Release Notes for Stages 7.9

Stages Version 7.9 is the third of a series of releases delivering smaller feature sets at a faster pace. Customers will be able to quickly benefit from new capabilities instead of having to wait for larger releases.

Version 7.9 comes with Long Term Support (LTS), so customers looking for long term stability are able to upgrade to this release and stay there for at least two years with full maintenance. As a consequence, the maintenance for the previous LTS release 7.6 has ended on March 31st 2023.

Did you miss our Stages 7.9 introduction webinars? You can still register to get access to the recording.

Process interfaces between different workspaces only become effective if they are released from both sides. If one side is not able to release their content, e.g. because they are in the middle of re-modeling their processes, this blocks the other side of being released as well.

To overcome this challenge, Stages 7.9 introduces new capabilities for managing interfaces in distributed modeling environments. With the new version, process owners can release their content independent of the process areas they interface with, which leads to higher business agility.

With the new capability, modelers can see all interfaces between process modules defined in multiple workspaces. A “Show only changes” filter allows to see newly created or deleted interfaces to the various target processes.

If the other side is not able to release their content, a new valid process version can be generated, which is based on the current valid version and the modified interfaces. With this, a release of the working version can be avoided.

See here for more details about the new interface feature.

To assure business resilience and compliance to standards, important processes need to be archived in long-term storage.

To make sure that process content can still be retrieved after multiple decades, Stages can now generate ZIP archive files containing the process content in a PDF/A file together with a copy of all templates, checklists, and other relevant files.

Learn here how to archive process content in detail.

The VDA QMC Project Group 13 has released the “Automotive SPICE - Process Reference and Assessment Model for Cybersecurity Engineering”. This document has been converted into a reference model in Stages and is now available for general use.

In addition, INTACS has released guidance for Automotive SPICE for agile development, which is now also available as the Agile SPICE reference model for Stages.

All customers that have purchased the Automotive SPICE reference model will receive the two new models as part of their maintenance contract. If you would like to have any of the models on your system, please let us know.

The Stages Process Execution Feature now supports Jira Data Center as well as Jira Server. The Jira-Plugin can be obtained by the Atlassian Marketplace (operation of Process Execution requires separate licensing by Method Park).

The CMS-Integration with Sharepoint Online is updated to the latest SDK supporting dynamic performance control by the Sharepoint Online Server (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/throttling).

To prevent information overload for users, email notifications sent within a short timeframe are now combined into a single message. If the notification templates were customized, they might need to be adjusted.

Please contact our customer care team to request the installer downloads if you run Stages on-premise or request an upgrade of your managed Stages Cloud instance. Alternatively, you can talk to your dedicated product consultant for more info.

For topics marked with *: please contact your product consultant for more info on how to integrate those enhancements into your configuration.