Service Pack 1: 8.1.01

Starting with Service Pack 1, you need not manually flush the browser cache whenever there is a change in forms and other metadata in the AR System server. The changed forms are automatically fetched from the mid tier and are reloaded in the browser.

For more information, see Updating browser cache.

The BMC Remedy AR System application install or upgrade is highly dependent on the environment configuration, the BMC Remedy AR System server configuration, and customization. When you manually validate the environment before install, you might see issues when the install or upgrade process fails, after which reverting the system and restarting the install is a costly and time consuming process.

To avoid this, a new BMC Remedy Configuration Check utility has been introduced. This utility is a centralized framework utility that validates the environment for BMC Remedy AR System install or upgrade. It also validates conflicting BMC Remedy AR System server configuration and customizations that might cause the installation or upgrade to fail, and generates a consolidated report.

For more information about this utility, see BMC Remedy Configuration Check utility.

Before Service Pack 1, BMC Remedy Full Text Search (FTS) required that one server in a server group act as the FTS server. With version 8.1.00 Service Pack 1, you can now install more than one FTS server in a server group.  Each of these servers acts as an independent FTS server, providing service failover.

For more information about the high-availability architecture, see High-availability architecture for FTS.

Terminology changes in FTS

Starting from this release, the following new terms are used for FTS plug-ins:

• FTS Writer is now called the FTS Indexer
• FTS Reader is now called the FTS Searcher

Before Service Pack 1, AR System server enabled you to gather performance statistics on the server. With Service Pack 1, you can also gather statistics about the longest running SQL and API calls. Finding out which calls are causing delays can help you troubleshoot performance issues. For more information, see Investigating slow BMC Remedy AR System API calls.

For more information, see:

• Setting server statistics options
• ar.cfg or ar.conf options A-B
• ARGetServerInfo

 The following topics provide information about the security enhancements and new features in this release:

Security enhancements for the mid tier

• You can now log on to BMC Remedy Mid Tier using only HTTP POST requests.

• You can add an inclusion list of URLs to be redirected to when you log out of the mid tier. To add an inclusion list, add the arsystem.inclusion_goto_urls property in the <midTierInstallDirectory>/WEB-INF/classes/config.properties file. For more information, see Adding inclusion list for Mid Tier.

New parameter for encrypting information

BMC Remedy Developer Studio provides the ENCRYPT and DECRYPT functions to encrypt and decrypt data in filters and escalations, securing the operations. By default, only the 56-bit DES algorithm is used for encryption, but you can specify the 256-bit AES algorithm for better security. To enable the 256-bit AES algorithm, add the Workflow-Encryption-Algorithm:x parameter to the ar.cfg or ar.conf file.  For more information about this parameter, see Workflow-Encryption-Algorithm.

Security restrictions on file uploads

You can now restrict BMC Remedy Action Request System (AR System) users from uploading and viewing files with certain extensions in BMC Remedy Mid Tier and BMC Remedy User Tool. This feature helps prevent users from uploading malicious attachments and viewing them. For more information, see Setting security restrictions on file uploads.

The following topics provide information about the other enhancements in this release: