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18th November 20229th February 2023

November 2022 – Newsletter

Welcome to the November 2022 newsletter from 3SL!

This newsletter contains a mixture of news and technical information about us, and our requirements management and systems engineering tool “Cradle”. We would especially like to welcome everyone who has purchased Cradle in the past month and those who are currently evaluating Cradle for their projects and processes.

We hope that 3SL and Cradle can deliver real and measurable benefits that help you to improve the information flow within, the quality and timeliness of, and the traceability, compliance and governance for, all of your current and future projects.

If you have any problems in your use of Cradle, please do not hesitate to contact 3SL Support here.

Artemis I

Cradle has been an integral part of the Constellation and Artemis programmes for many years, being central to the toolchains in both government and in industry.

We would like to extend our congratulations to NASA’s Exploration Systems Development mission directorate for the successful launch of Artemis I.

Follow the progress of the Artemis I mission through NASA.

32-Bit vs 64-Bit

For our next major release – Cradle-8.0 – we propose to remove support for:

- 32-bit Windows
- 32-bit Microsoft Office
- 32-bit Linux

We would like to know if this would have adverse effects for any of our current customers and any potential customers. If you believe that removing 32-bit support from Cradle would affect you or your company, then please send your views and opinions to 3SL Support here.

Cradle-8.0 will not be released until mid 2023 at the earliest.

New User Training Course

We have a new training course available: Cradle User Course. This course is ideal for:

- Anyone who is new to Cradle and needs an overview
- Anyone who is joining a team that has been using Cradle for some time
- Anyone who has not used Cradle for some time and needs to update their skills

For further details, please see here.

New Configuration Management Training Course

We have a new training course available: Configuration and Change Management. This course is ideal for anyone:

- Who needs to apply specific workflows to the information in your Cradle databases, or
- Who needs to introduce formal reviews and approvals into a Cradle-based project, or
- Who needs to understand and use Cradle’s baseline mechanism, or
- Who needs to apply configuration management, configuration control and formal change to a Cradle project

The course includes:

- Discussions in Cradle
- Change histories in Cradle
- Configuration Management in Cradle, including baselines, workflows, simple reviews, team reviews, formal change, audit trail and how to advance information to the next stage within their lifecycle

For further details, please see here.

G-Cloud 13

The UK government provides the G-Cloud procurement framework for its departments and agencies. G-Cloud 13 is the latest instance of that framework, agreement number RM1557.13, and is available between 9th November 2022 and 8th November 2023.

G-Cloud used to be delivered through the Digital Marketplace. In its latest form, G-Cloud is being delivered through the Public Procurement Gateway (PPG) managed by the Crown Commercial Services (CCS). You can find G-Cloud 13 in the PPG here.

3SL is pleased to announce that we have been accepted into G-Cloud 13, and that Cradle is available as a variety of SaaS services through Lot 2 in this framework, and a range of training and consultancy services are available through Lot 3.

Cradle SaaS Services

A wide range of SaaS services are available through G-Cloud 13 Lot 2. For a summary of this Lot, please see here.

Each service includes Cradle licences, a user-configurable schema, and a comprehensive support package. The SaaS can be delivered for both UNCLASSIFIED (IL0) and OFFICIAL (certified IL3) deployments. The services are:

- Agile Collaboration
- Agile Software Development
- Agile Software Management
- Application Lifecycle Development
- Application Lifecycle Management
- Business Analysis
- Business Process Modelling
- Defect Tracking
- Enterprise Architecture
- Integrated Risk Management
- Integrated Test Management
- Lifecycle Management
- MBE Model Based Engineering
- MBSE Model Based Software Engineering
- MBSE Model Based Systems Engineering
- Requirements and Testing
- Requirements Engineering
- Requirements Management
- Risk Assessment
- Risk Compliance
- Risk Management
- SysML Modelling
- Systems Engineering
- Test Execution
- Test Management
- Test Planning
- UML Modelling

The PPG infrastructure is still in development. CCS have advised that direct links to individual services in the G-Cloud Lots will be available at the end of this year. 3SL will post an update when such links become available.

