Category ' Newsletters '

5th May 20235th May 2023

May Newsletter 2023

Welcome to the May 2023 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 questions about your use of Cradle, please do not hesitate to contact 3SL Support.

3SL SaaS

Deploying Cradle as SaaS (software as a service) is becoming an increasingly attractive option for many organisations. Using SaaS greatly simplifies the deployment of Cradle as there is nothing that you, or your corporate IT, need to do.

We ask for the names of the people who will use Cradle, and the IP addresses from where they will access Cradle, and then we do the rest.

You and your colleagues get access to the latest Cradle, backed by our internationally renown technical support, with no need to be concerned about IT services, data integrity, backups or any of the other details that can be a burden for an in-house installation.

For more information, please look here. If you would like to talk to us about SaaS deployments of Cradle, please click here.

Baselines and Snapshots

Cradle provides two mechanisms to protect sets of information and provide read-only access to information as it was in the past.

Baselines

Baselines is the mechanism in Cradle’s Configuration Management System (CMS) to protect information from changes. Each baseline is a named repository for the state of a project at a specific point in time. A succession of baselines can be created over the life of a project, each containing more and more information as the project completes its sprints, iterations or phases.

Items can be registered into an open baseline and are given a version number: 01, 02, 03 … The version number assigned to each item is either 01 if there are no baselined instances of that item, or it is 1 higher than the highest version already in the database.

When the baseline is closed:

Unchanged items from the previous baseline migrate into (become a part of) the new baseline
A copy of all current links (cross references) is saved with the baseline
A list of the latest items and their versions is saved for the baseline

Snapshots

A snapshot is a copy of all the information in a database. Its contents can be viewed, read-only, at any time in the future. A succession of snapshots can be created over the life of a project. In effect, a snapshot is simply an online backup, a copy of a database.

A snapshot is a copy of an entire database. When a snapshot is created, everything in a database, including all of its baselines and definitions (excluding Personal and System scope) are copied into a separate area. Every snapshot is separate from all other snapshots and is separate from the live database.

Creating a snapshot is similar to making a backup copy of the database, except that this backup is directly accessible from within Cradle.

Comparison

#	Characteristic	Baseline	Snapshot
1	Summary	Creates a new approved set of items and links in a database that can be viewed RO.	Copies an entire database and related definitions to create a new database that can be viewed RO.
2	User Benefit	RO view of previous baseline that can be used for queries, view data, run metrics, publish reports or documents	RO view of everything in the database as it was in the past, for queries, view data, run metrics, publish reports or documents
3	Additional Items	None	None
4	Additional links	Duplicates all current links	None
5	Database Size	Adds some items and copies all links	None
6	Disk Usage	Small to medium increase	Medium to large increase

For more details, please see our blog post here.

Circus Starr

3SL are proud to announce that we are supporting Circus Starr!

The community interest circus company are dedicated to making a difference to the lives of vulnerable and disadvantaged children in Barrow-in-Furness and across England through the magical art of circus. We are pleased to support our community, and this accessible and inclusive event is such a worthy cause.

To find out more about how you can support the circus with a purpose visit www.circus-starr.org.uk or call +44 (0) 1260 288690.

The Coronation of King Charles III

Many people across the country and the Commonwealth will be celebrating the Coronation of His Majesty The King and Her Majesty the Queen Consort over a weekend of special events on 6th to 8th May 2023.

International Nurses Day

Every year International Nurses Day is celebrated on 12 May to commemorate the anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birthday. This day also celebrates the contribution done by nurses to society around the world. On this day the International Council of Nurses organisation produces an International Nurses kit to educate and assist health workers globally with a different theme every year.

"Nurse" Photo by Laura James from Pexels — Nurse

World Multiple Sclerosis Day

On 30th May it is World Multiple Sclerosis Day. World MS day takes place on 30th May every year. Share stories, raise awareness and campaign with everyone affected by MS.

Social Media

We congratulated our customer ZF Group on the opening of their West Coast Mobility Hub which is a cutting edge facility dedicated to shaping the future of mobility.

Borg Warner were presenting how H2-ICE enables fast and efficient transportation at the World Hydrogen 2023 Summit & Exhibition.

Siemens Mobility demonstrated how their pioneering Vectron Dual Mode locomotives combined advantages of full featured diesel locomotive with those of electric ones.

We congratulated Horiba on obtaining UKAS accreditation against ISO17021-1.

Roche confirmed that the US FDA had granted approval to their new combination treatment for certain types of previously untreated diffuse large B cell lymphoma. This makes it the first therapy in nearly 20 years approved by the FDA for people with this aggressive disease.

Looking Back!

Last month we discussed:

We would also like to thank all attendees on our Risk Management course which we provided in April.

