Release date: June 2021

New Features

This latest version of Lasernet brings with it some major new developments that we believe will help customers start enjoying some of the great new features and improvements we have added since our last release, as well as helping Lasernet to reach its full potential. 

Lasernet Launcher 10

Lasernet Launcher 10 is recommended as the primary method to access the desktop applications in the Lasernet suite. From the Lasernet Launcher 10, you can install Lasernet Meta 10, Lasernet OCR 10 and later the new application, Lasernet Printer Service 10. 

The desktop application for Lasernet Client is not available in Lasernet 10; it has been replaced with a brand-new web application. Web applications are accessible from the Lasernet app menu in your browser (more info in the release notes about Lasernet Client).

Lasernet License Manager 10

Run this application to activate your demo license key for Lasernet 10. License keys for resellers or end-users cannot be requested before the final release.

We are introducing a few minor changes in the Lasernet License Manager 10.

A Client Secret setting is now required and automatically generated when adding a new instance for Lasernet Server 10. This increases the security for Lasernet apps communicating with Lasernet Server 10 via Lasernet Config 10.

Select the Instance name and click the Edit button to view or Generate a new Client Secret. 

About Client Secret

The Client Secret is required as a new property setting when adding a new instance on the Lasernet Config 10 server. You can later copy the value for Client Secret to the clipboard to insert the value in the Lasernet Config 10 server.

Client Secret is a secret character string used by the OAuth 2.0 Client to authenticate to the Authorization Server. The Client Secret is known only to the OAuth Client and the Authorization Server. Client Secret must be sufficiently random that it cannot be guessed.

SQL Server properties

 Select the Lasernet Config instance and click the Edit button to change the SQL Server properties.

From Lasernet 10 the installer is bundled with a Microsoft SQL Server LocalDB as the default backend for the Lasernet Server instances.

Switching to Microsoft SQL Server Standalone (recommended in live environments) will start an automatic migration process, as for the previous versions of Lasernet.

From Lasernet 10 there is support for migrations to work in both directions, meaning you can also migrate from an SQL Server Standalone to an SQL Server LocalDB and back, for testing purposes.

Microsoft SQL Server Express LocalDB

For Enterprise solutions, we still recommended running the Lasernet 10 applications with a Microsoft SQL Server, but to simplify the installation in a demo or developer environment, Lasernet is delivered with an embedded database as backend by default.

About LocalDB

Microsoft SQL Server Express LocalDB is a feature of SQL Server Express targeted to developers. It is available on SQL Server Express with Advanced Services.

LocalDB installation copies a minimal set of files necessary to start the SQL Server Database Engine. Once LocalDB is installed, Lasernet initiates a connection using a special connection string. When connecting, the necessary SQL Server infrastructure is automatically created and started, enabling Lasernet to use the database without complex configuration tasks.

The Microsoft SQL Server Express LocalDB replaces the previously-installed Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0, for which Microsoft has announced that support will end July 2021.

The update is related to the following products:

• Lasernet Server 10
• Lasernet Config 10
• Lasernet OCR 10
• Lasernet Meta 10

Key Benefits

• Lasernet applications work without the requirement for manual installation of third-party databases.
• Simplifies the installation procedures.
• Replaces the Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0, not supported by Microsoft from July 2021.

REST API with OpenID Authentication

Lasernet 10 is introducing a new REST API and OpenID Authentication. This feature replaces the previous SOAP API and Basic Authentication in Lasernet 9 with a modern token or key-based approach. This streamlines the developer experience and facilitates the creation of new integrations in Lasernet 10.

Lasernet Config 10 server is the centre of the application process for connecting desktop and web applications to the Lasernet Server 10. Any request from any application is processed through the Lasernet Config 10 service.

Key Benefits

• Simplified developer experience for creating integrations.
• Standardized public key encryption authentication based on OAuth 2.0 protocol.
• Prepared for Azure AD Authentication.

Lasernet Config 10

Lasernet Config 10 is updated with a new embedded web framework to manage:

• Configurations
• Users and Groups
• Revisions
• History
• Deployments
• Print Servers with settings for Azure Storage Account and Azure Service Bus for easy access to Cloud and On-premise printing.

Lasernet Config 10 service acts as a proxy between the Lasernet applications and the Lasernet Server 10.

Installation procedure

1. Install Lasernet 10.

2. Add the Lasernet Server 10 instance.

3. License the software (a demo license running for 60 days for Lasernet 10 can be downloaded here).

4. Copy the Client Secret to your clipboard.

5. Sign in to the Lasernet Config 10 server.

6. Status for start of service is as default set to Automatic and Running. 

Lasernet Config 10and Lasernet Config 9 can run side by side.

Sign in

Lasernet 10 has a new single Sign in system, based on OpenID authentication for modern token and key-based integration, that works across Lasernet web apps. 

