Agile Platform ™

What’s New in Version 6.0

OutSystems continues on its path of enabling IT to change at the speed of business with the latest
features delivered with the Agile Platform 6.0:
Ready-to-use apps to kick-start your projects and quickly address your business needs
Platform-as-a-Service for you to focus on your app and not the underlying infrastructure
Mobile Support so you can easily build applications that render beautifully on all devices
Redesigned Service Studio to bring efficiency and joy to building and changing your apps
Gorgeous look & feel for your apps with the improved and completely redesigned style guide
Themes and Placeholders for small UI tweaks or completely change the look & feel of your apps
Simplified User Management to make the life of developers and operators a lot easier
Over the next few pages we'll guide you through these new features and explain how you can take
advantage of them in your next Agile Platform project. We're sure that with this information you'll be
ready to make the Agile Platform 6.0 work for you!

Deliver immediate business value with
ready-to-use apps
With the Agile Platform 6.0 you will gain access to a
set of 12 carefully crafted applications ranging from
HR to CRM. Each app is made available through the
newly released apps@outsystems and found in the
OutSystems tab of Service Studio. These apps were
designed for change, with the goal of providing you
with the 80% functionality needed to get started,
before crafting the 20% which is specific to your
company. All that with a platform that was designed
for change, giving you the best of buy and build.
To make this process truly seamless we’ve made
available the full list of applications in our website at
www.outsystems.com/apps including the ability to
immediately try out the running app in an isolated
environment created just for you in that instant.
When you know you want to keep a specific app and
start making it your own, you can either publish it
directly to your environment or setup a 15 day cloud
trial to try the platform. After you do that, you’ll be
presented with a small tutorial that guides you on the
essentials of how to change the app.
Don’t let infrastructure hold you down
with our new PaaS offer
The Agile Platform has long been designed for
working in the cloud and on-premise, letting you
move between the two as you see fit. With the Agile
Platform 6.0 we’ve decided to make application
delivery in the cloud even easier with our new
Platform as a Service offering.
This is a great option if you took one of the apps from
apps@outsystems and made it your own and now
want to take it online without the cost and
complexity associated with managing your own
development and production infrastructure.
All you need to do is subscribe to our PaaS offer right
on our website and everything else will be handled by
Agile Platform experts from OutSystems.
The cloud takes care of the infrastructure. The Agile
Platform takes care of the development, deployment,
and runtime. Everything is taken care of, you just need
to focus on building your next great web app.
Address your customers on the go and
empower your mobile workforce
For the last few years the number of smart phones has
been skyrocketing, particularly with the widely
popular Apple iPhone and Google Android. In fact,
mobile phones already account for about 7% of the
total number of web page views in the US, with every
company feeling the pressure to directly support the
mobile devices that their prospects, customers and
employees use continuously every day.
Version 6.0 of the Agile Platform addresses this trend
by providing everything you need to create your
own enterprise mobile web apps. All you have to do