We also received a fantastic review from one of our customers:

“When there have been technical difficulties, the staff have been frequently quick, knowledgeable, and able to help restore normal operations. The level of service is above the levels of several large name companies, I struggle to think of what more I can ask for.”

We appreciate all feedback as this helps us to both assess and look to improve both the products and services we provide.

Still to Come this Month

Test Execution Course – May 23rd to May 24th

5th April 20235th April 2023

April Newsletter 2023

Welcome to the April 2023 newsletter from 3SL!

If you have any questions about your use of Cradle, please do not hesitate to contact 3SL Support.

Is SaaS Beneficial?

Traditionally, software was installed on in-house computers. You managed the hardware that ran the software, ensured the integrity of the data created with the software with appropriate backups, and applied all the operating system and firmware updates needed to keep the system running properly.

Increasingly, individuals and companies simply want to use software, and have someone else host it, ensure the integrity of the data that they create, and manage the resilience of the underlying hardware and software infrastructure.

This is SaaS – software as a service.

Most large software companies try hard to force all customers to use SaaS by buying subscriptions. For example, although it is possible to buy Microsoft and Adobe products to install in-house, you have to work hard to find the part of their websites where such purchases can be made.

SaaS is charged on a per user per month basis for the functionality used. You pay more as you add users and as you access more functionality. You can stop the service when access to the software will be removed, all your data will be deleted, and you will stop being charged. This is all reasonable.

Some SaaS Benefits

SaaS brings benefits including:

You do not need to provide resources (hardware or VMs) to run the software
You do not have to maintain these resources nor provide the staff to perform this maintenance
You can easily react to short term needs
You do not need to provide integrity for the data that is created
You do not have any costs if you don’t need the resource for a while

Problems with SaaS

Of course there are also disadvantages to SaaS:

It will be more expensive than deploying in-house, typically after 2 years
You have no direct access, so you are reliant on your SaaS provider being responsive and complying with the SLA – you do have a Service Level Agreement don’t you?
You cannot directly interact with the software and must rely on the SaaS provider’s competence with the software and their understanding of what you want to achieve. This could cause delays or errors.
You do not have physical control over your data or the hardware that hosts it
Your data may be exposed by being given to third parties without your knowledge or consent, given such as the US Patriot Act (parts of which are still in effect) and the collaboration between groups including the EU and 5 Eyes – this includes all data centres managed by US companies regardless of their location, so be mindful when considering US-owned Infrastructure as a Service such as, but not only, Azure and AWS
You have to manage the IP ranges that are to have access, unless your SaaS allows access by the entire Internet

Is a Cradle SaaS Worth It?

This depends on your situation. In general:

if you do not have an IT organisation, or
if Cradle is too small to be applicable to your IT organisation

and:

if you are confident that 3SL understands Cradle and will be responsive to your needs and
if the SLA and Cradle SaaS are acceptable (see the 3SL Cradle End User SaaS Agreement – EUSA), and
you have agreed a location for your data (within 3SL or in a SaaS Virtual Private Cloud – VPC – that 3SL will build for you in an agreed location)

then, yes, SaaS is a good solution as it allows you to concentrate on using Cradle to the benefit of your projects and leaves the management of the Cradle infrastructure to others.

Fixed IPs for Cradle SaaS

We do not want a Cradle SaaS to be accessible by the entire Internet. Each Cradle SaaS includes an external firewall that specifies the IP addresses or ranges (CIDRs) of the locations that are allowed access. Access from any IP address is ignored if it is not in this list of allowed locations.

This method works well except when a user’s IP address is not fixed. A user’s IP address is not fixed if they access the SaaS from either:

many locations, such as customer sites, hotel rooms, train stations, public tea rooms, or
a domestic Internet connection where the ISP assigns a different IP address to the user every time that they connect to the Internet

In these cases, 3SL will consider the size of the IP address range. A small IP address range may be acceptable to both you and 3SL. For example, the CIDR:

78.37.252.0/22

is a range of 1,024 IP addresses 78.37.252.0 to 78.37.255.255 inclusive. In general, 3SL will not accept CIDRs of more than 64 addresses.

The solution to this problem is to have a fixed IP address.

Fixed IP Addresses and VPNs

If the end user’s location is not fixed or does not have a fixed IP address, they can get a fixed IP address by:

An organisation may provide a VPN. If so, then route the user’s connection to the Cradle SaaS over this VPN. This has two advantages. First, the connection from the end user’s computer is encrypted by the VPN, so it can be used safely from highly insecure locations such as tea shops or hotel rooms. Second, the connection to the SaaS will be from the organisation’s fixed external IP address. This is transparent to the end user. The end user simply starts the VPN as they will for all company work, and then connect to the Cradle SaaS.
A fixed IP address can be purchased from a range of providers, such as are listed here
For an extra fee, 3SL can provide a reverse proxy server that provides a VPN. The end user connects this VPN using authentication details from 3SL, typically a certificate issued by 3SL. The connection to the Cradle SaaS will come from the reverse proxy server, which has a fixed IP address. This method is also secure as it uses an encrypted VPN connection, and so it is safe to use from insecure locations.

