“These new features make the Slack platform even more powerful for every customer, giving both developers and end users the tools they need to easily automate any business process across their work apps, directly in the place they’re already working,” Rob Seaman, chief product officer for Slack. 

Workflows in Slack can now be created from events that occur in third-party apps, such as PagerDuty, Asana, and Bitbucket. It used to only support starting workflows from events that occurred directly in Slack or Salesforce.

The new functionality would, for example, enable a user to create a Slack workflow from a PagerDuty ticket. This workflow could automate an incident channel being created in Slack, adding team members, setting up a canvas, and sharing relevant information from the PagerDuty ticket. “Team members get the context they need to resolve the issue efficiently in their flow of work,” Salesforce wrote in a blog post. 

Next up, the company announced a new plug-and-play experience for building workflows that works by having the user fill in the blanks of a prompt to get a workflow generated for them.

This pairs with the platform’s 50+ new pre-built workflow templates that cover common use cases like starting a project, collecting survey data, or creating IT tickets. 

And finally, the company is adding new tools in the developer platform to make it easier for developers to create custom workflows. They will now be able to create and manage custom steps in the Slack settings, which can be used to update existing custom-built Slack apps or added to new workflows.

There is also now support for more languages for building custom steps, including JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, and Java. 

“As Slack continues to become the destination for getting work done, we’ll continue to make it as seamless as possible for users to create automated workflows and take productivity into their own hands,” said Seaman.

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The initial set of capabilities include personalized responses to search queries, channel recaps for key highlights of the activity within a channel, and thread summaries to enable you to catch up on long conversations quickly. 

The personalized search can be used to get up to speed on a new project, such as learning the project’s goal and the key stakeholders involved. The responses also display the citation for the information gathered. 

“This means no wild goose chases using roundabout search terms; if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, AI will make smart suggestions. Just ask a question conversationally, like you would to that friendly colleague who knows everything about your organization,” Slack wrote in a blog post. 

Other use cases recommended by the company include learning about company policies, finding internal subject-matter experts, getting insights about past decisions from historical context, and defining unfamiliar acronyms. 

Channel recaps and thread summaries can provide the key highlights and themes of a conversation. It can be useful for catching up after a vacation, getting up to speed on a new project, staying informed on customers in sales account channels, outlining a root cause analysis, and extracting themes from design feedback channels. 

According to Slack, customer data is not being shared with LLM providers or used to train LLMs. The AI runs on Slack’s infrastructure, which allows it to keep the same security practices and compliance standards as the application. 

“These new AI capabilities empower our customers to access the collective knowledge within Slack so they can work smarter, move faster, and spend their time on things that spark real innovation and growth. In the era of generative AI, Slack is the trusted, conversational platform that connects every part of a business to supercharge team productivity,” said Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack.

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Slack AI is built natively into Slack on its trusted foundation, grounded in a company’s collective knowledge found in Slack, and easy to access in the flow of work.

Using AI, channel recaps in Slack provide quick summaries of important information from any channel. These recaps not only help users focus on the most crucial details but also save time by allowing them to create status reports and extract key themes from different channels.

Thread summaries in Slack allow users to efficiently catch up on lengthy discussions within a thread with just one click. This feature is particularly useful when teams are actively involved in incident resolution, decision-making, or idea brainstorming, as it streamlines the process of staying informed.

Also, “Search answers” in Slack assists customers in leveraging their conversational data and the context it provides from the collective expertise and experiences within the organization. Users can ask questions, and the search feature not only provides results containing relevant messages, files, and channels but also includes an AI-generated summary to enhance understanding.

Slack has also added automation capabilities to empower anyone to automate without code using a new and improved Workflow Builder that offers connectors from companies like Google Workspace, Atlassian, and Asana. Users can also build and deploy custom apps, hosted in Slack, and Slack will take care of the hosting, eliminating infrastructure overhead and ensuring data is stored securely in Slack.

With Slack lists, customers can manage, track, and triage work while in the flow of communication by tracking projects, managing launches, and reviewing approvals and requests. 

“At Slack, we’re taking a collaboration-first approach to delivering an intelligent productivity platform in the age of AI and automation,” said Noah Desai Weiss, chief product officer of Slack. “We are focused on providing customers with a simpler, more delightful, and more efficient set of tools so every person can do the best work of their lives.”

