Question on Appian Common Objects package

Agree with Stacey, if the common objects are still recommended for use, it would be helpful to have some mention, reference, or link on the current release's record. Thanks!

...and/or even a mention in the current help documentation. As it is, the documentation for Appian Common Objects are on a wiki that will eventually go away.

There are two SharePoint add-ons listed for 7.10 and 7.11, Kiele.

Is Common Objects still recommended, Kiele?

+1 to Christine's comment. As far as I know, Common Objects is still recommended, and if that's true they should be linked on the current release's record to avoid confusion.

Agreed, a reference/link would be helpful. We upgraded our production servers this weekend from 7.6 to 7.11 and we just 'assumed' that the older 7.5 R2 common objects were supported and current (we tested our code base but didn't specifically target the common objects).

As a side note, there are a lot of commonly used shared components available and knowing the testing status of these for each version would be helpful. It puts the developers in an awkward bind when we need or want to add functionality to Appian because using the shared components comes with risk. I like the ability to add functionality to Appian that others create, but the overall lack of documentation & maintenance on them is worrisome and slows down our upgrade cycle significantly (more hours & risk for each upgrade).

1) for new and older rarely updated/tested/commented components that lack a proven track record we take a risk using them because they may break in future versions with zero support or updates

2) 6-12 month old components that have had a few updates or postings may be only slightly maintained by random people or Appian staff and will probably work and be less risky

3) some components appear to be popular and are actively updated and hence presumably 'tested' (unofficially or otherwise) and will be supported by someone. If they are popular and maintained, why not push to add them (or similar functionality) to the base Appian package so that they can be used without fear? The 'cost' of maintenance is thereby spread over a larger user base. If the components lack robustness (support for languages, locality, etc.) then maybe just assign someone internally to perform testing & light maintenance while coordinating with the people who wrote the code.

As of January 26, 2016, 3 business days after the 16.1 update was released:
271 components listed, no filter for latest compatible version newer than 7.2 available
Last 30 days - 6 updated, zero list 16.1, only 3 list 7.11
Last 90 days - 27 updated, zero list 16.1, only 3 list 7.11, 3 don't even list 7.10 (they show 7.9 or 7.8)
Last 180 days - 63 total components updated, 23%

10 months & a few releases later and it looks like there are no updates or suggestions from Appian about using the common objects. It would be good to know if the Common Objects app as well as other shared components are being maintained or at least tested with newer versions of Appian. Other than extensive testing by each customer there isn't an easy way to know if upgrading Appian will cause shared components to break or not work as expected when they don't list the version # or an updated date on the component page. My team spends significant amounts of time testing our applications (both developers and our internal business customers) prior to upgrading and this is one of the reasons we only upgrade every 3-5 releases. If we had more assurance that Appian releases were stable, what was deprecated would still work in our code and that the 40 or so custom plugins we have in production were tested we could probably save hundreds of man hours of work and get the benefits of upgrading faster & more frequently.