Happy Easter

Easter, also called Pascha or Resurrection Sunday, is a Christian festival and cultural holiday.

We would like to wish all our customers, prospects, distributors and suppliers a Happy Easter:

St George’s Day

Saint George’s Day is the feast day of Saint George, celebrated by Christian churches, countries, and cities of which he is the patron saint:

Depicting the legend of St George in an ACD — St. George as a UML Activity Diagram (ACD)

If you ever want a reminder of the legend of St. George the diagram above may be handy. For more information see the Cradle help section for ACD

We would like to wish all our customers, prospects, distributors and suppliers a Happy Saint George’s Day.

World Autism Acceptance Week

World Autism Acceptance Week is on Monday 27th March to Sunday 2nd April with Autism Awareness Day on 2nd April. The theme for 2023 is colour.

The National Autistic Society provide support for autistic adults and children and their families.

Parental Alienation Awareness Day

Parental Alienation Awareness Day is on 25th April each year. This is a global campaign to raise awareness of Parental Alienation. It is an opportunity for parents, grandparents, extended family members or friends to come together to access information, advice and to enable connection and support for others affected by Parental Alienation.

Social Media

Twitter

We helped to celebrate and raise awareness on both #InternationalWomensDay and #WorldDownSyndromeDay.

#hensoldt were exhibiting at #HeliExpo (booth 5614) where they talked about airborne portfolio covering mission systems, situational awareness and certified lightweight flight data recorder. Hensoldt also won contracts from #Hyundai Heavy Industries to provide six offshore patrol vessels and two corvettes which are currently being constructed for the Philippine Navy.

Congratulations to the team at @SafranSeats who had been recognised by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development at the CIPD Wales Awards for being the Best Wellbeing Initiative in the region for a large company.

@MirionHQ were exhibiting (booth 3) at the Cyber Security Implementation Workshop where they provided an insight into their solutions for cyber security, command and control and lifecycle management.

@Roche and Lilly have joined together to enhance early diagnosis of Alzheimers disease.

Looking Back!

Last month we discussed:

We would also like to thank all attendees on our Document Publisher course which we provided in March.

Still to Come this Month

Risk Management training course

22nd March 20235th April 2023

March Newsletter 2023

Welcome to the March 2023 newsletter from 3SL!

If you have any questions about your use of Cradle, please do not hesitate to contact 3SL Support.

Cyber Essentials Assessment

Certified for Cyber Essentials

We, Structured Software Systems Limited (3SL), have been successful in our re-assessment under the Cyber Essentials scheme for another year.

As a Government-backed, industry-supported scheme, Cyber Essentials aims to help organisations protect themselves against common online threats.

By being certified compliant with Cyber Essentials, you can be assured that 3SL’s IT systems have, at the very least, a secure Information Security Management System (ISMS) and a robust set of operating principles and controls to safeguard our, and our customers’ information.

ISO9001

3SL are proud to announce their fourth year recertification for ISO9001. The team working with the audit said we passed with flying colours and there were no non-conformances. This is a testimony to all who have helped throughout the year improving and recording our processes.

The ISO says of the scheme

“ISO 9001 sets out the criteria for a quality management system and is the only standard in the family that can be certified to (although this is not a requirement). It can be used by any organization, large or small, regardless of its field of activity. In fact, there are over one million companies and organizations in over 170 countries certified to ISO 9001.
This standard is based on a number of quality management principles including a strong customer focus, the motivation and implication of top management, the process approach and continual improvement. These principles are explained in more detail in ISO’s quality management principles. Using ISO 9001 helps ensure that customers get consistent, good-quality products and services, which in turn brings many business benefits.”

INCOSE

3SL are pleased to be advertising in the latest INCOSE members newsletter. You can find our latest publication here.

INCOSE Logo

3SL Inc SAM Registration

Our US partner, 3SL Inc, have successfully renewed their System for Award Management (SAM) registration for another year. This allows them to provide our products and services to the US government.

Happy Mothers Day

Mothers Day 2023 was on Sunday 19th March in the UK and Sunday 14th May in the USA. In other countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal, Sunday 19th March 2023 was Fathers Day where as the rest of the world, will celebrate it on June 18th 2023.

“Happy Mothers Day”

St Patricks Day

17th March marked St Patricks Day. St Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland and St Patricks Day is a national holiday in the Republic of Ireland although the day is celebrated all over the world.

3SL hope you all had a wonderful St Patricks Day.

Spring Time is Here!

On 20th March it was the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere and the first day of autumn in the southern hemisphere. This date marks the Astronomical spring equinox where as the Meterological spring started on the 1st of March.

