Micro Focus Connect 4.3 has been released

Finally! Many customers were desperately waiting for this Micro Focus Connect release. And today it has been published on the Marketplace. This article will highlight some major updates on the release 4.3.

Overview

• Introduction to Micro Focus Connect
• MF Connect Upgrade to 4.3
• Updates & Improvements
• Online Help

Micro Focus Connect Introduction

Micro Focus Connect is a tool used to synchronize item and relationship data between various Micro Focus change and configuration management systems and other repositories or clients. Once data is synchronized into the system, all of the change management capabilities of the system, including versioning, branching, tracing, labeling, and reporting, are available on that data.

Micro Focus provides a free entitlement of Micro Focus Connect Core to all ALM / Quality Center & ALM Octane customers. This allows to integrate different endpoints such as Azure DevOps, Atlassian Jira, IBM DOORS, etc. with Micro Focus ALM products.

Upgrading Micro Focus Connect from previous versions to 4.3

Prior to upgrade, backup Micro Focus Connect configuration and data described as follow:

• Stop any connection in Micro Focus Connect.
• Back up the following:
• <INSTALL_DIR>AppData\data\db directory
• <INSTALL_DIR>AppData\data\Connect.xml file

Download the latest installation files from the Micro Focus Marketplace.

Install Micro Focus Connect 4.3

• Run the setup file: mfconnect-4.3.0.19-amq-win64.exe.The setup will detect the existing installation and will upgrade.
• After upgrade process is completed, upgrade the connectors by replacing the old connector jar-files with the 4.3 download jar-files.

Once Micro Focus Connect is installed, open a browser and enter the URL ( http://<server>:<port>/ConnectWeb) — default port is 8081.

Updates & Improvements

Below are highlights of the major updates on Micro Focus Connect. Click here to see a complete list of changes.

• Linux Support added
• User roles & access
• Support of comment sync
• Database backup
• Purge connection activity
• Performance Improvements

Suse Linux support added

Many customers were looking for this capability. Now with 4.3, you can run Micro Focus Connect on Suse Linux.

User Roles have been introduced

3 roles have been introduced:

• Site: Administrator of the whole MF Connect Site
• Admin: Can do everything access promoting himself to Site
• User: Can manage Connections, Datasource & UserMaps

Roles can be found under the USERS tab in Micro Focus Connect.

Comments sync

Added ability to sync comment style fields for ALM/QC, Atlassian Jira, ALM Octane and Azure DevOps.

You can find the comment field now in the field mapping dialog.

ALM Octane Connector

Comment Create, Update & Delete properties have been added to the datasource for ALM Octane. You can decide whether a comment can be created, updated and/or deleted in ALM Octane. This can differ from datasource to datasource. For instance, within one datasource you may allow to delete comments if deletion happened on the target endpoint and in other cases you may not allow it.

Jira Connector

• On the Jira datasource you can now define a default link type, which will be used to associate item
• Types (leave blank for all) — Users can specify the subset of itemTypes by entering a comma delimited string e.g. “Bug, Epic, Task”. When a user specifies the subset, Micro Focus Connect will only consider the subset when determining the relationships between itemTypes (improves performance).

ALM / QC Connector

• Added support for comment syncing
• Added ability to turn on comment deletion for the Connect API Key
• Improved logging when first discovering which workspaces are accessible
• Improved messaging when ALM Octane returns http 502 and 403 errors
• Fixed issues with Application Modules when syncing multiple workspaces
• Updated ‘team’ field to be represented as an enum
• Fixed character encoding issues

Performance Improvements

Micro Focus has improved performance of Micro Focus Connect in the following areas:

• Connectivity of connectors
• UI Load & Save Configurations
• Synchronization

Online Help

Micro Focus Connect online help with all updates, enhancements and fixes is available at https://admhelp.microfocus.com/connect

Attached to this article a short PDF with the major updates described here.

Happy connecting!