Release notes v4.0.0.0

This page outlines all of the updates and enhancements in this release. For more information on upgrading, see How to Upgrade Connectivity Hub.

December 2024 - Connectivity Hub v4.0.0.0

The following features and updates are new in this release of Connectivity Hub:

System enhancements

Feature Description
Upland Software, Inc rebranding

Numerous UI updates were made for Connectivity Hub to match the standard Upland Software, Inc format. The following will now match the Upland style:

  • The Connectivity Hub installation wizard

  • The Connectivity Hub end user license agreement

  • The UI in the Connectivity Hub administration portal
AI/Vector search enhancements

When integrated with AutoClassifier 7.0, Connectivity Hub offers a streamlined mechanism to index content for AI/Vector search. AutoClassifier can seamlessly chunk content, while Connectivity Hub ensures that all chunks are indexed and chunk records in the index are automatically refreshed when documents are added, modified or deleted. This functionality is currently only supported for Microsoft Azure Search targets.

If you need both an AI/Vector index and a traditional full-text index for a given content source, you must configure two content sources within Connectivity Hub.

For more information, see Adding AI Search capabilities to your Azure AI Search content.
Microsoft Copilot support

Microsoft Copilot is now supported in this release of Connectivity Hub, enabling you to leverage Microsoft Copilot capabilities in the content indexed by your connectors. In this release, the following features were added:

  • The following semantic labels were added to allow Microsoft Copilot to answer user queries more precisely:

    • CreatedBy

    • LastModifiedBy

    • CreatedDataTime

    • FileName

    • IconUrl

    • ContainerName

    • ContainerUrl

  • Admins can specify meaningful descriptions for their content sources that are indexed by Microsoft Search targets.

For more information, see Target specific settings to enhance Microsoft Copilot functionality and Metadata specific settings to enhance Microsoft Copilot functionality.
Distributed crawl and Security Sync improvements

This release of Connectivity Hub features a new distributed crawler, allowing for better scaling, fail-over, and overall improved stability. For more information see How to deploy or upgrade a multi-server configuration.

Note the following:

  • The distributed crawl model uses a single Quartz instance that runs across all servers, allowing admins to schedule, start, and stop jobs by interacting with a single Quartz job in the farm.

  • Security Sync jobs have been enhanced to significantly improve performance and reduce the time it takes to complete a security sync.

  • Layer 7 load balancers are supported.

  • Layer 4 load balancers are supported if the client connections are terminated at the load balancer and the client IP is not preserved.

  • Upland BA Insight strongly recommends using HTTPS for secure communication with the Connectivity Hub administration portal.
Configuration settings enhancements Email addresses that were specified in the Configuration Settings for your Connectivity Hub instance will now auto-populate when creating a crawl job or related task.
SQL Server support Support for SQL Server 2012 has been removed in this release. Connectivity Hub now supports SQL Server 2016 and later.
SQL Client default encryption

Due to a vulnerability fix on SQLClient, the default encryption flag for SQL connections and Connectivity Hub database connections has been set to True. If you do not support encryption in your database connections, you must override the default encryption flag in the advanced connection settings by specifying Encrypt=false in the connection string.

For more information, see index your own database using the SQL connector.

Managed Identity for SQL database connections support

Connectivity Hub now supports using managed identity authentication to connect to a Microsoft Azure SQL database. The following authentication methods are supported:

  • SQL authentication

  • Microsoft Azure Active Directory username and password authentication

  • Microsoft Azure Active Directory Integrated authentication

  • Microsoft Azure Active Directory Service Principal authentication

  • Microsoft Azure Active Directory Managed Identity or Managed Service Identity (MSI) authentication

For more information, see Enable managed identities.
Automatic dependency upgrades Connectivity Hub will now automatically update all libraries and dependencies when your environment is upgraded. For a current list of all dependencies, see Third-Party Dependencies.

Fixed issues

The following issues have been fixed in this version of Connectivity Hub:

  • Empty folders were still displaying even if the "Hide Empty Folder" option was enabled in TestBench for your content source. (BAI-3845)

  • During a crawl job, the memory was not properly deallocated after the crawl was finished. (BAI-8325)

  • If your summary page for a crawl job contained a high number of errors, the page would fail to load. Connectivity Hub will now group similar error messages to ensure the UI will display properly. (BAI-10196)

  • When performing a crawl in PowerTools for datastore connectors, Connectivity Hub was failing. (BAI-10531)

  • Microsoft Azure Active Directory group lookup did not handle special characters or empty values. (BAI-10839)

  • FileShare security was not compatible with Microsoft Azure Active Directory targets. (BAI-10840)

  • The datastores selection filter was incorrectly displayed in the repositories connectors page. (BAI-10986)

  • Connectivity Hub would crash when multiple scheduled jobs were running concurrently. (BAI-11023)

  • Users may have seen errors after clicking View Items for crawl logs for items that were grouped under the same entry. (BAI-11510)

  • When adding new web service content, SQL connections were also displayed in the Connections drop-down list. (BAI-11618)

  • If a user clicked the Test/Load metadata button multiple times when creating a content source, all verification messages would display under each other. (BAI-11651)

  • Including HTML characters, such as '<', in the content source Enumeration Query field, would produce an error. (BAI-11651)

  • If you attempt to connect to a cache database that does not exist, Connectivity Hub will now display an appropriate error message. (BAI-11968)

  • Connectivity Hub will now display an error in the crawl log if it determines that a multi-value property was received for a single value property. (BAI-12078)

  • When running a full crawl using PowerTools with the max file size specified, the crawl would include attachments that exceeded the max file size. (BAI-12079)

  • Security sync jobs would display the number of modified groups as equivalent to the number of added groups. (BAI-12257)

  • Users were redirected to the content sources page after clicking the save button on a connection. (BAI-12273)

  • The overall performance speed of the UI and crawl service on the first request has been improved. (BAI-14344)

  • In PowerTools, navigating to a specific folder was not possible. (BAI-14595)

  • Search results that relied on multi-level security permissions would not display correctly according to the permission logic. (BAI-15064)

  • Improved error handling when configuration errors that occurred during a crawl job on an Amazon Kendra target. (BAI-15981)

  • The implementation of SQL queries were modified to improve the performance on Connectivity Hub during crawls. (BAI-16240)

  • The Connectivity Hub API displayed passwords in the response for various endpoints. (BAI-16590)

BREAKING CHANGES

The following are breaking changes that may affect your integration. Please ensure that you carefully review this list before upgrading to Connectivity Hub 4.0:

  • Due to the new crawler logic, the number of sync threads is now applied as a content specific setting. The number of sync threads that were specified will now be applied to every job that is concurrently running for the same target.

  • When upgrading Connectivity Hub 4.0 to integrate with AutoClassifier 7.0, the URL that is used in the service URL to communicate with AutoClassifier must be updated. For more information, see "Using AutoClassifier components to enhance metadata" in the Configure Your Azure Cognitive Search Target documentation.

  • Layer 4 load balancers (NLB) are no longer supported if they must preserve the client IP. Layer 7 load balancers (ALB) must be used instead.

  • The default installation folder is now <program files>\Upland BA Insight\ConnectivityHub\. Please follow the install and upgrade instructions to ensure a seamless transition when upgrading to Connectivity Hub 4.0.