The first time you run Lasernet Config 10 you will be prompted to create a new password for your default Admin user.

The default URL for Lasernet Config 10 is:

https://servername/lasernet or, for a locally-run config server,https://localhost/lasernet

You can also access Lasernet Config 10 from the new Lasernet Web Apps menu:

Compatibility

Lasernet Config 10 server settings are not compatible with Lasernet 9, meaning history and older revisions can not be migrated to the Lasernet Config 10 configuration. Therefore, Server instances, User and groups and Security roles must be re-configured for your new Lasernet 10 environment. 

Configurations for workflows and forms, designed in Lasernet Developer 9, can be imported to Lasernet Config 10 via the standard built-in import tools in Lasernet Developer 10. This works in a similar way to Lasernet 9and is fully backward compatible. 

User Interface

The introduction of a brand-new UI for Lasernet Config 10 means that you will find minor changes for how to configure and deploy to the server. But don't worry — you will feel at home from day one and all settings from Lasernet 9 are present in a simple and intuitive UI.

Since we are introducing our brand-new embedded web framework, you will soon find that minor UI features like column splitters and multi selections are still not supported; however, we will continuously develop these features in upcoming releases.

Printer Servers

We are introducing a new Printer Servers concept to remove all requirements for access to Windows printer drivers in the Lasernet Developer 10.

In the first alpha release, only Cloud printing is supported. Cloud printing requires an Azure Storage and Azure Service Bus subscription, like Lasernet 9, but the Connection Settings are now maintained and centralized in Lasernet Config 10 and the Printer Profiles in Lasernet Printer Service 10.

In a later release, you will also find support for On-premise printing, which is configured in a similar way to Cloud printing, but via LAN connections.

In the Print Server Properties dialog, you define a logical Name and a Description for your Print Server location, a Connection String and Entity Path for the Azure Service Bus, and a Connection String and Container Name for the Azure Storage Account. 

Key Benefits

• Improved user experience.
• Easy access to other web applications via the app menu.
• Centralized management of Print Server settings for cloud printing.
• Prepared for Azure ID Multi-Factor Authentication integration.

Lasernet Printer Service Module

Printer Service is a new module in Lasernet Developer 10. The list of Print Server names and Connection Strings are retrieved from the list of Printer Servers added to the Lasernet Config 10 server.

The Printer Name defines the name of the Windows Printer queue, like the Printer Name in the Printer Output module.

The Printer Service module is a new method in Lasernet 10 to send print documents, in the EMF format (default Windows printing format), to a remote print server, without the need for locally-installed Windows printer drivers, or a UNC path to connect to a remote network printer.

JobInfos supported by the Printer Output module are identical to the Printer Service module including JobInfo substitution for the Printer Name.

Lasernet Printer Service 10

The new Lasernet Printer Service 10 and desktop applications are installed On-premise on the Windows Printer Server with a new installer and are integrated to the Windows Printer Queues.

Configure the Lasernet Printer Profiles with Printer Device Mode on the local Windows Printer Server in either the Lasernet Printer Service 10 application or in Lasernet Developer 9 for backwards compatibility.

The list of Printers and Printer Profiles are deployed to the configuration in Lasernet Developer 10 through the Lasernet Config 10 server.

1. Click File > Options and Sign in, with your credentials,  navigate to the Lasernet Config 10 server to view the list of accessible Printer Servers added to the Lasernet Config 10 server.

2. Select a Lasernet Print Server and assign it to the Windows Print Server.

3. Set the list of printers to Active, with Printer Profiles you want to deploy and make public for the Lasernet Config 10 server.

4. Select Default or the Name of a Printer Profile you want to set as your default property, like Lasernet 9.

5. Click the Deploy button to deploy the list of selected Printers with attached Printer Profiles to the Lasernet Config 10 server.

Printers and Printer Profiles are listed and can be selected from the Printer Profile UI and Lasernet Form Editor 10. This function is similar to how Printers and Printer Profiles are added locally in Lasernet 9, and older versions, which are still supported by Lasernet 10.

The Lasernet Printer Service 10 is installed as a service and enables a remote Lasernet 10instance to print locally for Cloud — and soon On-premise — solutions in the EMF, PDF and DOCX formats. Printer Profiles are supported for the EMF formats only; similar to Lasernet 9. Status for start of service is set toAutomatic and Running by default.

The Cloud solution will use the Azure Service Bus and Azure Blob Storage Connections, assigned to the selected Lasernet Print Server, to download Lasernet print jobs from the Azure Queues, and send them to a printer name included in the printer job.

Key Benefits

• No dependencies on specific ERP or financial systems.
• Centralized management of Lasernet Printer Profiles.
• No need to install local printer drivers on clients running Lasernet Developer or servers running Lasernet Service.
• Built on proven Microsoft Azure technology for cloud printing.
• Prepared for LAN printing.