© 2001-2009 OutSystems - All rights reserved Page 1 www.outsystems.com

is specify that you want to create a mobile application
and, from that point on, your screens will have a
native like look & feel that fits beautiful in your device.
Both when you’re using IntelliWarpTM and when you’re
creating your application from scratch.
To make things more interesting, we’ve included the
Mobile Sales application in apps@outsystems, which
serves as a great show case for the things you can do
for mobile with the Agile Platform while covering the
most common use cases of Account Managers on the
go. From a technical standpoint we’ve used a fair
amount of HTML 5 and CSS 3 to maximize cross
browser compatibility and provide an even more
native-like experience.
And to make sure your user base is well covered we’ve
included support for iOS 4+, Android 2.1+,
Blackberry 6+ and Windows Phone 7 devices, using
progressive enhancement to adapt to the specific
differences in web standards support of each device.
Give your developers a new life with
Service Studio’s revamped UI
The Agile Platform frees developers from concerns
over all the low level plumbing that’s required to build
a typical enterprise application, and lets developers
focus on the business they’re supporting.
We’ve been doing that with our visual development
environment, with all the logging and reporting that’s
automatically included in the apps, with the version
control that happens behind the scenes, etc.
In version 6.0 we decided to take this one step further
by improving Service Studio, our IDE, which is where
developers spend most of their time. For that, we fully
revamped the user interface with a gorgeous new
skin and a full review of the location and structure of
the operations available, making it even faster and
more intuitive for both new and seasoned developers
to build great web and mobile apps.
We’ve taken as input all the usability tests and
usability studies we’ve conducted and placed the
button or menu of each operation where it is most
obvious and easier to access for each use case,
resulting in things like a clear separation between
processes, interface, logic and data, and a big 1
Click Publish button you just can’t miss.
Amazing usability as the new default for
your enterprise web apps
At OutSystems we’re focused on making sure IT
delivers the best value to the business it supports. As
such, for 6.0 we have conducted a thorough usability
© 2001-2009 OutSystems - All rights reserved
study on how the applications built with the Agile
Platform are used and decided to fully redesign our
built-in style guides for an awesome look & feel.
When you check the new styles out you will find fonts
are bigger, there’s a higher contrast between the
several elements of the screen, the colors work
amazingly well with each other and, overall, the
results are just gorgeous.
To make your life even easier we’ve included a set of
themes to more easily match your brand and added a
special version, which was designed so that your logo
fits right in with no changes needed.
Centralize your apps’ look & feel with
Themes and Placeholders
Changing the look and feel of an application that’s
already done, or even half-done, can be a huge
challenge. Some aspects of design are hard to
centralize, which means you need to visit every screen
of the application if you want to make the change.
In version 6.0 we wanted to make sure that changing
the User Interface can be done at the same amazing
speed as you can build and change your application.
Themes allow you to centralize the things that are
common in the UI and easily change them in a
single place rippling across all the screens in your
app. That includes both styles and the structure of the
pages themselves. As an added benefit, you can now
completely switch the look & feel of your app in a
second by simply selecting a different theme.
Placeholders are used when defining themes, allowing
you to specify one or more template pages which
contain the common parts for your screens. . You can
also use placeholders outside themes, to create
master pages that you can use to make it easier to
develop your application.
User Management, simplified
Our previous solution for managing users was good
but a bit too complex for 90% of the IT teams
leveraging the Agile Platform. Therefore we’ve
decided to revisit the use cases for user management
and simplified them to make the life of both
developers & operations staff a lot easier.
Although it can still be used, we no longer have
Enterprise Manager as the recommended option for
user management. Instead, we have incorporated the
core user management concepts into the platform
and provide a simple user management console to
get the job done.
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Ready-to-use Apps
With 6.0 you now have at your disposal a set of 12
ready to use enterprise applications. You can find
them both in the outsystems tab of Service Studio and
directly from our website at
www.outsystems.com/apps.
Having the apps accessible right from Service Studio
makes it really easy for you to install them. Just select
the app and click publish, and you will have it up and
running, with seed data and trial user definitions.
If you’re not sure if you want to install a given app you
can very easily try it out by just clicking try in Service
Studio or on our web site. This sets up a sanbox in the
cloud for you to try out the app in a way that’s
completely isolated from others.
© 2001-2009 OutSystems - All rights reserved
Finally, after you’ve taken the step to install, you will
find an interactive tutorial that guides you thorugh a
change so that you can better understand how the
app is built and structured.
With Agile Platform 6.0 you will find the following
selection of apps available:
Intranet & Human Resources
o Directory
o Documents
o Expenses
o Vacations
o Timesheets
CRM
o Sales
o Campaigns
o Cases
o Mobile Sales
Web Sites & Portal
o Website
o eCommerce
o Customer Portal
All 12 applications were designed by studying the
most common use cases for each, with the real
people that will use them every day. Our goal was to
cover the 80% that really matter and are commonly
used. Because we know that every business has its
own specific processes, and because this really were
the Agile Platform thrives, these apps were designed
for change and we urge you to take these apps and
make them your own by changing them to reflect the
exact way in which your business operates.
In case you were wondering, to actually deliver the
apps we decided to go for something really different
and didthe full development with an enthusiastic
group of 41 developers in a 2.5 day event. With
development sprints of just a few hours it was an
incredible experience we called CodeJam!
CodeJam really put the the Agile Platform to the test
and was a great ‘alpha’ test of 6.0. In the end we not
only delivered a set of gorgeous apps, but also a great
version of the Agile Platform.
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Platform as a Service
To make it really easy for you to go to production
without the hassles of managing your infrastructure
we’re launching with 6.0 a full Platform as a Service
offer.