The post Slack AI, Slack Lists, and new automation capabilities released appeared first on SD Times.

The platform includes modular architecture grounded in building blocks like functions, triggers, and workflows. They’re remixable, reusable, and hook into everything flowing in and out of Slack. 

It also includes new tools such as the Slack CLI and TypeScript SDK that simplify and clarify the most tedious parts of building on top of Slack. Developers can easily share what they built anywhere in Slack. With a link trigger, the workflow becomes portable and can be shared in a message, added in bookmarks, put in a canvas, and more.

Lastly, developers now have access to Secure deployment, data storage, and authentication powered by Slack-managed serverless infrastructure. And a fast, Deno-based TypeScript runtime keeps you focused on your code and your users.

Overall, the next-gen platform aims to provide a more seamless and streamlined experience for both developers and Slack users.

“Listening to developers, admins, and users is critical to building, maintaining, and evolving a platform like ours. We know that it’s been too darn difficult building custom integrations, ensuring that they’re enterprise-ready from day one, and keeping them fresh whenever new Slack features are released, regardless of experience level or interest,” said Taylor Singletary, head of developer relations at Slack. “After witnessing our customers’ enormous success in automating work with Workflow Builder, we knew we had to bring that automation power to even more people.”

Slack stated that Workflow Builder will soon become a no-code tool that puts the power of automating Slack and integrating everyday tools directly into the hands of users. The functions and workflows will become remixable as users discover new ways to combine triggers, inputs, and outputs with functions for the software they use most. 

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Me? I’m Team Crunchy. A lifetime member since the uniform was footy pajamas and my cereal of choice was Honey Nut Cheerios. 

You need to know these types of things– like how your coworkers prefer their morning cereal and if cilantro fills their mouths with the taste of suds- when you’re collaborating with people on a daily basis. It’s arguable that these tidbits are even more critical when you’re working in a hybrid model, which is probably why these questions are nearly always included during our Ask Me Anything interviews featuring new engineers.

Here are four other things I’ve picked up leading and collaborating with an engineering team in a hybrid/remote model.

1. Create an environment of learning from Day One

Engineers, especially new hires, just want to code, produce, and ship new features– it’s what we do, it’s in our DNA. When an engineer joins a new company, however, they have to catch up on a lot of code and processes. Onboarding new engineers is all about redirecting their energy for the first few months from doing to learning. 

Supporting this learning process was easy in the office. At Slack, we would seat you right next to your “onboarding buddy” and it was natural to turn to them and ask them questions. Even with assigned buddies, though, this didn’t translate favorably into the hybrid model. Setting up Zoom meetings required too much activation energy and structured meeting hours felt strained and awkward. One enduring trait of engineers is that they can determinedly set their minds to reading their way to a solution, which doesn’t always benefit them or the team they’re collaborating with. 

Slack Huddles is recreating the ease of in-person communication. When a question arises, all an engineer has to do is ping their buddy or another teammate for a few minutes of their time. The other person clicks yes and they’re connected. That’s much closer to what we had before. Of course, this has to be normalized as part of your team culture as well. The easiest way to do that is to model this behavior as a leader, and it’s totally normal for me to start or receive three to four huddle pings a day.

To keep my engineers from crawling up the walls of their home office in their first few months with Slack, they’re still fixing bugs and submitting code. Because not being able to ship code would probably drive them mad. But I remind them, their primary work product during this phase is learning – then shipping.

2. Set high standards, provide feedback that helps people achieve them

Once employees are up to speed, the expectations change from learning to performing. It’s your standards that set your technology apart amongst the millions of apps and feature sets that are released every year. Achieving that auspicious goal requires that every single team member performs to their utmost potential. How do you help your employees get back on track?

Don’t wait until an employee’s performance review to inform them they’re not coming up to scratch. Feedback is somewhat of a perishable good and it’s best when delivered fresh. Building continuous feedback loops into the way you lead and collaborate as a team means consistent improvement is the norm for everyone. Integrating feedback into your day-to-day model also normalizes the process and makes it easier to give and receive. 

Be intentional about the way you deliver feedback as well. Focus on framing the feedback around your employee’s role or function and use language that makes it clear this isn’t about who they are as a human being. If it is somewhat personal, reflect how a certain behavior or action may be perceived by others or how it impacts the team. 

