Please enjoy this sneak peek of a major upcoming enhancement to the functionality of custom fields and Stewardship Organisations (SOs) in the Aristotle Metadata Registry!
What’s new?
First and foremost, registry-wide custom fields can now be disabled on a per-SO basis!
This means that custom fields that are not relevant or otherwise useful to a certain SO can be ‘hidden’ by SO Administrators, via the new ‘Custom Fields’ tab of the SO settings page.
In addition, SOs can now create and contain their own, SO-specific custom fields! These are custom fields that can be used only on items that belong to that SO’s workgroups, and will not appear in the item editors of any items belonging to other SOs.
Note: SO-specific custom fields are configured with exactly the same parameters as registry-wide custom fields — the only difference is the scope of their use.
To facilitate this enhancement, all users of the Aristotle Metadata Registry that are members of one or more SOs will henceforth have an ‘Active’ SO. While an SO is set as your active:
- You will have access to any custom item templates available to that SO
- Created items’ editors will:
- Only display that SO’s workgroups
- Have access to:
- That SO’s SO-specific custom fields
- Registry-wide custom fields that are enabled by that SO’s Administrator(s)
- Cloned items’ editors will follow the same rules as above, but in the case that an item is being cloned from one SO into another:
- The editors will not have access to SO-specific custom fields of the source/non-active SO (these will be removed from the item)
- The editors will have access to the destination/active SO.
Your active SO can be changed from the ‘Create New Metadata’ page, and it’s upon first navigating to this page after this enhancement has released that one of your SOs will be made active initially. Your currently active SO can be viewed (and navigated to) via your username dropdown.
And finally, to maintain existing functionality whilst allowing for improved security in conjunction with these features, two new security policies have been developed and added to the Aristotle Cloud Settings Editor.
When enabled, these content creation policies respectively allow:
- Registry Administrators to set any SO in the registry as their active SO (allowing them to create content for all workgroups, as they have been able to in the past)
- For existing registries, this setting is enabled by default
- For registries created after this enhancement’s release, this setting is disabled by default
- All authenticated (logged-in) users to set any SO in the registry as their active SO (allowing them to create content for all workgroups)
- This setting is disabled by default.
Please enjoy the following videos demonstrating these new enhancements:
Custom fields and active SO:
Content creation security policies:
How do these enhancements benefit users?
These enhancements were made to custom fields as a means to bring their functionality closer to that of custom item templates, which can already be configured on an as-necessary and per-SO basis.
SO-specific custom fields will empower SO Administrators to further tailor metadata entry and visibility to their specific needs, ensuring only the most relevant fields are visible to their workgroups without having to bloat the available fields of other SOs in any one registry.
Additionally, the new ‘active SO’ feature and its corresponding security controls will help to smoothly incorporate the above enhancements, and streamline existing metadata item creation and editing workflows!
Your feedback matters
Your feedback is invaluable as we continue to innovate and improve the Aristotle Metadata Registry. We’ve designed this feature with your metadata management needs in mind, and we want to hear from you; please don’t hesitate to reach out with suggestions, ideas, or questions!
Note: The features outlined in feature previews are not yet finalised; any features described may differ upon final release.