With it you can subscribe for you Agile Platform on the

cloud on a monthly or yearly basis and with no
concerns over instalation, maintenance or even
licensing of supporting software, like operating
system or database.
This offer is a great option if you are just getting
started and don’t want to invest in the necessary
on site hardware, software and infrastructure Also on the field of usability, we have revised
management skills. It’s also a great choice if you’ve IntelliWarp so that it works great on Mobile. Lists are
just finished adapting one of the apps from one of the things where its behaviour changes the
apps@outsystems to your business and just want to most, with IntelliWarp only including the first text
take it live. field in your entity; adding any other fields below
the first one and with a subdued style and using very
Everything other than your Service Center and your different paging style; with long lists and a ‘‘show
applications is fully managed by OutSystems more’’ pattern. For this to happen you just have to
experts and you can use these environments for both specify that the theme is targetted at mobile devices.
development a production payloads.
And because we know you want true peace of mind
we even ensure daily backups (kept for 7 days) which
you can use should anything go wrong.
If later in time you want to move to on premise, or
vice versa, you can easily do that as the platform
targets both on-premise and the cloud.

Mobile
Smartphones are getting widely adopted these days
and, with 6.0, you can now fully address that new and
expanding market.
We have carefully designed every aspect of our mobile
themes so that the applications you create look and
behave as if they are native. Special care to ensure
the entire UI, including buttons, menus, lists, forms,
animations, etc. fit perfectely in iPhone and Android
devices with the goal of making your apps beautiful
and truly usable for your end-users.
And because we know you will likely have a
fragmented target user base we’ve added off-the-
shelf support for Blackberry 6 and Windows Phone
7. For supporting all these devices we’ve gone for a
progressive enhancement philosophy that allows us
to cope with the different levels of support for HTML5
and CSS3. This means that, while the rendering may
vary slightly between these devices, we ensure the
key elements of the layout and the content will never
get lost.
While on the field of HTML 5, with 6.0 we’ve added
support for selecting the HTML 5 document type in
your applications. This enables you to pretty much use
any HTML 5 construct in your own widgets as we’ve
done in our own themes and apps. It also allowed us
to introduce in Service Studio an option to specify the
type of input for the input widgets.