Lasernet Monitor 10

A new desktop application with improved user experience, reduction in log traffic, a Performance Monitor and a REST API and OpenID authentication communicating with Lasernet Server 10 through the Lasernet Config 10 server.

Headline features

• Text to search for
• Filter
• Find Previous
• Find Next
• Download Logs (as ZIP file)
• Fetch oldest
• Fetch newest
• Clear log
• Log messages are, by default, listed in a single window or in two logger windows for found log messages

Click a line with found log in the lower window pane to navigate to the relevantlog message in the upper window pane. Click Find Previous or Find Next to find the same log message elsewhere in the log.

Drag the scroll bar up to show older log messages or scroll bar down to show newer log messages. When scrolling, the log messages are continuously fetched fromLasernet Server 10, in a similar way to clicking Fetch oldest or Fetch newest, which shows the oldest or newest log messages.

Find Filter

The Find Filter dialog offers a more detailed search of log messages. It is possible to search using any combination of the following parameters: 

• Between a Start date and End date.
• For specific Event types.
• A new type of information called PublicID, which is the same ID for a job, in any module, from start to end of a workflow.

To improve the performance and limit the log traffic between Lasernet Monitor 10 and Lasernet Server 10, the auto scroll feature is replaced with a Fetch Newest button to retrieve the newest log information from the Lasernet Server 10.

The Green message bar in the button will continuously flicker when the Lasernet Server 10 is processing jobs or a Red message bar will be shown if there is No response from Service.

Lasernet Monitor 10 is also accessible as a new Lasernet web app, developed in our new embedded web framework, to centralize the Lasernet Monitor 10 in a web front-end. The web app can have limited features compared to the desktop application.

The default URL for Lasernet Monitor 10 is:

https://servername/lasernet/monitor or https://localhost/lasernet/monitor for a locally-run monitor server. Alternatively, you can access Lasernet Monitor 10from the Lasernet Web App menu:

Performance Monitor

With a new Performance Monitor, we are introducing a way to track Lasernet CPU, System CPU, Active Jobs, Memory Usage and Process Handles in Lasernet Server 10 and to deliver counters via the REST API. This is still limited to a few counters, but we are ready to accelerate the creation of Performance Counters in the Lasernet 10-series.

Lasernet Developer 10

Minor changes are added to the user interface in the Lasernet Developer 10.

Job Mode in Diagram View

1. Clear action for search text in Diagram > Job Mode

2. Highlight search results in Diagram > Job Mode search

3. Coloring for JobInfo Profile added to columns for output jobs in Diagram > Job Mode

Modifiers

The list of modules has been divided into five types of modifiers:

Lasernet Client 10

Lasernet Client 10 offers the best user experience in a new web front-end with a clean, flexible and intuitive user interface. Lasernet Client 10 is optimized for Lasernet Input Management users.

The web application provides a centralized web server installation, with a REST API and OpenID authentication,that communicates with Lasernet Server 10 through the Lasernet Config 10 server.

Headline features

1. Sign in or out with your Lasernet or admin user account.

2. Click the Gear icon for easy access to a Lasernet Server 10 instance.

3. Search for Paused, Scheduled, Succeeded or Failed jobs.

4. Click Refresh to update queues and counters for released and stored documents.

5. Select the type of Jobs for which you want to view or search.

6. Select type of Queue to view.

7. From the tool bar click to Edit Metadata in jobs, Attachment to view, add or delete additional attachments, Release to release single selected or multi-selected jobs, Release to to release to an alternative destination (if any), orDownload to download a copy of the document.

8. Click the ...to display a context-sensitive menu for the selected row, with relevant tools from the toolbar.

9. Select all rows.

10. Select a single row.

11. Toggle Preview window On/Off.

12. Preview window supports a wide range of formats, like PDF, DOCS, XLSX, TXT and XML.

Key Benefits

• Intuitive user interface.
• Removes the requirement for thick-client app installs.
• Optimized for Lasernet Input Management.

Lasernet Form Editor 10 (EMF/PDF)

Updated with features to support the market for professional output management documents in a wide range of formats.

Headline features

• Easier styling of fonts in Insert Text objects (postponed until beta release).
• Format painter usage for tables across forms in the configuration.
• Removed reference printers’ settings in forms to avoid requirements to locally-installed printer drivers.
• Support for Windows fonts to be loaded and stored in the Lasernet Configuration.

Key Benefits

• No dependency on third-party applications to create advanced shapes and lines (and their fill settings) in forms.
• Centralized design of advanced shapes.
• Cloud ready for Docker containers without Windows fonts and printers.

Lasernet Form Editor 10 (DOCX/PDF/XLSX/HTML)

The Word (RTF), Excel and HTML editors offer best-in-class tools to create professional Word/PDF documents, spreadsheets and HTML layouts for emailing.

Headline features

• Word control is enhanced to support more complex text processing, with text wrapping around tables, widow/orphan control in tables, break table rows across pages and shape enhancements.
• Create HTML documents with mail-merge functionality, as known from Rich Text DOCX/PDF, with DataSet as input.

Key Benefits

• Enhanced table handling.
• HTML supporting mail merge and easier to work with.

Font resources

Windows Fonts are supported as a new Resources type to centralize management of company-specific Windows fonts. Windows fonts stored as a resource are cached and accessible from the Lasernet Form Editor 10 and Lasernet Engine 10 (not supported in DOCX and XLSX formats) and for any user/computer opening the configuration in the Lasernet Developer 10.

Select Windows Fonts, installed in Resources in Lasernet 10 Forms and created in EMF/PDF, as output formats.

Key Benefits

• Easily share Windows fonts between users of the Lasernet Developer and computers.
• Cloud ready for Docker containers without Windows fonts installed.
• Does not require access to Windows Servers for manual installation of Windows fonts.

Barcode Reader

A new Barcode Reader module to read and extract values from barcodes in PDF documents or images. Decodes UPC-A/E, EAN 8/13, Code 39/93, Codabar, QR Code, Data Matrix, PDF 417 and MaxiCode, among others, into XML, JSON or JobInfo formats with the type of barcodes and values found in the document or image.

Key Benefits

• Easily configure decoding of barcodes in the Lasernet workflow.
• Support for a wide range of popular barcode types.
• Automate the process to eliminate the possibility of human errors when manually reading barcodes in batches.

PDF Barcode Splitter

A new feature in the PDF Splitter module for scanned pages in batch jobs separated by barcode. Support for UPC-A/E, EAN 8/13, Code 39/93, Codabar, QR Code, Data Matrix, PDF 417, MaxiCode, with the option for others. The option to discard separate pages is supported.

Key Benefits

• Easily configure the splitting of scanned batch jobs in the Lasernet workflow.
• Improve the process of scanning a batch of jobs on the client-side and automates the splitting of jobs server-side.
• Support for a wide range of popular barcodes.

Tesseract OCR

A new built-in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) module optimized for Lasernet Input Management 9.11 and 10, for text recognition in images, scanned documents and images embedded in original PDF documents. Improved compared to previous bundled third-party applications, the built-in OCR has support for multi-thread processing and retaining the original text from incoming PDF documents.

Key Benefits

• Improved workflow with built-in server module.
• Faster OCR processing with multi-thread processing support.
• Keep text in original PDF document to improve quality of extracted text and values for incoming documents.
• Easier deployment on new or existing servers.

Auto Capture

A new smart feature in the Lasernet Input Management solution, the Lasernet OCR Dictionary is usedto auto-capture text and values from PDF documents and pause them in Lasernet Client 10, for manual validation immediately after they are received. 

To improve AI, the Lasernet OCR Dictionary 10 can be trained by adding language-specific information about metadata to be extracted from the incoming documents.

Key Benefits

• Easier to handle one-off documents without having to create a Form.

Lasernet OCR 10

Headline feature

• Improved calculation method for Statistics in Lasernet OCR Engine 10.

Important information

The following modules are no longer supported by Lasernet from this version, Lasernet 10:

• Barcode fonts running the Symbology Barcode Profile.
• SAP BC-XOM Input module.
• Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) Input and Output modules.
• Google Cloud Printer Input and Output modules.
• Microsoft Fax module.
• DM Archive (replaced with the newer DM Upload).

It is recommended that unsupported modules are removed from the workflow in older configurations before the import of a full configuration in Lasernet 10.

Due to a certificate update for all our Lasernet Installers, it might be expected that a Windows Defender SmartScreen dialog will pop up when running the installer.

Windows Defender SmartScreen prevented an unrecognized app error. This can happen when a program installer is new and is not yet recognized as safe by your system. You can work around this error by clicking the More info link and then clicking the Run anyway button.

System Requirements

Supported operating systems

Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019

Hardware requirements

Developer

• x64 processor
• 8 GB RAM minimum
• 1 GB of free hard disk space

Server

• x64 processor
• 8 – ~ GB RAM (depending on load)
• 1 GB of free hard disk space
• A minimum of 2 cores are required

Software requirements

Lasernet Developer and Server

• Microsoft SQL Server 2017 LocalDB
• Microsoft OLE DB Driver 18 for SQL Server
• Microsoft Visual C++ 2019 Redistributable x64
• Microsoft .NET Framework 4.8

Lasernet OCR

• Microsoft .NET Framework 4.8

Lasernet Meta

• Microsoft .NET Framework 4.8