British Summer Time

Daylight savings begins on 26th March so remember the clocks go forward 1 hour at 1am here in the UK and throughout the EU. Let’s hope for a beautiful summer.

Looking Back!

Last month we discussed:

7th February 20237th February 2023

February Newsletter 2023

Welcome to the February 2023 newsletter from 3SL!

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

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2023吉祥如意！

The Chinese New Year holiday reached its climax with the Lantern Festival, celebrated on February 5th, 2023.

What are your Requirements for Valentines Day?

February is the month of Saint Valentine.

3SL Heart based on Photo by SHAHBAZ AKRAM from Pexels — Love Cradle

We want to share the love of engineering through Requirements Management and integrated MBSE. Rather than roses, we will use Cradle!

So if you need more Cradle licences for a bigger project or you want to upgrade your single user product to Cradle 7.7, then contact 3SL for further information.

Happy Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day)

We hope you have a great pancake day (February 21st) whatever your process flow may be!

Shows a pancake in a process flow — Pancake Flow Diagram (PFD) !

A PFD (Process Flow Diagram), rather than Pancake Flow Diagram shows a particular task or process that the system can perform. This is termed a flow. Systems may have many flows, each of which may have concurrent or optional elements.

Modelling the flow before you take action can ensure you have thought about, and documented, the expected behaviour(s). It can be clear which parts of the system are operating in parallel and which could be bottlenecks awaiting the outcome of previous operations. However, modelling Shrove Tuesday’s pancakes may be a bit excessive ….

Looking Back!

Last month we discussed:

Still to Come this Month

- Requirements Management online course – February 20th to 23rd

To book your place on the course please see here.

12th January 20233rd February 2023

January Newsletter 2023

Welcome to the January 2023 newsletter from 3SL!

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

Happy New Year

We hope all those celebrating over Christmas had a safe and happy time.

Into a new year and a time to reflect on both your company’s achievements and problems. Whilst the turn of a date is nothing magical, the psychological effect of a new term can really help enthuse and help us focus.

If a project wasn’t quite on track, a root cause analysis can help identify where things went astray. Use this as a positive for new projects and look out for the ‘gotcha’ next time round. It is also important to identify the successes, the team and company can lever the feel-good factor on jobs well done.

3SL US Training Courses

Our US colleagues have scheduled the following public courses:

- 3-Day User Course
  February 6-8 (3 days), $1395/attendee
- Combined Administration Course
  February 9 (1 day), $465/attendee
- 3-Day User Course
  April 17-19 (3 days), $1395/attendee
- Combined Administration Course
  April 20 (1 day), $465/attendee

These courses are open to anyone from any organisation. If you register for one of these courses, it may mean that you will be joined by people from other organisations.

All of these public courses are limited to 8 attendees. For further information or to book your place on one of these courses please contact 3SL US.

Combined Administration Course

The Combined Administration Course course is designed for project team leaders or managers who administer and manage Cradle projects. It covers both user and project administration. It also includes setting up project schemas helping your users to hit the ground running.

3-Day User Course

The 3-Day User Course is designed to help new users become acquainted with Cradle. This course includes hands on demonstrations for both administration and requirements management tasks.

3SL Listed in ESMCP ESN Supplier Directory

The Home Office is leading a cross-government programme to deliver the new Emergency Services Network (ESN) critical communications system. ESN is being delivered through the Emergency Services Mobile Communication Programme (ESMCP) in the Home Office where 3SL and Cradle have provided requirements and test/evidence management and contract governance support since 2013.

ESN is being delivered through the Emergency Services Mobile Communication Programme (ESMCP) in the Home Office. ESMCP has many component projects, including the acquisition of MCX end user communication services.

3SL is pleased to announce that we have been listed as a supplier in this programme. Interest in 3SL and Cradle can be registered through the portal or directly to 3SL.

Interest in Cradle from HMG or 3ES can be sent directly to 3SL or through G-Cloud 13 in the Digital Marketplace here.

Still to come this month

- Project Administration online course – January 17th to 18th
- User online course – January 24th to 25th

To book your place on either of the Project Administration or User courses please see here.

7th December 202212th January 2023

December 2022 – Newsletter

Welcome to the December 2022 newsletter from 3SL!

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

32-Bit vs 64-Bit

For our next major release – Cradle-8.0 – we are proposing 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.

This course has been included in our 2023 training course calendar as discussed below.

Public Training Course Calendar 2023

The courses available in 2023 are listed below. You can now see a list of the public courses available here within the Public Training Courses panel.

You can also book your place on one of the courses here.

For details of the modules in each course, please see here:

Project Administration Course

Learn how to configure Cradle to best support your project’s processes and to deliver that process support to your users. This is a great opportunity for project managers to understand their schemas and Cradle UI customisations.