December 2021 Product Updates

Kinetic Data December 2021 Product Updates: Next-Gen Search. Web APIs. File Resources.

We’re always looking to raise the bar here at Kinetic Data and lately, we’ve been quite busy!

We thought it was about time that we update everyone on some of the new features both recent and over the course of the year that can really help you make the most of the Kinetic Platform for building human centric business apps that really move the needle in your organization 🚀🚀🚀.

Next-Gen Search

Let’s start out with the big one, a capability you’ve been asking for since we released Kinetic CE. Next-Gen Search (we’re calling it DB Awesome) gives our customers the searching abilities they need to use Kinetic as a source of truth system for building really sweet business apps.

So, what does it do?

In the past, there’s been lots of restrictions on how you can query for data submitted to forms within the Kinetic Platform. There were also restrictions on how you could query for data across multiple Forms. We’ve combined the best of “Datastore Forms” and “Kapp Forms” together to empower builders to construct the queries they need within their portals and workflows.

You can now define “compound” indexes both at the Form level, and the Kapp level, meaning you’re not limited to querying only by the pre-defined Kapp Fields we provided in the past. This means the work arounds put in place previously to support complex searches (like writing fields to a normalized Datastore) are no longer needed (yay!).

Here’s a quick video overview of the functionality and how it works:

I WANT THIS! How do I get it?

This feature is available in version 5.2 of the Kinetic Platform. If you’re running on kinops, (our hosted platform) we’ll be reaching out over the next few months to assist your team with a migration. For our on-prem customers, we’ll be reaching out early next year to help plan your migration. If you’d like to get migrated early, feel free to reach out to [email protected], and we’ll work on a plan together 😀.

Web APIs

Ever wonder if you could use the Kinetic Platform as a workflow engine for other systems? Want Jira, Workday, Salesforce or ServiceNow to be able to execute a workflow you’ve built within Kinetic? Web-APIs allow you to do just that.

With Web-APIs, builders can create API endpoints which execute a workflow secured using KSL (the Kinetic Security Language) all from within our Space Consoles.

Here’s a quick overview and demo of how they work, presented at our Kinetic eVolve Event:

File Resources

For a long time, the Kinetic Platform’s bridging framework has allowed customers to fetch data from external systems at runtime and use them within Forms & Portals. We’ve recently extended this capability to do the same thing for Files, and we’re calling it File Resources.

With File Resources, Kinetic Platform builders can expose files from various data sources like AWS S3, Sharepoint, ServiceNow, BMC Remedy and other’s via custom built Filestore Adapters. These adapters get configured with connection information, and then File Resource Endpoints can be setup and secured, allowing requests for files to be proxied through the Kinetic Platform.

Customers are leveraging File Resources to display PDFs and Images embedded within various Knowledge bases within a Kinetic Portal.