Archer Community

Anonymous · ‎2023-05-04

Update

Effective 7/3/2023, Archer Versions 6.13 and 6.13.0.1 are not available for download. Please install 6.13 P1 HF2 (6.13.0.1.2).

Summary

Archer announces the availability of Archer Release 6.13. This update contains fixes for the Archer Platform.

Release Date

Archer Release 6.13 is generally available for On Premises environments on May 4, 2023.

Platforms

Archer Platform running on all supported Operating System (OS) platforms.

Details

Archer Release 6.13 is now generally available and delivers enhancements for Archer Use Cases and the Archer Platform.

Archer Release 6.13 is immediately available in all languages supported by Archer, including English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, and simplified Chinese.

Archer Release 6.13 provides updates to the following Use Cases:

Archer ESG Management use case includes new capabilities:
- The ESG Management use case has been integrated into Solution Master, including all translations.
- This Release includes all the functionality that was introduced in the Archer ESG Management release 6.12 on March 15, 2023.

Archer PCI Management use case updates incorporate changes required for Version 4.0 of PCI Data Security Standards.
- The use case includes the Requirements, Controls & Self-assessment Questionnaires prescribed by PCI DSS V4.0 and PCI DSS V3.2.1.
- The Compliance Project application has been updated to incorporate V4.0 Self-Assessment Questionnaires. The Compliance Project Application also support the documentation and assessment of Custom Controls.
- The PCI Control application has been replaced with Control Scoping Unit application to standardize the control versioning across Archer use cases.
- The Evidence Repository application is available within Compliance Project application.
- New reports and charts have been introduced to track custom control assessments.
- Archer Engage has been integrated with all questionnaires in the Archer PCI Management use case. If you have licensed Archer Engage, you can publish and work on all PCI Questionnaires with Archer Engage.
Archer Policy Program Management use case:
- The Authoritative Sources application has been updated to document the Customized Approach Objective and Applicability Notes.

Archer Audit Engagements and Workpapers use case:
- Scoping Unit application has been replaced with three new applications to capture instances of business entities, risk and control.
- Entity Scoping Unit application enables determination as to whether Business Units, Business Process, Applications, Facilities, Process Narratives and Compliance Scope instances are in or out of scope for a specific engagement.
- Risk Scoping Unit application enables determination as to whether Risk instances are in or out of scope for a specific engagement.
- Control Scoping Unit application enables determination as to whether Control instances are in or out of scope for a specific engagement.
- Advanced workflow has been introduced in the Audit Workpapers application.
- A new report to track action items for Audit teams is available on the dashboards.
- The Risk Register application has been added to the use case.
Archer Audit Planning & Quality use case:
- The Audit Engagement application has been updated to incorporate the changes to scoping unit application.
- The Risk Register application has been added to the use case.
Archer Control Assurance Program Management use case includes the following updates:
- Scoping Unit & Control Snapshot application has been replaced with a new application to capture the instance of controls.
- Control Scoping Unit application enables determination as to whether Control instances are in or out of scope of compliance engagement.
- Control Scoping Unit application houses point-in-time snapshots of Control Procedure compliance information and related elements of the risk environment and business infrastructure.
Archer IT Controls Assurance use case:
- Scoping Unit & Control Snapshot application has been replaced with a new application to capture the instance of controls.
- Control Scoping Unit application enables determination as to whether Control instances are in or out of scope of compliance engagement.
- Control Scoping Unit application houses point-in-time snapshots of Control Procedure compliance information and related elements of the risk environment and business infrastructure.
Archer Financial Controls Monitoring use case:
- The Process Narrative application has been updated to support Risk Based Audit Scoping in Audit Engagement and Workpapers use case.
Archer IT & Security Policy Program Management use case:
- The Authoritative Sources application has been updated to document the Customized Approach Objective and Applicability Notes.
Archer Third Party Risk Management use case has been updated to provide visibility into the ESG practices of critical vendors:
- The Engagement Risk Assessment and Engagements modules include questions related to inherent and residual ESG risks, which replaces the Sustainability section.
- An ESG assessment created by Archer subject matter experts comes preconfigured with Archer Engage for Vendors.
Archer Business Impact Analysis use case:
- The criticality assessment for Products & Services has been updated to align with Operational Resilience regulations. The new questions determine the impact of a disruption to the company, its customers, and the country/industry.
- The use case is preconfigured to operate with Archer Engage.
Archer Business Resiliency use cases have been updated as part of a dashboard refresh. These use cases include Archer Business Impact Analysis, Archer Incident Management, Archer Business Continuity & IT Disaster Recovery Planning and Archer Crisis Management.
- Three new dashboards leverage the latest chart types including network graph, featured metrics, tree map, and more.
- Dashboards are persona based and are intended to serve as a template when designing new dashboards.
- Current Business Resiliency dashboards will be removed from future packages; however, customers will continue to have access to their legacy dashboards.
The Findings and Task Management applications have been configured to operate out of the box with Archer Engage for Vendors.
The Archer Enterprise Catalog package has been updated to include the following changes:
- Primary controls – new fields have been added to support PCI version 4.0.
- Products & Services – new fields have been added to store the customer, company, country impact ratings determined in the corresponding Business Impact Analysis record.
- Applications, Business Processes, Business Unit, Facilities, and Control Procedures – calculation updates for the Last Audited Date calculated field.

