Omniscope projects release management

Omniscope provides an easy and comprehensive set of tools that allow you to manage projects in your organisation across development and production servers.

This article discusses how you can setup Omniscope to manage the deployment of projects, workflows and reports.

Key features and vocabulary:

• Working copy - a Working copy allows you to work on a project on a separate server or within the same server in a different folder on a copy of an original project. Once you are happy with the changes you can then publish/push those changes to the original project. Or revert the changes and pull from the original project.
  
  
• Project Version History - see workflow and report changes over time, who authored what , and work with confidence. Revert or create a copy out of a specific revision.
  
  
• Scheduler - Provides an interface to automatically schedule certain actions and task on a regular basis or based on events.
  
  
• OpenID - Omniscope provides ability for you to authenticate using OpenID providers such as Google, Okta, KeyCloak, Auth0, EntraID, to authenticate your users.

We recommend that you have at least 2 servers. By server we mean a dedicated machine (Linux recommended). You could potentially have a third-server which is a test server where you can deploy new builds to test everything works before deploying to production. For system requirements see here.

Production server

This server acts as a production server. All your end-users will use this server to view the final projects/Reports.

The scheduler on the production server can also be used to automatically refresh the projects/reports on a regular basis.

Since this is the customers facing server, it is on this server you would setup authentication for your end-users using OpenID which is highly recommended.

You can also use the "Admin dashboards" to audit who is accessing which Reports and general server performance.

You would need to allow your project editors to have "Project publisher" permission on the production server so that they can create working copies on the development server. For more information on permissions see here.

The production server should also have resources access setup to manage what local resources should be accessible by projects.

Omniscope also has a concept of virtual roots which allows you to create shortcuts on the main project list page so that your end-users can easily navigate to specific folders.

It is highly recommended you enable HTTPS on this server. For information on how to do this see here.

If your projects use custom blocks you should configure your server from Admin web app > R/Python and Blocks library to run in Docker for added security.

Development server

This server acts as a development server. You project editors would typically use Working copies to work and deploy projects, workflow and reports to the production server. 

You can additionally use Scheduler actions , specifically multi-project and working copy actions to automatically deploy the changes to the production server in bulk. You can also use the Scheduler to periodically backup the projects on both the production or development servers.

When working on a project, whether you are authoring a workflow or a report, Omniscope keeps track of the changes and allow you to see the project version history, so you can understand who made changes - especially when collaborating on the same project,  revert to a previous version or make a copy out of a specific version.

NOTE: Project history and data are automatically deployed to the production server when you use working copy actions as behind the scenes its the same as you downloading the IOZ from the development server and then importing it in production server.

This server doesn't need to be accessible to the outside world and should be deployed within your company VPN so that only people within the organisation have access to it. However, you should configure permissions accordingly to ensure that project editors have relevant access. 

Project editors

The project editors who are responsible for creating the projects and managing them will normally be working on the development server by creating new projects and/or updating existing ones. 

Working copy functionality requires the project to be already present on the production server. So when a new project needs to be deployed. It would first need to be created on the development server and then manually deployed to production by downloading it as ioz and re-importing it onto the production server.  Note this is only needed first time after that you can create working copy of the original project on the production server onto the development server.

We highly recommend you use project parameters for configuring your database connections and other settings so that you can easily change from production database to a test database on a development server. 

Your project editors can utilise the project templates to create a set of pre-configured projects for rest of the team to use to create new projects.

End-users

End-users (your customers) will be accessing the production server, they should be configured with the relevant permissions. In most cases these are likely to be List directory and Shared Report viewer permissions.