New features delivered in 23.02

The following features and enhancements were included as part of 23.02:

Treating leads as contacts

Prior to this release, leads were managed as separate records in NexJ CRM, and were converted to contacts only when they qualified. In this release, the new lead management feature allows you to add a contact with the Lead status instead. Using the Lead status for a contact is aligned with other contact statuses, which ensures the smooth transition of a contact through the client lifecycle. All lead management activities are synchronized between the contact profile accessed from the Contacts workspace and the lead profile accessed from the Leads workspace. For example, when you add an activity to the contact's profile, it is reflected in the lead's profile. When a lead profile is deleted, the contact profile is deleted as well (AFL-8102).

You can create new leads on either the Contacts workspace or the Leads workspace, as well as using the floating action button. When you create a new contact with the Lead status, you can specify lead-specific information, such as source type or market segment. You must also specify at least one phone number or email address (AFL-8040). You can see and update the lead-specific information for an existing contact on the Edit Contact dialog or on the Lead Details card on the Details tab on the contact's profile (AFL-8036).

When the pitch to the lead has reached a conclusion, you can choose either to archive the lead, which sets the lead status to Archived and the contact status to Other, or to convert the lead, which sets the lead status to Qualified and the contact status to Prospect (AFL-6363).

The existing lead management functionality (treating leads as separate entities) has been renamed to "Legacy Leads". It is still supported and is enabled by default. The new Leads as Entities feature is disabled by default. To enable this feature, in the Admin Console, navigate to the Global Application Settings page and disable the Legacy Leads feature.

For more information, see "Leads" in end-user documentation.

Displaying additional information about activities

When viewing a list of activities in a data table, you can now see the full notes associated with each activity (AFL-5476). The note is displayed as a new row, below the row with all other information about the activity. To include the notes rows in the data table, use the Select columns command (which may be accessed from the More Actions menu for the data table) to select the Note field.

This feature is currently supported only in the Activities tab on the Contacts workspace.

For more information, see "Activities" and "Adding notes" in end-user documentation.

Reporting enhancements

This release includes the following enhancements to the ad hoc reporting functionality:

A configuration dialog was added to ensure a user does not inadvertently lose changes when they select the Cancel or Revert button after configuring a report (CDM-5272).
A subject area configuration parameter (pickerWhere) was added in order to allow filtering the list of Enumeration values seen in filter pickers (CDM-5213).
A subject area configuration parameter (hideSpecificFilter) was added in order to allow hiding the (Specific) filter picker for select associated attributes where such picker would not display a unique list of values and may be confusing to users (CDM-5186).
Two new buttons (Cancel and OK) were added to the Configure Filters dialog, replacing the single Close button that was previously available (CDM-5094).
The style of the filter chip dialogs on the Reporting workspace was updated to better align with other NexJ CRM workspaces. Specifically, the filter dialogs pop up directly under their respective filter chip rather than in the center of the screen (CDM-5070).

Usability enhancements

This release contains the following usability enhancements:

When creating a new schedule item from the Schedule workspace calendar, you can now select the schedule item template (including SLM schedule item templates) before the New Schedule Item dialog opens (AFL-8028).
The About NexJ CRM dialog accessed from the User settings menu contains information about the current release, which may be required when communicating with your system administrator or NexJ Customer Support. This dialog now contains additional details, including the base revision and base model version numbers, in addition to the current revision and current model version numbers (ECRM-30895).

Object queue monitoring enhancements

Performance optimization has been applied to the Object Queue Dispatcher's advance priority query (ECRM-31775).
A system batch job has been added that will prevent the ExchangeStreamingQueue from growing beyond a threshold value to minimize potential excessive growth affecting other areas of the Object Queue Engine (ECRM-31788, ECRM-31571). The threshold value can be set on the Statistics page of the System Admin Console. Expand the node for your application (for example, nexj.finance), select Administration, and update the value for the Streaming queue threshold attribute.

Technology enhancements

This release includes the following technology enhancements.

The React compatibility wrapper has been updated and requires React v18.0 or later (AFL-8146).

Security enhancements

This release includes the following security enhancements:

The SecondString library has been upgraded to version 20120620 (ECRM-31726)
The Apache Common Codec (Metaphone) library has been upgraded to 1.15 (released on August 28, 2020) (ECRM-31726)
The jackson-databind library has been upgraded to 2.14.1 (released on November 22, 2022) (ECRM-31806)
The Batik SVG Toolkit library has been upgraded to version 1.16 (released October 25, 2022) (ECRM-31707)
The date.olson.db.js module has been upgraded to 2022g (released November 29, 2022) (AFL-8074)
The AntiSamy library has been upgraded to 1.7.2 (released November 18, 2022) (ECRM-31705)
The NekoHTML library has been upgraded to 2.66.0 (released October 22, 2022) (ECRM-31705)
The IANA top level domain list has been updated to version 2023022700 (Last Updated Mon Feb 27 07:07:01 2023 UTC) (ECRM-31708)

This release also includes the following reporting security enhancements (CDM-5027):

The Highcharts JavaScript library has been upgraded to version 10.0.0 (released on March 7, 2022)
The jsPDF library has been upgraded to 2.5.1 (released on January 28, 2022)
The jsPDF-AutoTable library has been upgraded to 3.5.25 (released on November 30, 2022)
The JQuery library has been upgraded to 3.6.1 (released on August 26, 2022)

Enhancements for Cloud-deployed environments

This release includes the following enhancement for Cloud-deployed environments.

Storing file attachments in the IBM Cloud Object Storage S3 bucket

When NexJ CRM is deployed in a Cloud environment, your deployment can store file attachments in the IBM Cloud Object Storage S3 bucket for file persistence (AFL-7213).