Updates & Upgrades

When you upgrade from censhare 2021.1 or below, please note that there are significant changes! 

We highly recommend that you read the relevant guides carefully. Please plan more time and effort for your upgrade.

What changes with your upgrade

Deployment

• Additional components and tools need to be installed and initially configured. See censhare - RPM-based installation.

Authentication

• The initial user management must be done in Keycloak. See Add new users to Keycloak.
• Migration of users must be carried out in Keycloak. Migrate users to Keycloak.
• The login page must be customized in Keycloak. (2022.1) Create custom branding.
• We provide comprehensive authorization mapping that helps you synchronize your user management between censhare and Keycloak. See Authorization mapper.

Frontend customization

A custom front-end now requires a modified upgrade workflow that is significantly different from previous versions.  It includes packaging and building your customizations, such as brandings or multiple locales, into webpack bundles and releasing them. 

New technology

In times of distributed organizations and decentralized work scenarios, the performance of your applications is of high importance. Page load speed and responsiveness are key to an engaging user experience.  That is why we have transitioned to webpacked technology. Like many modern web applications, censhare now uses bundling and minification technology to reduce communication and data traffic between the web browser and the censhare Server. 

Previously

The censhare web interface is built on TypeScript, a JavaScript-based scripting language, and the open-source Angular framework. Thousands of JavaScript files are transferred on request and executed in the web browser. The HTTP protocol, however, only allows for a few simultaneous requests. This creates a huge overhead that requires additional time and bandwidth. It slows down communication between the censhare server and the web browser. Previously, censhare Web loaded each static resource (JS, HTML files) individually, which resulted in thousands of requests being sent from the browser directly to the censhare server.

Now

webpack allows static resources to be organized into a few minimized bundles, reducing load times. To improve performance,  JavaScript files are downloaded once at the beginning of the communication and stored. Whenever a JavaScript file is needed, it is already available there and can be executed immediately. This allows users to load and interact with censhare Web faster. In addition, static resources are served by a separate web server - Static Resource Server - which also reduces the censhare server's load. 

External authentication

censhare provides an external authentication solution that can integrate existing authentication methods such as LDAP or SAML. External authentication simplifies account management, especially for many users across multiple applications. More choices of authentication mechanisms are available such as two-factor authentication. censhare uses Keycloak as an open-source identity and access management solution. Keycloak is used with the censhare web-based client and the desktop application clients. Existing authentication methods can be used and users can work with censhare Web and the censhare desktop clients as before.

A comparison between censhare 2022 (left) and censhare 2020 (right) regarding censhare Web.

Next steps

Technical FAQ censhare and Keycloak

Project FAQ censhare  and Keycloak

Install Keycloak and Configure Keycloak

Migrate users to Keycloak

censhare - RPM-based installation

censhare - Initial configuration

(2022.1) Build, release & deploy bundles