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The exact input types you can specify are
Text --- the default
Number --- smartphones will typically use a
numeric keyboard for this input type
Email --- smartphones typically use a keyboard
with the @ symbol more visible for this type
Search --- smartphones and desktop browsers
will typically add a reset cross for this type
As for CSS3 we’ve used it extensively in our new off-
the-shelf themes, especially on the mobile ones, to
improve cross-browser support for things like
rounded corners or implementing full page transitions
in the iPhone.
Note that, the entire mobile functionality is
implemented using themes and placeholders. This
means that you can easily take the themes we provide
and adapt them to so that they fit in in completely
different form factors and styles.
Out of box we provide you with both a device
agnostic theme, which is the default, and device
specific themes for iPhone and Windows Phone 7.
The first one is the best option if you are targetting a
wide a set of devices or want the application to reflect
your own brand identity. In these scenarios you
should use the default as the base theme and
extend it to customize its colors or other elements
in the layout you may want to change. The iPhone
and Windows Phone 7 themes are designed for when
you have a single corporate device or are targetting a
specifc subset of your users.
When designing screens for mobile devices, getting a
WYSIWYG preview of what you’re doing includes
seeing things with the same size they’ll have on the
device. As such we’ve set the canvas size to reflect the
size of the actual device and added the capacity to
specify the orientation of the device so that you can
preview your screens in both portrait and landscape.
© 2001-2009 OutSystems - All rights reserved
As a final note, some of the rich widget patterns,
such as the feedback message, the autocomplete and
the input calendar have been revised to make sure
they work flawlessly on mobile and a new pattern was
also created to guide the users in adding your web
application to their iPhone’s home screen.
Service Studio UI & Productivity
Improvements
Probably the first thing you’ll notice after you install
version 6.0 is that Service Studio has been fully
redesigned. We’ve done this because this is were
developers spend most of their time, so we wanted it
to be easier to use, and we wanted the overall
experience to be a true joy.
Some of the highlights are the new big 1 Click
Publish button and a clear separation between the
several application layers by placing the elements of
each layer in separate tab.
To further improve the organization of your eSpace
you can now group actions into folders, all
referenced items are automatically grouped, and you
can create multiple entity diagrams in your eSpace.
Overall every single icon and menu operation has
been revised so that its look is improved and its
location best matches the way it is used.
With 6.0 we have also introduced the outsystems tab,
with direct access to apps@outsytems, and a server
view, which provides you with instant visibility over
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what applications you have installed in your
environment, and a one click access to create new
web or mobile applications.
Speaking of applications, you can now specify that a
given eSpace is actually the main eSpace for an
application. When you do that, you can choose a label
and an icon for it and, if the current eSpace is the
main eSpace but the backoffice screens are actually in
a different one, you can also specify that here.
Additionally, you now have the ‘‘New Application
Module’’ operation whenever you are working in an
Application’s eSpace. When you use it, a new eSpace
will be created with references to all the common
application elements, such as themes and menus,
and IntelliWarp will know how to use them.
Overall we’ve also made it easier to work with
referenced stuff in Service Studio. You can now open
a web block in its producer by just right clicking it
and you can download all consumers of a given
eSpace in one go. More important, after you do that
you can refresh all open consumers with one click.
Because we know that precisely selecting or
positioning an element in your page can be a pain,
© 2001-2009 OutSystems - All rights reserved
you can now do that in the new widget tree available
for every page.
Syntax highlighting in expressions has also received
a set of improvements with entities, structures and
functions now all receiving differenciated colors.
To make it easier to track who did what, and so that
you to know who to ask when you’re not sure about
something, we’ve added to all top level elements the
the tracking of who created that element, who last
changed and, when that happened. Best of all, this
information is also shown when you are merging
your version of the eSpace with another version,
making it much easier to solve any conflicts that
occur.
1 Click Publish has also undergone a couple of small
performance improvements by streamlining the way
communication with the server is handled and by not
publishing personal areas unless you explicitly use the
run operation.
Finally, IntelliWarp is even smarter by now having
improved type inference, by creating mailto: and tel:
links depending on the underlying data type and, by
automatically setting the correct HTML 5 input types
depending on the underlying data type.
Gorgeous Default Theme
In addition to providing an amazing experience for
developers using the Agile Platform we also want to
provide an amazing experience for those that use the
resulting applications.
As such, and in preparation for building the 12
applications in apps@outsystems, we have conducted
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extensive design and usability research to ensure they
were both pretty and highly usable. This involved
following a set of usability best practices and a series
of usability tests to make sure we got it right.
The outcome of that work is a set of themes that
capture the essence of the resulting design.
Furthermore, IntelliWarp uses these themes with no
effort on your side.
Bottom line: your apps will come out looking
gorgeous right after you create them!
Of course the tough work of capturing and really
understanding the use cases to be solved doesn’t go
away but a big part of the design is pretty much
handled for you.
We provide 6 base themes for web applications: 4 are
color variations over the base theme; another is a
wave theme, specially designed for easily inserting
your own logo and, the last one is a theme that
mimics the style guide of versions 4.2 and 5.x of the
Agile Platform.
An important detail of the new default themes is that
they include an application switcher which is
automatically filled in with the list of eSpaces defined
as applications or their backoffices.
© 2001-2009 OutSystems - All rights reserved
Themes & Placeholders
The new base technologies that we’ve introduced
with 6.0 and that really made it possible to deliver on
mobile and on the new look & feel for the apps were
the themes and placeholders.
Placeholders appear as a new widget which is
available whenever you are designing a web block.
Pretty much like any other widget you can simply drag
it from the left toolbar to any location in the canvas of
your web block and define a set of properties for it
such as its name and style. What is really different is
that 1) you cannot place anything inside it and 2)
whenever you use the web block in one of your
screens the placeholder will appear as an empty
space for you to fill in.
In essence, placeholders are really great for when you
have parts of the UI that change from screen to screen
inside parts of the UI that are always identical.
Themes define essentially two things: a CSS style
sheet and a set of layout web blocks. Specifying the
CSS style sheet pretty much defines the look of your
pages in terms of colors, fonts and fine styling. The
layout web blocks work as master pages and define
the overall structure and location of the common
elements of your pages.
In practice these layout web blocks are automatically
added to any new screen you create with this theme.
They must include one or more placeholders and, for
the layouts which are used by IntelliWarp, they should
have specific names which are used for it to know how
to fill in the screens.
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 Permission Areas with that of Roles and added the
concept of Groups. The change to roles has the goal
to both force the developers to really think about who
the applications are targeted to and design
accordingly. This will also improve knowledge
transfer between developers. Groups are defined at
runtime, usually correspond to ‘‘organization groups’’
such as a department and can have a set of Roles
associated to them.