In the meantime, please contact 3SL here to discuss acquiring a Cradle SaaS through G-Cloud.

Cradle Training/Consultancy

A range of configurable services are available to support a Cradle deployment through G-Cloud 13 Lot 3. For a summary of this Lot, please see here.

These services are:

- Consultancy
- Administration Training
- Fundamentals Training
- Advanced Lifecycle Training

In the meantime, please contact 3SL here to discuss Cradle training and consultancy services through G-Cloud.

Social Media

Over the past month we have discussed:

- Additional frames for both Change Requests and Change Tasks

Thank You

3SL would also like to thank all of our customers, evaluators and potential customers who have found the time to send feedback on our services, such as evaluations, training courses, Cradle support and so on.

We understand how busy you are.

Your responses are essentialto help us both monitor and seek to improve the services we provide to you.

Thank you!

16th May 201717th May 2021

May 2017 Newsletter

May Already

Since our last newsletter: We sincerely hope that those of you who celebrate Easter had a nice break and are not too full of Easter Eggs! We’ve also had an Activity Diagram to celebrate St. George’s day and tried to conquer the Universe on Star Wars Day with some Functional Modelling. That aside development continues on Cradle 7.3.

New Voices

We’ve expanded the writing team to include authors from elsewhere in the 3SL team. Because this is a blog, there is more emphasis on people’s personal insights into the Cradle product. This should make the style and tone more varied and hopefully more interesting to read.

As you may have already seen the 3SL-Blog is groaning full of new articles. These are mainly “Hints and Tips” and longer RM/SE articles. Increasingly we’ve found that some of the support questions that arrive here in 3SL towers are very similar. To that end we’re publishing them under the FAQ section.

If you have a burning question and would like to see an article covering a particular topic, drop us a line at social-customer@threesl.com and we’ll see what we can do. On the other hand, if you have a novel use of Cradle that you’re happy to share with us, drop us a line with the article, screen shots and accreditation details and we may feature it.

Non Graphic Interfaces

There is widespread understanding of the WorkBench and even Web Access interaction with Cradle. It is, after all the main way we interact with the data. However, there are many occasions when we want some of the data from Cradle but don’t want to or can’t use a screen to interact. This month we’re highlighting c_table.

c_table

This command line utility can be used to produce Reports, Matrices, Metrics, Graphs or Queries in a tabular form. This can be an HTML, RTF, CSV or SVG output. If every morning you need to go into a meeting, or stand at your ‘toolbox talk’ with a printed report detailing the number of ‘Issues’ with a category of ‘Raised’ you can do this by running one command. Creating a desktop short cut to run the command / batch file you need not start WorkBench just to run the query and publish the result. Even more cunningly a script could be triggered at 8:00am every morning to create the document for you. Our blog article “Batch File Reporting in Cradle” adds more detail.

CompeteFor

If you are working or bidding on large infrastructure projects, Cradle is now available through the CompeteFor procurement portal. Whatever the size of your Requirements Management or Systems Engineering task, Cradle is there from Concept to Creation.

Social Media

Twitter

May Day 2017 Madness Giveaway. Thanks to all those who re-Tweeted and followed @threesl, during our Twitter #FreebieFriday giveaway and congratulations to @baguettio, who won a copy of Cradle RM Desktop. It was really great to see re-Tweets from around the globe.

Hints of the Month

Here are some links to helpful topics since our last newsletter, they should improve your Cradle experience:

When working in large teams or over a long period an item’s edit history is very useful. See the LinkedIn discussion Who Changed That? When? Why?

When you have many items to submit all in one go, selecting them on the screen and submitting them is not practical. This article Configuration Management – Submit by Query discusses the alternative.

You can read Hints & Tips in the 3SL Blog.

