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Recent Enhancements to Job Manager in OPEN DISCOVERY

By Kelly Lyons, IPRO Product Learning Experience Team & Scott Kirk, IPRO Product Manager, Enterprise

We are excited to introduce our newest Job Manager release! This point release is customer-feedback driven. You asked and we’re delivering. These latest enhancements will lead to:

  • increased visibility into submitted jobs
  • better workflow management
  • greater flexibility in setting user permissions
  • improved distribution

Added together, these enhancements will result in a better Job Manager experience.

A Single Pane of Glass

A major goal of IPRO is to create a “single pane of glass” where users can perform all necessary functions in one program, thus eliminating app hopping. To accomplish this, we have already updated Review to include functionality previously available in Eclipse. A separate project aims to migrate many components from eCapture, including Streaming Discovery, into Enterprise to achieve a seamless experience.

A Brief History of Job Manager

Job Manager started with the migration of the job queue from Controller in version 2019.7.0. It aims to be the central location to manage jobs within an Enterprise deployment.

This first release had some similarities to today’s version, but it was basic and had some limitations. In this version of the application, users had to switch between processing and review jobs, and the program only supported two job types. Additionally, sorting could be challenging. Nonetheless, this older version laid the groundwork for later releases.

The 2020.8.0 release gave users the ability to get more information about their jobs, including any errors encountered and it also provided additional details not visible in the summary view.

The next version (2020.9.0) was a major release. In a substantial shift, we went from supporting not only mass action PDF and OCR jobs to supporting more than 10 different job types. Moreover, this release provided:

  • The “Scheduled Jobs” tab. This allowed us to remove the Eclipse Scheduler and Eclipse Agent, since all functionalities transferred to Job Manager and the Job Manager agent. This simplifies where to find jobs handled by Scheduler while also lowering the complexity by reducing the different agent types required within an environment.
  • The “Job Details” page was enhanced, allowing users to dig more deeply into ongoing jobs and job progress.

Job Manager 2021.9.1 followed with several key features:

  • The Agents tab provides similar information to the ‘Worker Status Information’ tab in the eCapture Controller. The Agents tab reports information on the Agents performing the work, their installed version, active tasks, and current status. Using this tab, users can find out which Agents are working on tasks in real time. 
  • The Job Details page also reports the Agent assigned to each task. If you need to troubleshoot or find error logs, they are now easier to access since you know which agent ran into the error. 

This saves valuable time, allowing users to perform tasks more efficiently and freeing up time for other tasks.

New Release

Since the initial release of 8.0, we’ve been gathering customer feedback and implementing steady and significant changes and improvements with each release.

For In Progress jobs, the Job Manager indicates the case name, in progress jobs and those that are up next to be processed. Users can now easily see In Progress and Upcoming jobs with progress stats for each job. This is hugely beneficial in allowing users to anticipate how much longer tasks will take and then plan accordingly.

While a job is running, you can drill down into it to find more details. This provides further insight into the job submitted. The user can correlate the work complete with job processing time thus far and get a sense of how much remains to be processed.

To help users better manage multiple concurrent tasks, job types have an underlying priority listed in the visual queue. Certain types of jobs take priority in your queue once submitted. Priority is based on a few factors, some of which take place behind the scenes.

Some types of jobs, such as import jobs, must undergo multiple types of tasks to get documents imported, but users may need to know how many documents there are and how much longer it may take. You can now view how many items are being worked on, including both the number of pages and the number of documents.

Users will also now receive feedback on jobs containing errors. The program indicates when a job was completed with errors, enabling users to more easily identify problems, and make any needed adjustments.

Another large change involves user permissions. A new permission ‘Can View User-Specific, Case Specific’ has been added to allow users to view jobs that they did not initiate but are associated with cases to which they are a member. In addition, the ability to pause, resume and cancel jobs was previously only available when a user had permission to view all jobs across the environment. This permission has been broken out and can now be provided in combination with the level of access at which a user can view jobs within the Job Manager job queue.

We’ve reconfigured the processing time for high-priority tasks, such as Native to HTML conversion tasks. Now, if you have a large review pass, the program will create 20 Native to HTML conversion jobs. As review is happening and batches are checked in, it will create subsequent individual jobs, ensuring that 20 jobs are in the queue at any given time.

In the Agents tab, we have also added an agent priority setting. This feature allows users to guarantee that resources will be available to tackle more transactional-type jobs. Users can now reserve up to 50% of their resources for normal-priority jobs, such as analytics, OCR, keyword lists, and more. For example, if all resources are being utilized to tackle critical or high-priority jobs and you submit a normal-priority job, 50% of your resources will be redistributed to work on the normal-priority job. If there are no normal-type jobs in the queue, those resources will still continue to work on the critical/high-priority tasks.

The OPEN DISCOVERY 9.2 release is packed with lots of small but mighty enhancements that add up to big improvements. These changes will result in increased efficiency, better performance, and improved user satisfaction.

Keep checking back with the Product Learning Experience team’s regular blog series for more information on IPRO’s products, the Learning Center and different training options!

If you’d like to learn more about IPRO’s products or if you’d like to purchase any type of training, head to our online Learning Center: https://learn.staging.ipro.com/

IPRO’s Help Center, where you can find documentation on all IPRO products, can also be found here: https://my.staging.ipro.com/help  

If you have topics you’d like for us to cover, please feel free to drop us a line and we will incorporate your ideas into future blog posts.