Linkurious Enterprise 3.0: introducing Case Management

This article was updated on November 29, 2021

We are happy to announce that Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 is now available as a stable version. Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 ships with the following improvements: 

• New branding: Linkurious Enterprise U/I integrates a new brand visual identity. 
• New case management capabilities: Alerts now enable investigation teams to better prioritize, distribute and track suspicious cases. 
• Improved support for plugins.
• Improved support for Elasticsearch.
• And a few additional improvements.

With Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 becoming the stable version, Linkurious Enterprise 2.10 is now supported as a maintenance version. We have decided to extend support for 2.10 to October 7, 2022 (instead of April 7, 2022).

This article was originally published when 3.0.0 was first released as a beta. To highlight the evolutions released since 3.0.0, they have been tagged with a NEW label.

New major versions are the opportunity to lay the foundation work for the coming months, to revisit our compatibility with third party software, and our own technology stack. Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 hence comes with breaking changes, listed at the end of the article. Please make sure to read through them and understand how you may be impacted before upgrading. When updating Linkurious Enterprise, please make sure to follow best practices. Feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions.

Over the years, we’ve updated our messaging to help customers understand the value of our products. We’re updating our branding to reflect how our product has changed in the last 3 years and to emphasize the value of our platform for anti-financial crime use cases. Our long term vision of helping the world make sense of connected data remains unchanged and we’ll continue to serve multiple use cases by delivering general-purpose software for graph visualization and analytics. That will also translate into a new brand visual identity that will be activated across all our platforms before the end of year.

Expect to observe a visual change, notably with the new logo:

• In the header of the application
• On the documentation website

Linkurious Enterprise has demonstrated the relevance of using graph visualizations to speed up the collection and analysis of facts by investigation teams. 

Alerts now come with Case Management capabilities to help our customers reach faster time to resolution and tame their ever increasing flow of suspicious activities to be processed.

The main features we introduce as part of Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 for this new Case Management capability are the following:

• Case assignment
• “In progress” status
• Comments in cases
• Access rights on Alerts

For starters, we are introducing a change in vocabulary. Alerts are queries that are run automatically on a predefined schedule to detect suspicious activities. The output of the Alerts are cases that need to be investigated and closed. The “case list” is where all the cases are listed. The “case view” is where the graph for the case is displayed.

In Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 you can now: 

• Assign a case to a user, either from the case list or from the case view.
• Assign or reassign cases in bulk from the case list.
• Filter the case list by assignee.

With the new case management capability, team managers can: 

• Distribute work within their team.
• Assess the workload of each of their team members.
• Manage the transfer of work when a team member is on leave.
• Identify and assign cases that are unassigned.

Assign a case from the case list or from the case view

Bulk assign cases from the case list

Filter the case list by assignee

Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 introduces a new “In progress” case status. Users are now also able to add a comment to the case to explain the reason for a status change. Status changes and related comments are displayed in the “history” of the case, together with the comments. 

With the new “In progress” status:

• Investigators can quickly navigate to the ongoing investigations that need their attention.
• Team managers know how many cases are being worked on.
• Team managers know how large the current case backlog is.

Changing the status allows users to enter a comment. Both the status change and the comment are logged in the case history.

Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 introduces the ability for users to add comments to a case in the case view. This allows users to:

• Record their progress as they move through the case.
• Pause their investigation, and retrieve the context and their past findings when they resume it.
• Share information and facilitate collaboration with their teammates.
• Preserve an audit trail of their actions and findings ensuring compliance with internal and regulatory requirements.

Comments added to a case are logged in the history of the case and each comment references the author and the time of the comment.

If you have regional teams responsible for handling cases in their own geographical area, or multiple departments investigating different kinds of fraud, you are likely to have a large number of Alerts. 

But each user may be concerned by only a few of them. And you might actually want to prevent them from being able to access cases they are not supposed to investigate. 

Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 introduces the ability to define which user groups can access an Alert. You can now make sure each investigator sees only relevant Alerts.

If you are already a user of the Alerts, you will notice a few more changes in Linkurious Enterprise 3.0:

• Redesigned Case list: this is a first step towards a redesigned experience for the investigators.
• Case deduplication: Linkurious Enterprise is now better at detecting duplicate cases across a single Alert. When creating queries for Alerts, please make sure to follow best practices.
• Save the graph in the case view: Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 now allows users to save the state of the graph in the case view before pausing their investigation, allowing them to resume it later.

In Linkurious Enterprise 2.9, we added the powerful capability of enabling our customers and partners to write their own plugins. We wanted to make this even easier, so we introduced a few changes in Linkurious Enterprise 3.0:

• Official plugins: official plugins are plugins built, distributed, and maintained by Linkurious team. These official plugins will remain compatible with new versions of Linkurious Enterprise. A list of the official plugins and our support policy for official plugins is available here.
• We have improved the plugin documentation to help our customers install plugins, and each official plugin has its own documentation to help with their configuration.
• We have published a Plugin Development guide to help our customers and partners develop their own plugins.
• Our Customer Success team has recorded a Deep Dive webinar. Please contact your Customer Success Manager if you want to access it. 