9th March 201713th August 2019

March 2017 Newsletter

New Release – Cradle 7.2

We are pleased to announce the release of Cradle-7.2:

Cradle-7.2 contains a range of new capabilities that are described in its Release Notes.

Customers with active maintenance have been sent an e-mail notification of this release, and details of which enhancement requests and bug reports are in it.

Some of the highlights are:

Full support for IPv6 networking
Availability of 64-bit Cradle for Linux, use of the latest Windows .NET and improved support of Office 2016
Locking projects and disconnecting users through Project Manager
Improvements in custom web UI components, and the as-supplied Basic web UI
Dashboards as dials in WorkBench and in web UIs
More flexibility with Change Tasks in the CM system
Extended quality checks in the Conformance Checker and for SysML in the Consistency Checker
Find and replace
Extensions to queries and views
New functional modelling options with PADs and IDEF0

Download and Installation

You need a new Security Code for Cradle-7.2, other Security Codes cannot be used. If you have not received a new code and are under maintenance, please contact support@threesl.com. If you would like to discuss upgrading an out of date system, please contact salesdetails@threesl.com. If you have a single user version you can purchase the latest revision at the 3SL shop.

There is a database conversion from 7.1 to 7.2. The converter which will run automatically if you install Cradle-7.2, over the top of, in the same directory as, the earlier version of Cradle from which you are upgrading.

You must upgrade all of your Cradle installation to 7.2. (clients and server) as mixed versions, e.g. Cradle-7.1 clients / Cradle-7.2 server, and vice-versa are not supported.

I have a Cunning Plan…..

OK it does not have to be cunning, it just has to be clear. Cradle provides a bi-directional integration with Microsoft Project® that allows a Cradle project to be associated with multiple Project schedules and bidirectional updates with Project. By linking activities in each schedule to become a WBS hierarchy in Cradle the loop is closed and the plan and the Cradle requirements and models are all linked.

The main reasons to control things this way is to ensure there is no inconsistency between the management planning and the project engineering. To ensure that each engineering activity is planned for and each element of the plan has some actual work assigned to it, avoiding incompleteness. A plan linked to Cradle communicates the holistic view of progress and items all in one place.

To read more on this topic, our whitepaper “Integrated Project Management from Cradle” can be read here.

Social Media

Facebook Twitter Link

Our Facebook account is connected to our Twitter feed, so if you can’t follow us on Twitter (@threesl), you can still get the hints and tips via your Facebook timeline, see the (3SLCradle) page.

YouTube Learning

Our popular YouTube channel has a number of ‘How to’ style videos to help you with particular aspects of Cradle, requirements management or systems engineering. We know that some of our customers may find a particular aspect complex, and although there is comprehensive online help documentation and articles provided, having a video take you through the steps can make a real difference. Of course 3SL can also offer full training, giving you broad coverage or highly tailored content as you require, contact us to discuss further.

Remembering the old adage “Tell me and I forget, Show me and I remember, Involve me and I understand” seems very appropriate. But what aspects are most appropriate to you our customer?

In this article 3SL’s managing director Mark Walker, asks for your feedback to guide 3SL’s video output.

“But the customer has sent it as an mp4!”

Your boss wants you to record the evidence of the test to provide full traceability
The testing house has sent a video of the compression strength test
You’re ‘stuck’ with all your requirements and tests in Cradle and now you have a video…

Don’t worry it’s not a problem. Although Cradle may not be able to play videos, it can store all sorts of information in its database, or by reference to external files. We provide a large list of files pre-defined, but Cradle can easily cope with new file types.

In this case you would add a binary frame to store video, you may have a directory alongside the Cradle database where these files reside, so an ‘As File’ frame would make sense, or if it is also to be controlled through the Cradle CMS (Configuration Management System) it could be “In PDB” (Project Database). You would choose our favourite app to view them in, then you would assign a frame of this type to your, say, TEST item type. Now you have the traceability you need with the test evidence referenced from the TEST item and links to the SYSTEM_REQUIREMENT through to the original customer Requirement.