Follow up by asking for any feedback they have for you as well. Thank them for their honesty, and commit to processing and integrating any valuable feedback you receive– both as a role model and for the benefit of your work.

3. Listen to what’s not being said

Giving, receiving, and integrating feedback are all expedited when your communication skills are sharp. While many people have practiced the art of talking, far fewer have devoted adequate time to listening. My advice to you is to look into active listening. There are nearly as many interpretations of what that means as there are people espousing its positive impact. So while I am listening actively I’ll speak to some specifics. 

Listen for what is not being said. Frustrations arise, but some teammates may be reluctant to face conflict head on until the situation gets out of control. It was easy to watch body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, or the way people walk away from a meeting in an office setting. As a leader in a hybrid model, I’ve had to attune my ears and eyes to the minute indicators of how someone communicates via text, audio, and video to keep a pulse on team dynamics. When you’re listening well, you can waylay issues before they mushroom. 

Like any good engineer, I appreciate an efficient system. Going remote meant that I needed to tighten up the way that I respond to my team’s professional and interpersonal needs. By systemizing conflict resolution, you guarantee that grievances don’t go unchecked on your to-do lists. These slips can happen due to unconscious bias, a busy schedule, and the blending of our work-home lives. A process makes sure you do it right every time with everyone.

4. Arm your team with the essentials, and get really good at using them

Going hybrid meant a lot of things: being unmoored from an office or an in-person team, the collision of personal and work life, the ability to hire engineers living literally anywhere. It also necessitated a new wa of working together while maintaining the extremely high level of collaboration that engineering teams like mine need.

The tool came first for us, and then came the cultural shift. 

We already knew that Slack was a platform for great immediate interaction. It’s asynchronous abilities, however, weren’t as celebrated when we were all in-office at the same time. But once Slack embraced this nebulous work environment– physically and culturally– asynchronous tools began to shine.

A great example is the way we share materials. Now, it’s our norm for California early-birds to log off before their coworkers and drop a file marked “Here’s something to check out.” In the past, people may have felt pressure to immediately respond. Now you know that person isn’t checking comments until early the next morning. 

We’ve really changed the expectation so that it’s clear that people are sharing things that are meant to be consumed when their teammates have the space and time to do so- whether that’s in a few minutes, hours, or even weeks in some cases. 

Another tool that has been pivotal for our hybrid collaboration is GitHub. We have our own internal controls and compliance that require that every piece of code is reviewed by another engineer. It’s also how better software is made so that there are more engineers, eyes, and minds on it. Code reviews in GitHub have many of the advantages of pair programming – only you don’t have to be sitting next to someone looking at the same code at the same time. 

Once you’ve completed your piece of code, you can submit for peer reviews by whomever is available whenever they are. You can also ask someone who has specific subject matter expertise or domain knowledge. It’s the norm that that person will finish what they’re doing and then get to it, it may even be that they ask for a review in kind on their code. This is all asynchronously occurring. In Slack, you know once someone has left comments and you can go back to the feedback when you’re ready.

We’ve really upleveled the way we work together. And, quite frankly, I think if my team was all in the same office, we would still choose to work this way. 

Leading in a hybrid model, for me, remains grounded in my values and my skills as a leader. But as an engineer and a leader of engineers, I get excited about the tools we can expand on or create to enhance the way we work together.

We had many of these tools on a rudimentary level pre-pandemic, and through this experience they’ve gotten better. We have also gotten better– our work flows, our norms, our leadership skills, they’re all better. And I’m sure we have farther to go. Looked at on a timeline for scale, if this is how we work forever, we’re not going to figure it all out in the first 18 months. And I, personally, am looking forward to seeing how far we go.

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In addition, the JFrog app for Slack allows notifications, content, and actions related to specific software incidents to be shared with one or more Slack channels. These interactive notifications enable users to take action with “ignore” rules, displaying details, and more. Notifications can also be paused or deleted.

JFrog’s new app for Slack also provides users with quality assurance, shift left security, and contextualized alerts. For more information on this integration, visit here or download the free trial.

CockroachDB 21.2 supports event-driven data architecture

 Cockroach Labs, the company behind CockroachDB, today announced the release of CockroachDB 21.2 to strengthen its position as a transactional database for cloud-native applications. 

