches are now built in parallel which speeds up the creation of such caches especially in high scale systems, where a lot of List Items are frequently changed. Previously, this resulted in delays when e.g. auto-tagging content using product or other identifiers.
• Search suggestions, display of filters, and search in filters can now be enabled or disabled for fields in the Content Browser and List Item filters. This allows Admins to better control in which fields search suggestions are shown, which fields will be displayed in the Content Browser and List Item filters and which filters will have a search.
• A warning is shown when deleting a user role that is used in a permissions set requiring Admins to confirm the deletion explicitly.

Please note that the following API changes and SDK`s are tentative and thus they can change until the release date.

With the upcoming Picturepark Release “San Salvatore” (10.9) we will also introduce some API Changes. Please find details here: https://api-changelog.picturepark.com/api/

Please check if those changes will affect your integration and adapt your Source Code. If you use our SDK`s or samples like the Content Portal, we recommend to update to the latest version:

• Picturepark.SDK.DotNet:
• Picturepark.SDK.TypeScript:
• Picturepark.SDK.Samples (including Content Portal):

If you want to test your changes in advance, we can provide a test account which runs already on the new version, for free or a charge, depending on your subscription plan.

From April 2021 on we will no longer support Microsoft Edge browser (version 18, non-Chromium version) for which support will be cancelled by Microsoft by the end of March 2021. See additional information on Edge support by Microsoft: Consult our documentation to see which Web Browsers are supported for the Picturepark Content Platform.

Aside from various improvements to the overall stability of the system, bug-fixes have been applied in the backend, as well as updates made to versions of components we use. The following bugs have been fixed with this release:

• Fixed a bug that resulted in video and audio files only being played back once until the page was refreshed.
• Fixed a bug which resulted in text overflow in the sidebar of the user management, when text was too long for shown fields.
• Fixed a bug which prevented Monaco editors from loading when editing a Content Item with a video or audio file preview.
• Fixed a bug which occurred when scrolling multi-line text fields.
• Fixed a bug where multiline text was cut in the trace log for Business Rules, preventing information being seen.
• Fixed a bug that meant the contents of nested tagbox fields were not exported via the Excel Roundtripping App.

Fixed a bug which prevented importing data via the Excel Roundtripping App, if only the target Layer had non-indexed tagbox fields configured.