IntelliWarp automatically uses the layout web blocks

List Screen, Show Screen, Edit Screen, Info Balloon and
Pop-up Editor when creating screens of that type. All this can be managed using the system application
‘‘Users’’ which is installed with the platform and
The Blank Screen and Email layout web blocks are includes the common integrations with LDAP and
used when you create screens and emails by hand in a Integrated Authentication. A key thing is that the
web flow. architecture was really setup so that, if you want to
The Menu entry simply specifies which web block in extend it further, you can easily replace Users with
the eSpace contains the menu. your own application on top of the core concepts
provided by the Agile Platform.
An important note regarding themes is that they
support inheritance and, when you say your base
theme is some other theme, everything you don’t
explicitly fill in will keep the values of the base theme.
This is great for both when you are taking one of the
default themes and just changing some colors in the
CSS and for when you have standard corporate
intranet theme and you just need to change the
layout of particular screen type in your app.
Finally you can specify if your theme is for mobile and
what is the exception flow that handles the
exceptions of screens using that theme. As an All these changes make the entire access control and
example this allows for you to have both a mobile and user management process much easier for both
normal web theme applied to different web flows and developers and operators.
that they have different login pages. As for Enterprise Manager, we are making available a
version for 6.0 that uses the Agile Platform 6.0’s new
Simplified User Management core functionality so that you don’t have to go
Up to version 5.1 user management for the through the cost of migrating your apps. As a long
applications delivered with the Agile Platform was term strategy we do advise that you plan a
handled through Enterprise Manager. discontinuation of Enterprise Manager in your factory.
While it was functional, it was also a bit too complex
and incorporated a lot of functionality beyond user Download the new Agile Platform 6.0 today and
management that was not used very often. Also, its check it out for yourself!
security model was done as an add-on to the platform,
with additional concepts on top of users and Click here to download it.
permission areas, which made it overly complex and
hard to maintain.
Because of all these issues, we’ve decided to move
the core user management functionality inside the
Agile Platform. We replaced the concept of

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