The developer said highlights of Switch 2018 update 2, which was first made available last month, include improvements to the 'designer' and several 'flow' elements, additional features to job boards, various performance enhancements, and a free online opt-in Insight Dashboard.

“This is a dashboard available for all users who opt-in to share usage data with Enfocus and provides them with a weekly overview of the processing that Switch did that week,” said Switch product manager Toon Van Rossum.

“This solves an interesting issue, mainly that our users complained that it was difficult to show the value that Switch brings to the company.

“A lot of our users already opted-in for usage data sharing in the past so it only made sense for us to try and give them something in return. In combination with our user events and user feedback, this data is extremely valuable to plan our long-term and short-term roadmap.”

Improvements to the Switch designer contained in the update include more intuitive pop-up tool tips when hovering over a “condition with variables” parameter. The tool tip now displays the value of the conditional variable.

Specific flow element updates in this release have seen the Database Connect element receive major speed improvements while the Assemble Job, Mail Send and Problem Jobs elements have received additional functionality to simplify flow design.

The ability to apply a pie chart style to History Graphs has also been added and it is now possible to give a status to folders at the end of a flow, which allows job boards to contain a “finished” count for a flow.

Other updates include searchability in the submit points of the Switch Web Portal, which is now possible with instant results. And in the Job Client, filtering by Job State is now supported and scripting improvements have been made to webhook requests and dataset extensions.

Van Rossum said update 2 has ultimately kept Switch 2018 up to date by offering compatibility with new operating systems – including a new Mac OS update from Apple.

He added input received from customers during the company’s Switch World Tour events “weighed heavily” in the development of this update.

“These user events are extremely important to help us build a road map for Switch. It helps us validating our long-term plans, but also helps us to understand the smaller features or tweaks to improve existing features.

“For update releases we look at these (relatively) low-effort, high-value features. And if for some reason we need to work on existing features in Switch, we have a look at the feedback and requests that we received related to this feature.

“As Enfocus works with a partner channel it’s too easy to lose a direct relationship with the customers, but we take the extra step to make sure that we still build what our users need.”

Switch 2018 update 2 is available for free for maintenance customers, who will have received a download link on the day of the release. The download is also available on the MyEnfocus profile page on the developer’s website.

Switch 2018 was launched last April and the first update, which featured the Reporting Module function, followed in the summer.