August 9, 2021
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5 Minutes

Ellie version 3.7 is out now!

Data Modeling
Product Design
Ellie Editorial
Ellie Editorial Team

On Tuesday, June 8th, 2021, we launched Ellie version 3.7! In this blog post, we’ll tell you what is new and what has changed.

As is the case with all SaaS software usually, your Ellie should have automatically updated to the latest version. You can easily check your version by opening the menu in the upper right-hand corner – there, you should see something like this:

The correct version number in the top-right menu.

Major feature: Azure Active Directory user management

The big new thing for Ellie v3.7 is our new integration with Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory or AAD for short. By enabling AAD for your Ellie, you can start managing your Ellie users via AAD security groups instead of the traditional email+password-based Ellie user accounts. Note that this integration is entirely opt-in by nature; you certainly can still continue to use the traditional Ellie accounts like before, but for those of you who have AAD set up for your user management, this is going to make things a lot easier!

New login option available

In a nutshell, once connected to AAD, Ellie will allow users to log in with their Microsoft accounts, as long as the users are members of the necessary security groups. These security groups are created by your Active Directory admins and mapped to Ellie’s user roles (admin/write/read). To connect Ellie with your AAD, we need a couple of technical parameters and a contact with your administrators, so please contact support@ellie.ai if this is something you’d like to do. Note that by default, no one will be able to log in with Microsoft credentials until the initial setup for your organization has been done with Ellie support.

Even with AAD integration, your Ellie admins can still add traditional Ellie accounts for e.g. users who are merely visiting and do not exist in your AAD domain. However, the existing Ellie accounts will be removed and replaced with your AAD security groups. But don’t worry, we will guide you through the setup – just contact us and we’ll get your AAD user management hooked up in no time!

Improvement: Visible sub- and supertypes in Entity Glossary View

Adding subtypes for entities in Ellie’s models has always been a powerful way to visualize the fact that some things are split into multiple types that might behave differently or have different information about them. On a model canvas, this has been denoted by the box-in-a-box notation:

Customer subtypes in a sales-related model

However, up until v3.7, these subtype- and supertype-relationships have not been visible in the entity’s glossary view, where you can see all the relationships an entity has across all the models. Good news: now they are! See below:

Customer-entity has two subtypes – now visible on the entity’s Relationships tab

The subtype- and supertype-relationships can also be found from the CSV export files created via Ellie’s Reports functionality if you choose to export a model’s relationships.

Other improvements and bugfixes

A couple of quality-of-life improvements were made in the Model List view. You can now filter the model list also according to the model status (those little blue circles that indicate whether a model is “work in progress” or “approved” etc.), and for Collections, trying to rename a collection to an already-used name is now handled more nicely.

The visuals for resetting your password (which, of course, is now only valid for the traditional Ellie accounts and not the new Microsoft accounts) have been brought into the same style as everything else, and the text instructions should be clearer with the new page layout there. Multiple other small UI improvements and graphical fixes were also added.

If you have any questions or comments, or if you encounter any issues with the latest update, please contact us at support@ellie.ai!