Release 6.13 includes the following Archer Platform enhancements:

User Experience
- New Global Navigation delivers Modern User Experience through Mobile responsive UI. The flexible and responsive Navigation Menu and redesigned Environment bar create more space to display Record and Dashboard content. Users have the option to choose between Classic and new Global Navigation Experiences.
- Next Generation Dashboard has been designed to deliver a modern and intuitive user interface. Dashboard Administrators can spend less time visualizing how a dashboard will look to end users and visualize what will be built and make changes in real time while staying on a single screen
  - Next Generation Dashboard is designed to support 10 chart types, including Pie, Donut, Vertical, Horizontal, Line (without Date Range), Sankey, Heatmap, Tree map, Combination and Featured Metric. Additionally, tabular format such as Column Flat or Column Hierarchical will be displayed as Column Hierarchical.
  - Chart properties ‘Variations’ and ‘Color Palette’ can be managed directly from the dashboard.
  - For Next Generation Dashboard to work with Release 6.13, it is necessary to install the .NET core hosting bundle to web server (where IIS is installed). The hosting bundle will not be part of the Archer installer. The .NET core hosting bundle can be downloaded and installed. If this bundle is not installed, the Next Generation Dashboard UI will detect this error and prompt the user with the necessary information to download and install the same.
- A new default color palette, called Vibrant, has been added for statistical reports (Charts).
Administration
- The Archer installer has been updated to overwrite default Archer icons located in instance directories within the Company Files folder. This enables Archer to deliver new images to customers rather than requiring images to be downloaded from the Archer Community and copied into instance directories. Please note that custom images with unique names will not be overridden by this process. For more information, please review this blog article.

Please note the following update:

Inactive Field Calculations: Please review upcoming changes for calculations of inactive fields.
JavasScript Transporter Data Feeds: With Release 6.13, Archer has removed the old xmldom library. Please ensure to update any JavaScript Transporter Data Feeds using the code described in this blog to ensure they continue functioning with the new code release.

Recommendations

Archer recommends customers apply this latest update. All releases are cumulative. If you are running Archer Release 6.2 or earlier, you must first upgrade to Archer Release 6.8 and then upgrade to this latest release. To obtain Release 6.8, please contact your account rep or open a support case.

Documentation

Release Notes for Archer Release 6.13 and additional release documentation are available on the Release 6.13 page on the Archer Community.

End of Product Support Policy

Archer has a defined End of Primary Support policy associated with all major versions. For additional details, refer to the Product Version Life Cycle.