HotDocs Advance Release Notes

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About Release Notes

Because we update the various parts of HotDocs Advance independently, we provide the following:

• HotDocs Advance Release Notes – the release notes for the web application you use to organize uploaded templates, launch interviews, and download assembled documents
• HotDocs Core Assembly Service Release Notes – the release notes for the core service responsible for delivering the interview and for creating assembled documents
• HotDocs Author Release Notes – the release notes for the HotDocs Advance template authoring tool

About HotDocs Advance Release Notes

These release notes refer specifically to the HotDocs Advance web application you use to organize uploaded templates, launch interviews, and download assembled documents. Because we make updates to the web application independently, we provide you with separate release notes found here.

New Features and Enhancements

The following HotDocs Advance incremental releases contain new features and enhancements:

1.39(28 September 2024)

New Features

• Advance API version 2.0 is now available. This version supports work items using multiple templates.
  • API 2.0 enables you to assign more than one template package to a work item. This can be useful if you have a set of templates that have a similar scope regarding the same matter.

Compatibility: Please note that API 1.1 and the Advance user interface can only access work items that have a single template, regardless of which API was used to create them. However, API 2.0 can create and access all work items.

Advance API versions 0.1 and 1.0 are obsolete and will be removed.

Feature enhancements

• This release contains improvements to Single Sign-On.

1.38(no cloud release)

1.37(16 May 2024)

Feature enhancements

• This release contains various background improvements to HotDocs Advance.

1.36(23 March 2024)

Advance API versions 0.1 and 1.0 are deprecated. These API versions will be removed in a future release. You must upgrade any integrations that rely on these versions. 

Feature enhancements

• Site Administrators can now configure work groups to disable standard users' permission to edit default answers.
• You can now set custom date ranges when generating the Document Assembly by User report.

1.35.1(3 February 2024)

Feature enhancements

• Improvements to the Document Assembly Activity by User report, including adding a count of documents assembled.

1.35(25 November 2023)

New Features

• Administrators can now download a template from Advance. Downloaded templates can then be imported into Author for editing.

Feature enhancements

• Improvements to the styling and accessibility of Advance, such as when creating and editing users.

1.34(16 September 2023)

New Features

• You can now continue editing an interview which another user has saved and exited.
• Site Administrators can now download a report with details of administrative user actions.

Feature enhancements

• You can now abandon an interview from the interview page.
• You can now add new documents during post-processing and optionally choose the order of assembled documents using the HotDocs API.
• This release contains various background improvements to the security, stability and styling of HotDocs Advance.

1.33(29 July 2023)

Feature enhancements

• This release contains various background improvements to the security, stability and styling of HotDocs Advance.
• You can now use a POST request with the Custom Interview Event webhook.

1.32(6 May 2023)

New Features

• You can now watch work items to monitor the changes and updates that other users make to them.
• You can now view watched work items only using the Show watched only checkbox.
• You can now retrieve unanswered interview variables from an assembled document's metadata using the HotDocs API.

Feature enhancements

• You can now optionally notify users with details of the work items you share with them. You can additionally add a custom message to the notification.

1.31(4 March 2023)

New Features

• Integration Administrators can now control users' access to assembled documents and answer files on work items.

Feature enhancements

• You can now view the number of assembled documents for each work item in the work items table under the column heading Documents.

1.30(10 December 2022)

New Features

• You can now use In-interview Action Links to give users access to external workflows from the interview.
• You can now filter work items using work item statuses.
• HotDocs Advance now uses a Pendo integration for metrics gathering.

Feature enhancements

• Integration Administrators can now manage Webhooks.
• You can now configure Advance to connect to iManage private cloud instances.

1.29.1(31 October 2022)

Feature enhancements

• This release contains various background improvements to HotDocs Advance.

1.29(20 August 2022)

New Features

• You can now activate PostProcessing webhooks when a user completes an assembly for a specific template.

1.28.1(9 July 2022)

New Features

• You can now save your assembled documents to your organization's instance of iManage.

1.28(28 May 2022)

Feature enhancements

• Action Links now use an HMAC to authenticate the data being sent from Advance. Webhooks now also use an optional HMAC authentication method.
• You can now download all assembled documents in a work item with a single zip file.
• To delete tenancies, you must now enter the tenancy name to confirm deletion.

1.27.2(27 April 2022)

Feature enhancements

• You can now activate LoadInterviewEvent webhooks when a user loads an interview for a specific template.

1.27.1(12 March 2022) 

New Features

• You can now use workflows to enable users to set different statuses for work items and track their progress from creation to completion.

Feature enhancements

• The JSON response data from webhooks now has a maximum size of 200Kb.

1.27(30 October 2021)

New Features

• You can now use Template Links to enable users to open Advance and create a work item from an external source. For example, a knowledge base.
• You can now use Load Interview Events to populate interviews with external answer data when a user loads an interview.

