New features delivered in 9.2.0
The following features and enhancements were included as part of 9.2.0.0.
NexJ CRM user experience enhancements
NexJ CRM 9.2.0.0 features a user interface (UI) based on a responsive platform that implements Google Material Design specifications.
The UI provides the following benefits:
- Improved productivity through a new user experience design
- Responsive design that works for multiple screen sizes
- Provides an easy-to-use UI that increases user adoption and reduces the learning curve
- Uses modern technology that works with universal web patterns and browser technologies
- Delivers functional and visual consistency
- Provides a modern application user experience based on Google Material Design guidelines, which delivers intuitive navigation that helps you to find what you need where you expect it
For this first release of this new UI, the following function points are available:
- Contacts and companies record creation and editing
- Activities, tasks, and schedule management
- Notifications that alert you to information changes in NexJ CRM
- Conversations for exchanging messages between users
- Document Manager for storing and organizing documents
- Opportunities for tracking specific products or services that create further upselling opportunities
- Email-to-Service-Request for automatic creation of service requests based on incoming customer emails
- Service request creation and editing
- Customize workspace for business administrators to configure categories, custom fields, coverage groups, and so on
- Predefined reports that display information from specific workspaces
- Business processes for change approvals
Functionality that has not been migrated to the new UI remains available in the classic UI, which was used in the 8.X releases.
Floating action button, sidebars, cards, and data tables
The 9.2.0.0 UI includes a floating action button, sidebars, cards, and data tables. The floating action button enables you to quickly access the most common functionality for a workspace or the application.
For more information, see "Navigating the NexJ CRM user interface" in the end user documentation.
Searching and filtering
This release includes enhancements to the searching and filtering functionality. You can use predefined filters to find records quickly that match the filter criteria based on the workspace subject area. You can create and save user-defined filters by combining predefined filters with your own additional filtering criteria using filter chips. When it is shown, you can use the text search field to enter search criteria based on the subject area and the search functionality of a workspace. You can also create personalized saved lists of contacts, companies, or users that you frequently need to access as a group.
For more information, see "Searching and filtering in NexJ CRM" in the end user documentation.
New Tasks workspace
This release provides a new workspace for tasks. This new workspace enables you to leverage search and filter capabilities, display more tasks information in a larger working space, and manage tasks.
For more information, see "Tasks" in the end user documentation.
Push notification information enhancements
The About NexJ CRM dialog provides information about the push connection used for NexJ CRM. As of the 9.2.0.0 release, the Push State field can display more connection states compared to the classic version of NexJ CRM (8.X releases). The following states are available for display:
- Starting
- Connecting
- Stopped
- Polling
- Running
- Retrying
The classic version has Starting, Running, and Stopped states.
A push retry timeout (in milliseconds) is also displayed in 9.2.0.0.
NexJ Admin Console enhancements
To create a consistent configuration experience, NexJ CRM has deprecated some user options and replaced them with privileges.
For more information, see Enabling user options .
NexJ System Admin Console enhancements
As of 9.2.0.0, the System page in NexJ System Admin Console enables you to manage session timeout settings, global process concurrency settings, recurring schedule items, message queues, and the frequency for generating new periods, and simplifies monitoring the health of your application server cluster. For more information, see Configuring global system settings and Reserving servers for specific functions.
Application development enhancements
This release includes enhancements to application development functionality, including a Scheme code linter.
Data compression enabled out-of-the-box
To improve performance, and as of the 9.2.0.0 release, HTTP traffic is compressed to minimize network bandwidth.
For more information, see Creating a new environment file.
NexJ Studio project linter for Scheme code
This release includes a linter to enforce coding standards in Scheme scripts and XML source elements. Linting rules are provided with this engine and may be expanded by implementing new rules in a NexJ Studio project. The rules may be disabled entirely, by resource type, or with a comment indicating that the lint violation should be ignored.
For more information about the NexJ linter mixin, see Linting Scheme code in NexJ Studio projects.
NexJ Studio support for JavaScript
Instead of using Scheme as the default scripting language in NexJ Studio, you can now use JavaScript for the following:
- Use JavaScript as the scripting language when testing your code in the Minimal Console.
- Create JavaScript Libraries in addition to Scheme Libraries in the Resources layer.
- Define individual unit tests as well as the unit test initializer in JavaScript.
- Set the project language as JavaScript. This affects the following fields:
- For a class attribute, Value, Validation, and Initializer.
- For an action in a class event, Condition and Script.
- You can also individually define class attributes and actions in class events as supporting JavaScript.
For more information about using JavaScript in NexJ Studio, see Using JavaScript and Using the Minimal Console.
Ability to enable and disable concurrent metadata loading
To minimize potential server start-up issues, concurrent metadata loading is now disabled by default. If necessary, you can enable it by setting the
concurrentLoadingEnabled
property in the environment file to
true
.
Improved interface development functionality
Model Description Language (MODL) has been designed to simplify interface development and make it more efficient, including reducing the requirement for scripting.
The Model Server renderer, which translates MODL elements, attributes, and scripts into an application running on a user's browser, has been enhanced to support the rendering of the new or improved user interface elements described in "NexJ CRM user experience enhancements" above.
Simplified specification
Prior to this release, the screen and form elements were used in various combinations to provide support for portlets, popup dialogs, pickers, filtering, and querying patterns. The new MODL elements explicitly call out these patterns to simplify the design. The application now consists of workspaces, which include the optional navigator portlet and the page portlet. Each portlet is then composed of reusable layouts and controls. In addition, specific new elements have been added for pickers, dialogs, filters, and banners.
Efficient development
- Using MODL UI controls reduces scripting requirements. For example, you can now define simple pickers or filters without any scripting at all.
- MODL UI controls are designed with responsive design support. This means that a single design can be appropriately rendered on many different sizes of screens without the need for additional coding.
Performance improvements
- Simplified markup and scripting improve client load and performance.
- Reduced state requirements improve performance and increase flexibility in server clustering and load balancing configurations.
UI automated testing
You can now record and play back UI testing scripts using Selenium WebDriver.
Monitor application with Grafana dashboards
You can monitor the health of your application server(s) over a defined period of time using Grafana dashboards. This release includes dashboard templates, available for download from the NexJ System Admin console, that work with Grafana when statistics are persisted to InfluxDB.
For more information, see Monitoring NexJ Model Server with Grafana dashboards .