This release brings users improvements that allow developers to integrate more seamlessly with event-driven data architecture, build against CockroachDB with more schema design and query optimization tools, as well as operate more easily at a larger scale. 

CockroachDB reduces complexity and makes it easier to quickly deliver reliable customer experiences by 

• Integrating more seamlessly with event-driven data architecture 
• Delivering a better developer experience 
• And operating more easily at a massive scale 

For more information, visit here.

Alluxio releases version 2.7

Alluxio, a developer of open-source data orchestration software, today announced the immediate availability of version 2.7 of its data orchestration platform. This release brings users 5x improved I/O efficiency for Machine Learning (ML) training at a lower cost by parallelizing data loading, data processing, and training pipelines. In addition, this release provides enhanced performance insights and support for open-table formats in order to more easily scale access to data lakes for faster Presto and spark-based analytics. 

In addition, the company announced $50 million in Series C financing led by a leading global investment firm, with participation from existing investors such as a16z, Seven Seas Partners, and Volcanics Ventures. This funding brings Alluxio’s total amount raised to more than $70 million.

With this, Alluxio also announced the expansion of its Asia-Pacific presence with the opening of a building in Beijing, China. Alluxio will use the financing from this oversubscribed funding round to continue fueling its growth by investing in expanded product capabilities as well as scaling go-to-market and engineering operations globally. 

Snowflake updates

Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, today announced new product capabilities that build on its unified platform to expand what’s possible in Data Cloud, while bringing a new level of simplicity. These latest innovations help global organizations operate consistently across clouds and regions; help data engineering and data science teams build pipelines, Machine Learning workflows, and data applications faster and with more flexibility; and simplify bringing users the right data. 

Expanding on existing cross-cloud replication and failover capabilities, Snowflake has added new innovations that make it easier to operate continuously, among these features are cross-cloud account replication, improved replication performance, and expanded capabilities and integration.

In addition, Snowflake announced new capabilities that expand what data engineers, data scientists, and developers are able to build on Snowflake. These innovations include Snowpark: Stored Procedures, Snowpark: Unstructured File Processing, and Snowpark: Logging Framework. 

The post SD Times news digest: JFrog creates new integration with Slack; CockroachDB 21.2 released; Alluxio announces version 2.7; Snowflake updates appeared first on SD Times.

The shift to remote working happened at such a massive scale and in such a short time that collaboration tools have been dubbed the “new work nucleus.” 

The business technology review site TrustRadius wrote that it saw a 400% increase in traffic to the collaboration software category from the beginning of the pandemic to now. Also, last month’s collaboration traffic was four times as much as traffic from exactly a year ago, correlating directly to buyer intent.  

Meanwhile, research firm IDC found that a whopping 96% of North American businesses will be spending more and investing more on team collaboration solutions into 2021. 

Major software companies are seeing tremendous opportunities in expanding into the collaboration tool space. 

In early December, Salesforce issued a bid for $27.7 billion to acquire Slack, which if it comes to fruition, would make it the second-largest software deal in history. 

“Being able to kind of federate out the work of best tooling and having that all integrated I think that’s a brilliant strategy by Salesforce and also really empowering the remote workers too, because just between the nature of the cloud and everything that they’re doing with enabling people to work from anywhere access, and then combining that with Slack,” said Dave Messinger, the CTO and vice president of product at Topcoder. 

The collaboration market is mature and cloud office suites have gained widespread adoption as primary tools for organizations for file sharing and work collaboration. There is currently a lack of differentiation among the core features that these platforms offer, forcing vendors to look towards specialization, according to Gartner in its Market Guide for Content Collaboration Tools released in May 2020. 

Aspects of collaboration in these platforms — such as file sharing, device synchronization and the provisioning of collaborative workspaces — have been fleshed out by collaboration platforms. 

Within various industries, the most sought-after collaboration feature was video conferencing with 65% of companies adding it to accommodate changing work requirements during COVID 19, according to Avaya in its “Work from Anywhere” study released in October 2020. Avaya is a business collaboration and communication solutions provider. 

This was backed up by TrustRadius, which showed that the most searched comparison between collaboration vendors was Microsoft Teams and Zoom for their video conferencing capabilities, and by a giant margin.