1.26.1(28 August 2021)

New Features

• The Advance user interface style has been updated.
• You can now use Action Links to give users access to external workflows from the work item details pane.
• You can now use the Branding API to update the custom logo displayed in client interviews.

1.26(10 July 2021)

New Features

• You can now set a custom logo for your client interviews.
• You can now create a public interview link to collect data from unknown external users.
• A new API resource, publicInterviewLinks, is available to create and manage public interview links.

1.25.2 (23 May 2021)

New Features

• You can now use the Try It Out feature in Swagger with the HotDocs Advance APIs.
• Improved accessibility features, including announcement of errors for screen readers.

1.25 (29 March 2021)

New Features

• A new webhook, the custom interview event, is available. You can use this to connect to external data sources during interview.

• Improved keyboard accessibility.
• Better programmatic announcement of dynamic screen changes.
• Improved field labeling for screen readers.

1.24 (15 January 2021)

New Features

• You can now add SMS code authentication to client interviews as an extra layer of security, using Azure Active Directory B2C.
• The expiry time for a client interview link can now be customized.
• Advance now provides API methods for adding images to work items.
• Quick documents are now included in reports.

1.23 (9 October 2020)

New Features

• You can now upload images to interviews for templates asking an Image variable.
• You can now add a passphrase to client interviews as an extra layer of security.
• A new report on document assembly activity by user is available to administrators.
• A new report on template usage over time is available to administrators.
• You can now filter work items by date and other fields.
• You can now configure Single Sign-on using authorization code and PKCE, including for Salesforce.
• Work items can now be shared either with all users of a work group or with specific members.

1.22 (30 July 2020)

New Features

• No publicly exposed features added.

1.21 (28 June 2020)

New Features

• You can now download documents for a previous version of a work item.

1.20 (20 June 2020)

New Features

• You can now overlay answers from other work items into your interview. A Site Administrator must enable this setting.
• A new feature, a work group default answer set, allows you to create a set of common answers shared across a work group.
• The Advance APIs now allow you to:
  • retrieve metadata for a work item version.
  • retrieve the answer set for a previous version of a work item.
• Advance now saves interview answers more frequently to long term storage.

1.19 (13 May 2020)

New Features

• Advance now notifies administrators when the client interview quota is low or used up.
• You can now copy a link to a client interview to another email or document.

1.18 (31 March 2020)

New Features

• A new feature, client interviews, is available on subscription. You can now send client interviews to external clients to gather data for work items.

1.17(12 March 2020)

New Features

• A new site usage summary is available to administrators.

1.16 (27 February 2020)

New Features

• A new administrative function is available, Site settings; you use this to edit settings for your site, such as whether new work items are shared by default.
• You can now generate a report on template usage within your site.
• You can now download an answer file for a work item.

1.15 (13 January 2020)

New Features

• You can now create and save a work item without launching an interview.

1.14 (11 November 2019)

New Features

• You can now use webhooks to receive notifications in your own applications about events in Advance.

• A new administrative role, Integration Administrator, is available; you use this new role to manage webhooks.

1.13 (22 August 2019)

New Features

• When assigning templates to a work group, you can now use the All Templates option to include all templates uploaded to your tenancy in the work group.
• Users are now prevented from opening an in-progress interview they did not initiate for a work item.
• Using the Advance API, you can now add and remove user groups from work groups.

1.12.19191 (15 July 2019)

New Features

• When assigning access permissions for a work group, you can now use the Everyone user group to include all Advance users in the work group.
• You can now send an invitation e-mail to a user (inviting them to log into their Advance tenancy) after the user is created.
• You can now configure your tenancies to use Single Sign-on (SSO).

1.12.19162 (12 June 2019)

New Features

• Advance now defaults new work items to private.

1.12 (25 April 2019)

New Features

• When creating a new work item, you can now upload a HotDocs answer file to pre-populate interview answer data
• You can now assemble documents using the Advance REST API
• You can now view user roles and e-mail address data in the response from the user details REST API endpoint
• You can now view the last logged in date in the response from the users REST API endpoint

1.7 (28 February 2019)

New Features

• Work Items created using the API are now automatically populated with assembled documents
• Root administrators can now view and edit tenancy users from the root application
• You can now create, complete, delete, and save assembly sessions using the API.

1.1.5 (12 December 2018)

New Features

• Core Assembly Service updated to support TLS 1.2

1.1 (26 October 2018)

New Features

• Added Quick Documents feature; you can now assemble documents without answer data or documents persisting in HotDocs Advance.
• Permissions for Site Administrators have changed; Site Administrators no longer have universal permissions.
• You can now create private work items which are visible only to the owner and Site Administrators or Content Administrators.
• Advance now supports Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2.
• Work items created through an API are marked as "New".

1.0 (14 September 2018)

Initial release of HotDocs Advance