It's been a while since my last blog post. I know it. But, I have been focusing on “Getting Things Done”. This new version of the Social Media Scripting Framework has been quite a challenge and, in fact, it has taken longer than expected. Anyway, it is finally here!
But let's start from the beginning. Once the previous version was on the street, I have started collecting feedback from different sources. Many were exited with the possibilities that this tool was bringing to the table. However, it became more and more clear that some aspects had to change in order to make it more easy to use and also more scalable. In other words, if I wanted this to grow, a much better foundation was needed.
Therefore, I started working on a full redesign of the whole architecture in order to achieve these goals. As a result, a number of significant changes were done. Here you have the main ones:
- New Design/Architecture: Unified Data Structures for all Digital Media channels/formats and Unified semantics for all Digital Media channels.
- Native support for LinkedIn!
- Native support for RSS feeds!
- Microsoft Excel is no longer needed in order to work with Excel files!
- Configuration and Session profiles.
- Data versioning support.
- Data privacy policies.
- Data expiration/aging support.
- Data tagging/labeling support.
- Data normalization has been made mandatory and transparent to end users.
- Improved data quality checks. A hell of a job! 8-D.
- Significantly enhanced and simplified user experience. The so-called “Timeline rebuilding” concept is no longer needed or used. Long story short: way easier to use! :D.
- Basic logging and caching capabilities.
- Improved and enhanced exception handling. In other words, enhanced reliability ;-).
- Improved Debugging/Tracing capabilities.
- Now function names try conform more closely to PowerShell naming conventions.
- TimeLine analysis functions are now independent from the Digital Media channel.
- Basic help-based documentation.
- Lots of bug fixes.
- … and all this, without increasing the System Requirements. Just PowerShell, for the most part 😉
I won't bother you with too much detail for now because I will cover relevant aspects of these changes on future and more focused blog posts. However, I hope that, with this short description, you can have an idea of the scale and the depth of the changes introduced on this new release.
There is still a lot to be done. For example, making something “scalable” is not only about having a design “good enough” that can incorporate new Services over time. It's also about performance when volumes go up significantly (Big Data). Unfortunately, I am afraid, we are not there. Maybe some day we should go down that path … but, maybe, we shouldn't. Only you will tell. The question is that there are so many opportunities in front of us, that I am absolutely positive that the journey is going to be awesome ;-D.
Anyway, I'd like to think that this is just another step in the right direction. Nevertheless, it is up to you to decide what do you think about it … If you think this is worth your time, please, find the download details here and let me know what you think!
1000 thx in advance! 😀