Integrations the biggest topic
But aside from features such as video conferencing and chat, collaboration platforms also offer project and task management, workflow automation, abilities to track location and changes to a file, and much more. Tool providers are primarily looking to pull these functionalities together with integrations. 

Integrations have become especially important as organizations are using many different collaboration tools within their organizations for different tasks.

For cloud-based productivity, teams rely mostly on G Suite and Office 365. Then, they implement video conferencing tools such as Zoom or WebEx and workflow automation tools such as Jira and ServiceNow. 

“Jira is also a popular tool for developers these days. I’d say there’s a 50/50 split between issue management on Jira vs GitHub among the wider developer community. Most developers prefer GitHub because it’s friendlier, but probably too slow for project management, so as companies grow they are switching to Jira,” Aaron Haynes, the CEO of Loganix, wrote in an email. Loganix offers link building services for SMBs and SEO agencies.

Finally, organizations are using instant messaging tools such as Slack and Teams as primary forms of contact. And there are usually many more circulating at once. Now, companies are looking more at unified solutions. 

“You traditionally see organizations using many tools — typically one for planning, another for creating code, another for building and deploying it, and 1-3 tools for monitoring and observability. However, what we’ve seen happening is a need for a single DevOps platform. Some enterprises have tried stitching these disparate tools together into their own “DIYOps” platform, but this undifferentiated work distracts their teams from the business goals and their customers. Thus, teams and DevOps tools companies alike are moving towards a single DevOps platform,” Brendan O’Leary, a senior developer evangelist at DevOps solution provider GitLab, wrote in an email.

The different types of tooling are implemented because there are primarily three layers to collaboration. The first is a communications layer and the second is essentially a content layer, where organizations can do their file sharing. And the third layer is that productivity layer. That’s the integrations of the IP stack and this varies by department, according to Wayne Kurtzman, a research director of Social and Collaboration at IDC. 

“This change really puts the abilities of developers who know what these tools really can do into a new level. We’re going to see additional integrations and this is where collaborative apps get their superpowers,” Kurtzman said. “Once you add workflow, the core IP stack, and the MarTech stack and integrate them, they develop new metrics that are just starting to be recognized and the developers pretty much understand this. So 2021 is going to rock for developers.”

Providing workspaces
With integrations, collaboration tool providers are now focusing on providing the right team workspaces. 

“An effective collaboration tool enables developers to sync up the different tooling,” Topcoder’s Messinger said. “Like right now Jira and GitLab integrate out of the box and there’s a lot of integrations you can set up. So developers are in GitLab tagging the issues they want, and that syncs to a SaaS with Jira.”

The necessity of proper integrations with collaboration tools is also driven by more complicated pipelines that have emerged at development companies due to CI/CD growth, Messinger added.

In the past, traditional pipelines went from QA to a production release. Now, the process includes much more shifting between different parts of the organization.

“We have several clients now in the enterprise space that are doing this now with much more complicated multi-step, multi environments and multi-company type development pipelines. So I think, you know, being able to find the right resource and the right talent has always been a problem for these guys from a deployment and development standpoint,” Messinger said. “So being able to integrate those collaboration tools or those pieces is just critical.

While the collaboration tools can handle some scenarios effectively they can still be difficult to use in others. 

“Tasking, status reports, and the standard software development life cycle is pretty nailed down and easy to follow. I think tools like Slack have made things easier and even now like being able to add a kind of bridge corporate Slack so we can add customers and have our Slacks talk to each other and still be compliant. Teams is doing a good job of that as well,” Messinger said. “I think probably where some of that stuff may fall down is I think it’s tough to make some of that stuff be like a system of record. So it’s almost too easy to collaborate in some cases as like, ‘Hey, did you change that requirement or that piece of information?’ And it’s like, ‘Oh, it was in a Slack conversation?’ It’s like good luck going back and finding that piece of information where it was agreed to in a Slack conversation.”  

Messinger added that he has seen a dramatic increase in interest for whiteboard-type tools. These include tools like Trello and Miro. He added that tools like Miro are doing a better job of creating that collaborative environment than before, though it’s still not the same as just being able to sit down and collaborate with everyone in one location on the whiteboard. 

