The main improvement enabled by this release is the new and comprehensive browser- based user interface which has been developed from the ground up using the latest web technologies. Almost all functionality provided by the Supportworks desktop client is now available in the browser. A major part of the development effort was focused on true cross-browser support. Hornbill has developed the web client using leading edge browser technologies such as AJAX, JavaScript, DHTML and CSS (with no ActiveX or Java applets employed). Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8 and 9, Firefox 3.6 and above on Windows, Linux and Mac, Google Chrome 13 and above on Windows and Linux an Apple Safari on Mac and Windows are all fully supported with this release.
In addition to the web browser client, significant security enhancements and enterprise features have been added which allow for secure use over a public network. Hornbill has also added SSL and TLS support for all SMTP, POP3 and IMAP integrations as well as SSL support which is enabled by default. A full complement of fully documented XML-based web services API's are provided for integration providing both XML and JSON native data support for browser and mobile device integration. Hornbill are also making libraries available for JavaScript, PHP, .NET, Java and C++ for these API's making integration easier than ever. The new web client is built entirely on these new API's which demonstrates their completeness.
Gerry Sweeney, CTO of Hornbill Technologies, said: "This is a significant release that takes our software onto a new level. The enterprise ready security features, the web browser interface and the many changes we applied to support our cloud platform has contributed to creating the best software release to date. We also took the time to optimise our Windows desktop client to streamline the protocols in use. By pipelining and streaming data we have improved application performance significantly on latent networks, in some cases the performance improvement was ten-fold which a significant achievement that also underpins our new cloud offering."