In our LinkedIn discussion we describe adding a Document to an item.

Hints of the Month

Here are some links to helpful topics since our last newsletter, they should improve your Cradle experience:

A bright ‘Red’ box in the middle of the table screams Urgent/Highest/Action, when running a query you may wish to Highlight Important Values with Colour as described in this article.

Have you ever wondered what makes up the Content of a Cradle Database? Read the link for a simple overview.

No-one wants to lose their hard crafted work, our tips on Safeguarding Against Unintended Data Loss could ensure that if something does go wrong, you can limit its impact to your project and business.

7th February 20179th February 2023

February 2017 Newsletter

Happy Chinese New Year

新年快乐！
3SL 祝愿我们的所有客户，合作伙伴和供应商2017吉祥如意！

Regulation, Compliance and Traceability from Cradle

Discovery, Implementation, Demonstration, is this really what making a product is all about?

From a product development point of view, Elicitation, Analysis, Specification and Validation may be terms an engineer is more familiar with. However, we work in a world where regulation and compliance are hugely important factors in a product’s lifecycle.

As developers and producers we must discover the sets of codes, regulations and standards that form the non functional requirements of our product. We must the implement the changes to our product design to ensure the end product is compliant. Before delivery we must be able to trace our designs and decisions to demonstrate how we comply.

For further discussion on the parallel paths that a product lifecyle must comply, please read one of the 3SL’s whitepapers here.

Twitter Tips

Thanks to those extra follows from January, don’t forget to retweet whenever you find a tip helpful and keep using those #3SL and #Cradle tags.

Baseline Past and Present

Whenever a project reaches a defining moment it is advisable for the project to be baselined. A line in the sand to say ‘we are at this point’, a point from which further development and changes can stem.

However, sometimes we want to return to and extract a particular baseline, say to use as the starting point for a new project variant. See how to export this information in our linked in article

Cradle is Citrix Ready

Large or complex deployment, centrally managed? A number of our customers use Cradle deployed in a Citrix environment.

Cradle 7.1 has been certified for Citrix XenApp 7.6 and can be accessed through the Citrix Ready Marketplace

False Positives

Any software developers out there? We’re gathering experiences, encountered while developing and distributing software, of the eternal battle between virus protection, legitimate development and malware hackers. Please join the discussion here on LinkedIn or see it in the ‘Cradle – RM/SE Tool from 3SL’ group.

Many Roles

Do you sit as a person with many hats? Today you are Engineer, tomorrow you are QA Manager? In smaller organisations many people find they wear a number of hats, but like to keep their operations separate. Whether this is from an administration and traceability point of view, or just to prevent a change being made to data accidentally by a role with an elevated privilege (think sudo in Linux). It may also be the case that you want all these roles to exist in the future, but while the embryonic project is being set up and developed there is only a small team working on it. These roles are later handed over to new colleagues.

Cradle allows you to set up all the users individually and then provide a common alias or in Cradle terms a ‘Switch Identity’. The user can then switch between the various roles without the more time consuming logout – remember different password – login loop.

This is further illustrated in our LinkedIn discussion.

MBSE Buzz!

Model Based System Engineering is all the rage at the likes of the NASA / JPL symposium 25th – 27th Jan. Why not have a look at Cradle’s New MBSE Reference in our improved 3SL website.

Hints of the Month

Here are some links to helpful topics since our last newsletter, they should improve your Cradle experience:

Need to estimate your hardware requirements over the life of a project see the Database Size Calculator.

Want to show every user a special message before they start? Use the Login Messages and User Acknowledgement facility.

Happy about installing, IT want to know everything is OK, drop in at VirusTotal – see Check Cradle Files are Free From Viruses.

New to managing documents and statements you can Avoid Problems Opening Source Documents and Statements here.