Customer collaboration, features are focus
Another phenomenon that has been picking up steam regarding collaboration tooling is that tool providers are working to provide ways for their customers to suggest additional features and integrations. 

“I think one of the more interesting aspects in collaboration the last few years is how enterprises increasingly are adding both partners and even user customers to collaborate, not necessarily in the same private group, but they’re extending their collaboration network so they can get better, and more loyalty and trust is built by the companies who now are communicating and feel that they have more input,” IDC’s Kurtzman said. 

One such place for collaboration between consumers is Microsoft Teams’s Uservoice site, where people can suggest changes and people can vote on those changes.

“Microsoft is actually implementing those changes,” said Mark Rackley, a partner and chief strategy officer at PAIT Group, a Microsoft technology consultancy. “So if there’s something you don’t like about Teams today, there’s a good chance that it’s going to change in two, three, or six months so just keep an eye on all the changes.” 

Vendors are also working on producing customized views and reports and developing AI, advanced analytics, virtual assistants and machine learning within their platforms. 

“People are in there doing conversations every day so why not do conversations with a bot to do other tasks within their organization whether that’s general help questions, or things like filling out simple forms for vacation requests and things like that to start other workflows,” Rackley said. 

IDC’s Kurtzman agreed that interest in machine learning and AI in collaboration tools has seen great interest as a way to free up developers’ time. “We’re also seeing an increase in people learning basic coding skills to take the next step. At the same time, we’re seeing enterprises look to no-code where possible, but still there’s complexity, higher value complexities that developers will need to fulfill,” Kurtzman said. 

A large determining factor as to what tools a company chooses is how easy it is to set up and for teams to start using it. This became especially important as many organizations were forced to shift from their physical workspaces to the digital realm in a matter of days. This forced newcomers on the bandwagon quickly, and also those organizations that already had pockets of collaboration tools had to assess how they would move their work entirely online. 

“One of the most important things that happened to collaboration applications in 2020 is that the adoption, not the revenue, but the adoption of collaboration applications jumped by a five-year span in a period of only six months between January through June 2020,” said Kurtzman. 

PAIT Group’s Rackley said the pandemic has quickly pushed implementation of collaboration tools up on organizations’ priority lists.

“It’s interesting because a lot of time was spent before saying let’s spend a lot of time planning, but now it’s just like let’s forget planning and we need Teams now. We’ll worry about the planning and the cleaning up after the fact,” Rackley said. 

What do you want to do?
The difficulty of adopting these tools largely depends on what kind of functionalities companies expect to use. File sharing and chatting and calls are pretty straightforward, but when users want to start customizing and integrating into other things, while it still might be pretty simple,  people might need someone to show them first so that they can do it, Rackley explained. 

Topcoder’s Messinger added that while collaboration tooling might not be as easy as a one-click deploy to get it done, it can usually be measured in weeks or less. The more important factor in the way tooling is adopted in an enterprise largely depends on the collaboration culture surrounding it. 

“The tooling may not be as out-of-the box as being able to do a one-click deploy to get the tooling done, but it’s also not like a three-month drive. If you think of some of the tooling, it’s probably maybe measured in a week or less to set up, but the acceptance, the openness is really a cultural shift. I actually think that’s been a forcing factor from COVID that people have really moved the culture that way,” Messinger said. “If companies had already done their homework and were following a DevOps culture, then it’s tremendously easier to add collaboration, add remote workers, work at home, and use alternative staffing models.”

Many web and mobile applications have already been working in this sort of DevOps manner over the last 10 years or so and the difficulty in creating a collaborative environment might come down to the large packaged applications.

“This is where managers have to become facilitators and it changes the way they manage. And that’s one of the big challenges for them is they have to create online exactly what they would if they were to create a community in real life, they need to have a safe place where people are willing to share their best ideas, where they feel safe,” IDC’s Kurtzman said. “It really comes down to the culture and the willingness to employ the creativity in your workforce and your management team.” 

More developers are turning to open source to collaborate
Before the pandemic, developers were collaborating on open-source projects in GitHub from all places in the world, but this phenomenon has seen a massive boost during the pandemic. 

The GitHub State of the Octoverse 2020 report found that developers are sharing and reviewing code faster compared to last year. In May, over 40% more repositories were created compared to last year, and since then, roughly 25% more open-source repositories have been created compared to the same time period last year. 

