The following features and enhancements were included as part of 8.1.0

Contact and interaction management

NexJ CRM now includes the following enhancements to its contact and interaction management capabilities.

New summary dashboards for the Contacts workspace

Users need to consume large amounts of data on a daily basis in order to prospect, analyze, and optimize client relationships. Client dashboards summarize and present key information for a client in a single screen, which gives users the ability to quickly consume data. The use of charts makes it easy for users to visualize data and navigate directly to relevant areas within the client’s profile.

Key capabilities provided by the new Summary tab on the Contacts workspace include:

Wealth Management Client Dashboard

See the client’s asset allocation, account summary, latest transactions, and latest activities.

Capital Markets Client Dashboard

See the client’s asset allocation by asset class and sectors, latest transactions, and latest activities.

Corporate/Commercial Banking Client Dashboard

See the client’s upcoming opportunities and latest activities.

The following image shows summary dashboards:

Simplified access to importing contacts

You can now access contact import functionality directly from the contact list in the Contacts workspace. Click the Options button above the contacts list and select Import Contacts.

Consolidated menu access

Add functionality that had been available in multiple menus for different types of information is now available in the single Add menu on the global application toolbar. This includes contact import and lead import functionality.

Support for .eml files

NexJ CRM now supports .eml files as attachments.

NexJ CRM user experience enhancements

User experience enhancements in NexJ CRM improve user adoption and drive efficient work flows. To provide a modern user experience and align with web standards, NexJ has adopted select user interface patterns in line with Google’s Material Design. By working iteratively with our customers, we continue to improve the user interface and add features to make day-to-day use of the application easier.

Consolidated toolbars

The application toolbar has been merged with the navigation toolbar to maximize screen real estate. Use the new toolbar to access workspace navigation and global actions such as adding new clients or action items, navigating to workspaces, accessing user preferences, and more.

New buttons and icons

The following buttons have new icons or are new buttons. New icons implement two-dimensional iconography, mono-color, and are modern, and clearer.

New buttons and icons

Updated tab styling

New tab styling in the application follows modern web guidelines. Tabs provide more color contrast in the application.

The following image shows some of the key user experience enhancements:

Dynamic display of advanced search filter criteria

When you select advanced search filter criteria, the criteria now dynamically displays as a string of read-only text. You can view your search criteria selections quickly and easily.

Updates to data tables

The data table design has been modernized to bring them into closer alignment with material design guidelines, and to make customizing the row height in data tables easier.

Updates to entity banners

The banners for contacts, companies, households, and funds have been redesigned with better color and contrast in order to better engage users with the information they contain.

Notifications

Notifications keep users informed of up-to-the-minute changes impacting their business. Runtime configurable business rules are used to detect events and deliver actionable notifications to the appropriate users. Internal notifications can be triggered from events such as client coverage changes, a new note on a covered client, upcoming or past due events, task assignment, and business process steps.

Notifications includes the following key features:

Unsubscribing from specific notifications

Take control of your notifications by unsubscribing from specific types of notifications. Mandatory notifications cannot be unsubscribed from.

Additional subject areas for notifications

The available subject areas for notifications have been expanded and now include the following five new areas:

• Contacts
• Companies
• Households
• Call records
• Documents

Tokens support in notification

You can now use the same tokens available for email notifications when creating messages for display in the notification stream.

Time-based notifications

You can trigger notifications at a specific time and date, in addition to triggering notifications when a record is added or modified in the system. For example, you can create a notification to remind a relationship manager of a contact's upcoming birthday or to escalate a stale lead to the lead creator.

Actionable notifications

Take proactive actions directly from your notifications by selecting from the following quick actions:

• Add follow-up
• Add to call list, for leads and contacts
• Add note
• Add call record
• Mark as complete

Notifications as actions in rules

The Notifications tab in the Customize workspace has been merged with the Rules tab. This facilitates the creation of task automation rules. Use the Rules tab to create rules for various subject areas (such as documents or events), define evaluation criteria for the subject area, and specify actions to be taken when the criteria are met. Available actions are:

• Create activity plan
• Create task
• Send notification
• Update field

Notification email format support

Notification emails now support the HTML format.

Lead management

NexJ’s lead management solution provides rich prospecting capabilities to manage prospects, generate referrals across business lines, and tap into lucrative cross-sell opportunities. Users can track leads and referrals through the system and monitor progress on conversion. Embedded dashboards enable management to gain insight into the effectiveness of leads by source and determine outcomes with visibility into active leads, resulting KPIs, and revenue predictability.

The NexJ CRM lead management functionality includes the following key features.

Create personalized documents for multiple leads

You can select one or more leads on the Leads workspace and create personalized Microsoft Word and PDF documents using NexJ Add-In to advance leads through the sales process.. You can also print Microsoft Word and PDF documents in the Leads tab on the Contacts workspace.