Seeing an odd Word error ? Read all about it Word Error – Ambiguous name detected: TmpDDE.

Don’t worry if you computer raises a False Positive from Symantec and Trend Micro Office Scan. AV Products will explain why.

The world still revolves round documents (paper or electronic) it’s an easy way for humans to deal with data, from Cradle you can Publish a Formal Document.

Installation issues? A few of articles that may help Installation Issues With .NET Framework, Installation Issue With Windows C Runtime, Installation Issue With Office 2016 / 365 / ClickToRun

6th January 20178th December 2022

January 2017 Newsletter

Happy New Year

3SL would like to wish all our customers, partners and suppliers a happy and fruitful 2017.

We hope you are all back to work and busy using Cradle-7.1.2 for your design, requirements management. If you’ve not got the latest version for the start of the year head over to www.threesl.com, login to your account and download it from the Software part of the Resources area in our website here.

If you install Cradle-7.1.2 clients don’t forget to update the server too and visa versa!

Role for RM and SE Tools

We obviously love the fact that Cradle is used on such a diverse set of projects within a huge range of companies. Some customers have fully embraced integrated thinking and manage every aspect of their project with appropriate tools. However, we also know there are pockets of Cradle being used in isolation in engineering departments and disparate projects dotted around our customers’ sites, where unfortunately the wider organisation, their suppliers and customers are just not as tuned into well balanced control and design.

If you find yourself in that situation you may like to use the details in our set of white papers dealing with the uses of information systems in engineering. A paper dealing with the role of RM and SE tool scan be seen here.

Agile Controls

3SL in Australia is distributed by our new partners at Agile Controls.

We are thrilled to announce they have recently signed up their first major customer, we wish them continued success in 2017 and look forward to supporting Cradle’s ‘down under’.

They can be contacted at:

Agile Controls,
108A Tregarthen Road,
Ashton
australia@threesl.com
+61 427 975 674

Twitter Tips

Sometimes you don’t have time to digest all the information in a newsletter. 3SL often tweet simple usage tips that can make a difference when learning all the capabilities of Cradle.

For example:

Confused about which symbol is which? Hover to see a tool tip or select Draw button from Tools ribbon.

Click to view this post or follow @threesl if you want to chat about #Cradle or #3SL don’t forget to use an appropriate #tag

Sharing With Others – Web Publisher

When you need a static intranet version of your project, a version you can place on a CD or pen-drive and ship then consider Cradle’s Web Publisher. This allows you to publish your project to a linked set of html pages that can be packaged up and sent to anyone with a browser. You could of course publish parts as a paper report, or as a more complete document with Document Publisher. However, the simplicity of being click a symbol on a diagram and be taken to the specification behind it provides a simple way to share your data with other parties. Of course if you are able to enlighten your customer or supplier, then 3SL will happily demonstrate the full benefits of Cradle and then you can share exports or a common project database.

Artemis I

32-Bit vs 64-Bit

New User Training Course

New Configuration Management Training Course

G-Cloud 13

Cradle SaaS Services

Cradle Training/Consultancy

Social Media

Thank You

May Already

New Voices

Non Graphic Interfaces

c_table

CompeteFor

Social Media

Twitter

Hints of the Month

Keeping In Touch

LinkedIn

Twitter

Facebook

YouTube

Google+

HashTags

New Release – Cradle 7.2

Download and Installation

I have a Cunning Plan…..

Social Media

Facebook Twitter Link

YouTube Learning

“But the customer has sent it as an mp4!”

Hints of the Month

Extra Videos

Happy Chinese New Year

Regulation, Compliance and Traceability from Cradle

Twitter Tips

Baseline Past and Present

Cradle is Citrix Ready

False Positives

Many Roles

MBSE Buzz!

Hints of the Month

Happy New Year

Role for RM and SE Tools

Agile Controls

Twitter Tips

Sharing With Others – Web Publisher