GitHub measured the level of collaboration on its platform based on the speed of pull requests. Early in the year, the time to merge pull requests took a few hours longer compared to last year. In March, time to merge began to be faster, ranging from 45 minutes to almost seven and a half hours faster in comparison to last year, according to GitHub. 

Across all GitHub repositories, newcomers pushed code and created repositories much more than veterans, while also interacting a bit more than veterans with creating and commenting on issues and creating pull requests. 

Earlier this year to further collaboration on the platform, GitHub announced Discussions, in which teams can post updates and or have a conversation that spans projects or repositories in a forum. 

“This provides an opportunity for us to think about different ways for people to engage with open-source communities. Participating in and watching Discussions can be a good way for newcomers to learn community norms and patterns in a safe way that doesn’t overwhelm maintainers,” GitHub wrote in the Octoverse report. “These patterns have applications in enterprise settings too.”

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Their mission is to “drive ‘silicon-to-cloud’ innovation for the benefit of enterprise customers—fueling a differentiated modern computing platform and providing additional choice for integrated business solutions.”

Founding members of the group include Google, Box, Citrix, Dell, Imprivata, Intel, Okta, RingCentral, Slack, VMware, and Zoom. 

The Modern Computing Alliance will attempt to tackle the most pressing issues in computing today, including performance, security and identity, healthcare, and remote work, productivity, and collaboration.

To address performance issues, it will invest in creating a seamless, user-friendly experience, Google explained. For example, it can increase video and audio quality in Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) by leveraging hardware-based capabilities and platform optimizations.

The group will also work to create advanced cloud data security, as well as improve data loss prevention solutions. 

According to Google, healthcare is included in the list because providers need to improve their ROI on technology so that they can improve patient outcomes and reduce IT costs. “Clinicians need more time ‘facing the patient’ and less time interacting with IT systems.To maximize their resources, we will optimize productivity, efficiency, and authentication in hospital settings, and improve performance for telemedicine applications,” John Solomon, vice presidnet of Chrome OS at Google, wrote in a post. 

Finally, the Modern Computing Alliance will attempt to enhance the productivity of the distributed workforce. According to Google, in order to achieve this, IT needs transparency, simplified administration, and analytics for users and devices, while employees need better workflows to make the most of their tools. The alliance will provide silicon-to-cloud telemetry insights and analytics, as well as recommendations for optimizing workflows and automating repetitive tasks.

“The technology industry is moving towards an open, heterogeneous ecosystem that allows freedom of choice while integrating across the stack. This reality presents both a challenge and an opportunity. To address the complexity of this challenge requires a new level of collaboration in the form of an industry-wide effort. Technology leaders have to work together in new ways to develop open solutions that transcend products or brands any individual might envision, and create a better, more optimized experience for everyone,” Solomon wrote. 

The post Google, Slack, Zoom, and others form Modern Computing Alliance appeared first on SD Times.

“As software plays a more and more critical role in the performance of every organization, we share a vision of reduced complexity, increased power and flexibility, and ultimately a greater degree of alignment and organizational agility. Personally, I believe this is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can’t wait to get going,” said Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder of Slack. 

Slack will be integrated into the Salesforce Cloud and be the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360. More information is available here. 

The next major release of Android Gradle plugin
Android is providing more insights into the upcoming release of the Android Gradle plugin. AGP 7.0 will feature a new versioning scheme, require Java 11, and introduce API changes. 

With this release, the team explained it would be adjusting the versioning for Gradle and decoupling it from Android Studio’s versioning scheme. 

AGP version 7.0.0-alpha01 was released with the first Canary version of Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1). 

Weaveworks announces Weave Kubernetes Platform (WKP) 2.4
The latest release of WKP aims to unlock the power of Kubernetes and GitOps at scale. It features the ability to add GitOps to any Kubernetes cluster; multitenancy with team workspaces; application portability; and the ability to install Kubernetes across all major target environments. 

“This release helps teams who want to deploy Kubernetes into many different environments, and deploy applications onto their platform in a more secure, reliable and portable way. With this release GitOps can be added to any Kubernetes cluster – whichever Kubernetes you’re using. Major features in this release include: Team Workspaces, RBAC for workspace members, the ability to add GitOps to any Kubernetes cluster and support for adding WKP to existing infrastructure,” the company explained in a blog post. 