If you have any project that may involve writing a plugin, we can support you with services or by referring you to one of our partners. Please get in touch with your Customer Success Manager or Account Manager if you have any questions.

If your use case involves searching numbers or dates (for example searching for a date of birth) you need to use Elasticsearch as your search vendor.

In Linkurious Enterprise 2.10.7, we already improved our support for Elasticsearch by adding support for Elasticsearch 7. In Linkurious Enterprise 3.0, we have made it easier to enable search for numbers and dates with Elasticsearch:

• Set the type of a property to number or date in the schema (see how to do it here)
• Re-index your data as prompted.

Once the re-indexing is complete, users can start searching dates or numbers on that property by using the Advanced search syntax.

Linkurious Enterprise users can already trigger a Query Template that takes a node or an edge as input by right-clicking on a node or an edge and selecting it from the context menu. With Linkurious Enterprise 3.0, users can now trigger Query Templates that take “non graph” input (for example a string, or a number) as well as Standard Queries by right-clicking on the background.

The background context menu now gives access to Standard Queries (the first 2 options in the video) and “non graph” Query Templates, such as the Query Template returning all transactions of a given type and above a given amount in the video.

In Linkurious Enterprise 3.0, you can now share a Custom Action with a specific user group. You can do so by editing the Custom Action and changing its sharing settings.

Shared Custom Actions now have an identified owner in Linkurious Enterprise 3.0. One now knows who to contact to ask for a change, for example.

In Linkurious Enterprise, there are two different paths to expand a node:

• Double-click on the node: all neighbors are added to the visualization.
• Context menu and selective expand popup: choose which node categories and possibly which edge types you want to expand. Only the neighbors that match your criteria are added to the visualization.

In Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 we introduced the ability to select multiple categories from the selective expand popup.

You can now choose to set the hierarchical layout as your default layout, by changing a setting in the Data-source settings page. For more details please refer to the documentation.

Previously when Linkurious Enterprise lost the connection to its graph database (for example when the database server is restarted), an intervention from a user with Admin rights was required to re-establish the connection. 

Now the new auto-reconnect feature will automatically attempt to reconnect to the database every 5 minutes without human intervention (to customize the time, please refer to the documentation).

Mapping user-groups from third-party authentication providers (like Active Directory) to user-groups within Linkurious Enterprise got easier: you can now also use the name of the group in Linkurious Enterprise instead of its ID to define the mapping. When the same group name is defined in multiple data-sources, the new way to map groups allows access to multiple data-sources with a single mapping rule. For more details please refer to the documentation.

Until Linkurious Enterprise 2.10, Java was a dependency to Linkurious Enterprise, meaning that the server needed to have Java installed. 

Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 removes that dependency by shipping with Java embedded (OpenJDK) in the package. NOTE: The package size increased from about 80 MB to about 300 MB, so you may experience longer downloading times.

In the coming weeks we are going to release 2 improvements as part of Linkurious Enterprise 3.0:

• Properties ordering: administrators will be able to define the order in which the properties should be displayed in the Property panel in a visualization.
• Connecting to multiple LDAP/ Active Directory servers: Linkurious Enterprise will allow users registered from multiple LDAP or Active Directory servers to connect.

• Case assignment: Investigation team managers will be able to assign cases to specific investigators, and investigators will be able to hand over a case to a colleague by reassigning it.
• Access rights on Alerts: Alert creators will be able to restrict access to a specific alert to a user group.

Due to a change in the architecture of the Alerts, customers that already have Alerts running before updating to Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 will need to make small changes to their alert queries before re-enabling them (for more details please refer to the documentation). You can get in touch with the Customer Success team for guidance.

Microsoft announced the end of support of Internet Explorer 11, with Microsoft 365 dropping support as soon as August 2021. Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 will not provide support for Internet Explorer 11. You can check our list of supported browsers and operating systems here.

Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 will no longer support JanusGraph databases. If JanusGraph is your database of choice, please reach out to your Account Executive.

Linkurious Enterprise supports 3 main search strategies: native search solutions (Neo4j Search for Neo4j databases, and AzureSearch for CosmosDB), embedded Elasticsearch (an instance of Elasticsearch shipped with Linkurious Enterprise) and external Elasticsearch (Linkurious Enterprise can be connected to an existing Elasticsearch instance/cluster).

Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 will support only Elasticsearch 6 and Elasticsearch 7 as part of the external Elasticsearch strategy. Elasticsearch 5, declared End Of Life (EOL) by Elasticsearch in 2019, is no longer supported in Linkurious Enterprise 3.0. Please reach out to our Customer Success team if you need support upgrading to a more recent version of Elasticsearch.

Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 embedded Elasticsearch instance is upgraded to version 7.10. This version change requires customers to re-index their database.

Node.js is the backend framework on which Linkurious Enterprise is built. For security and maintenance reasons, we are upgrading this key component to its latest version. This should not cause any problem to customers whose servers run on a modern operating system. However, if your servers are running on operating systems that have reached end-of-life, we advise that you update your servers prior to installing Linkurious Enterprise 3.0 (the list of compatible operating systems is available here).