SUSE completes Rancher Labs acquisition
SUSE first announced plans to acquire the Kubernetes management solution provider in July. Together, the companies will deliver a Linux operating system, Kubernetes management platform and a host of edge capabilities. 

“Our customers have made it clear they want powerful technology that is both leading-edge and reliable to accelerate business transformation,” said SUSE CEO Melissa Di Donato. “We have historically delivered innovative solutions that anticipate what enterprises need, and today with Rancher, we are set to make history again. With our powerful and modular approach to open source software, our customers can count on reliability and unmatched agility to innovate everywhere – from the data center, to the cloud, to the edge and beyond.”   

Amazon announces SageMaker Data Wrangler
The new solution is designed to make it easier to prepare data for machine learning. It enables users to select and query data, transform data, visualize the data, diagnose and fix issues and automate machine learning data preparation workflows. 

“Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces the time it takes to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning (ML) from weeks to minutes. With SageMaker Data Wrangler, you can simplify the process of data preparation and feature engineering, and complete each step of the data preparation workflow, including data selection, cleansing, exploration, and visualization from a single visual interface,” the company wrote. 

The post SD Times news digest: Salesforce acquires Slack, Android Gradle plugin 7.0, and Weave Kubernetes Platform 2.4 appeared first on SD Times.

It allows users to automatically collect and route info to the right teams, standardize how to collect and share info up front, and create a customized workflow.

“By doing all of this in Slack, where your team is already working, you’re keeping things simpler and more transparent for everyone. Building a workflow takes just a few clicks. You can customize it for the way you work and publish it for your team to use all in a matter of minutes,” Slack explained.

The details on the tool are available here.

WSO2 announces Identity Server with RESTful APIs
WSO2 announced the release of Identity Server, a new configuration model and RESTful APIs for self-service IAM. 

The new solution includes new adaptive authentication options, cross-protocol single logout, multi-domain federation support for Microsoft Azure AD and Office 365 and built-in support for managing active user sessions. 

“As enterprises conduct more of their business online, developers need to implement IAM solutions that ensure both secure, easy access for users and simplified management for administrators  — often across multiple systems and cloud domains,” said Prabath Siriwardena, the vice president of security architecture at WSO2. 

Databricks announces new MLflow capability
Unified data analytics provider Databricks announced the release of Model Registry, a new capability within MLflow, that enables a comprehensive model management process. 

The Model Registry allows organizations to collaborate on models and optimize the development lifecycle of ML through one collaborative hub, flexible CI/CD pipelines and full visibility and governance of the experimentation, testing and production phases. 

The Model Registry is available on Databricks and provides the benefits of its Unified Data Analytics Platform including enterprise-level security, scale, and fine-grained access controls, the company said.

The full details of the new capabilities are available here. 

CloudBolt 9.0 released with hybrid cloud management strategies
Cloud management platform CloudBolt announced its new Cloudbolt 9.0 platform (dubbed ‘Cumulus’ meaning ‘multi’) with new capabilities to mitigate cost and accelerate the time-to-value for enterprise hybrid cloud management. 

CloudBolt 9.0 comes with expanded support for Kubernetes, extended support for IaC with out-of-the-box integration with Terraform, and new integrations with Infoblox, phpIPAM, ServiceNow. It also integrated Splunk to enable IT to send logs to security information and event monitoring as well as integrations with APM solutions Datadog and SolarWinds. 

The 9.0 release builds upon CloudBolt’s platform capabilities by simplifying multi-cloud management with a single pane of glass, accelerating workload delivery through self-service IT, and enforcing governance through centralized automation and orchestration as enterprises continue their hybrid cloud journeys.

The full details on the new platform are available here.

Ranorex Studio 9.2 is now available
Ranorex Studio 9.2 is now available with support for WinForms and WPF applications running with .NET Core 3.0.

The updated version includes a new pause and resume test execution feature, toolchain maintenance with support for Jenkins Pipeline and Azure DevOps build and release management and faster test execution.

The post SD Times news digest: Slack announces Workflow Builder, WSO2’s Identity Server with RESTful APIs, and Databricks’ new MLflow capability appeared first on SD Times.