Send batch emails to leads

Use the batch email feature in NexJ CRM to send emails to your prospects in bulk. Emails can be formatted using the rich text control which offers a variety of different options to format the email content. Include attachments with your email by selecting files from your computer, from Document Manager, or from your favorite documents in CRM. Merge fields can be used to personalize the email body and the attachments for each of the prospects selected.

Attach documents to leads

You can now attach documents to individual leads.

Select multiple leads to delete in bulk

You can select multiple leads on the Leads workspace and delete all of them at one time.

Export leads

You can now export leads to which you have access. Leads can be exported into a CSV file for analysis outside of NexJ CRM.

Delete lead activities

You can delete lead activities from the Activities area on the Leads workspace.

Preview contact information when matching a lead to a contact

When you are adding leads, and you decide to create the lead from an existing contact, you can preview the selected contact's information before confirming that you want to populate the lead with the contact's information.

View lead batch process status

You can now view the status of your lead-specific batch processes, such as bulk email distribution or bulk printing. To see the status of your completed batch jobs, select the Completed Batch Processes filter on the Leads workspace. To see the status of all batch jobs, click the Options button  in the navigation toolbar and select Batch Processes.

Key enhancements

The following image shows some of the key enhancements:

Event management

Events are a series of meetings that may span across multiple days or weeks and take place in different cities around the world. They can take the form of roadshows, conferences, tradeshows, and more. These events are complex as event coordinators may need to manage a large number of attendees, meetings in different time zones, feedback forms, itineraries, reports, and more. NexJ event management simplifies event planning, tracking, and execution, even when there are multiple individuals collaborating on the event.

Event coordinators can define event details, breakdown the event into multiple segments or legs based on location or theme, manage itineraries, and query the system to find the right event participants. Event coordinators can also take advantage of numerous time-saving features, such as event and meeting templates, invitation personalization, distribution, and follow-up, to deliver polished and productive events.

Event management includes the following key features:

New event reports

Event management enables you to track, share, export, and print the following new reports that show upcoming events broken down by sectors, segments, or meeting availability.

• Daily Event Summary
• Event Summary
• Event Feedback Report
• Event List
• Event List By Sector
• Meeting Availability Report

Ability to submit event meeting requests to multiple attendees at once

Submit and approve multiple meeting requests at a time. Requests that have more than one client in them, are split into one request per client to make it easier for Event Coordinators to track duplicate requests and appropriately allocate open event spots.

Enhanced event creation

When you create an event, the company and analyst information now prepopulates. In addition, you can now specify multiple analysts for an analyst event.

Enhanced event feedback

When you add feedback to an event meeting, the Date, Ticker, and Sector/Industry information is now filled in automatically.

Enhanced event filtering and display

You can now create user-defined filters for events using Security Coverage or Availability as filter criteria.

Filter the event calendar with more ease now that event log filters give you more real-estate to manage the event calendar. Use new calendar filters to see only days in which there are meetings or all days in which the event takes place.

Key enhancements

The following image shows some of the key enhancements:

Opportunity management

Opportunity management enables you to manage complex, multi-product opportunities through every stage of the sales cycle. Opportunity coverage roles and stage plans ensure that key workflows, activities, and other required interactions are completed at each stage. Documents, collateral, and interactions with interested parties, syndicate partners, and client leads, can be linked to opportunities and stored in the client’s Interaction Journal. Actionable notifications and dashboards ensure team members and managers have actionable insight into opportunities and the sales pipeline. Client and Product teams can use the Deal Chat Room to collaborate on sales strategy and stay in sync on events impacting the sales process.

Opportunity management has been enhanced.

Ad hoc reporting

Create and run opportunity-specific reports to derive meaningful insights about your client opportunities. You can also export these reports into different output formats, including PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and CVS.

Export opportunities

You can now export opportunities to which you have access. Opportunities can be exported into a CSV file for analysis outside of NexJ CRM.

Ad hoc reporting (end user and reporting engine)

NexJ CRM uses TIBCO JasperReports Server to provide enhanced ad hoc reporting capabilities such as runtime-configurable reports and role-based access control.

NexJ Ad Hoc Reports enable you to create and run your own reports at your convenience. You can create summary and detail reports in the form of lists and charts, and export them using a number of different file formats including PDF, Word, and Excel. You can organize and share your business queries with other users, allowing them to run the same reports with their own parameters without having to recreate the queries.

Users can generate Ad hoc Reports on demand from the Ad Hoc Reports workspace.

End user: New chart types

You can use new chart types, such as heat maps, in your reports to derive meaningful insights from hierarchical data.

Control the formatting of chart attributes, such legends, to customize chart look and feel.

The following image shows the additional chart types:

End user: Improved accessibility

End user experience has been improved due to enhanced keyboard navigation and accessibility.

End user: Variable page format support

You can now combine reports with different page layouts into a single workbook.

Reporting engine enhancements

NexJ’s partnership with TIBCO’s JasperReports Server to deliver cutting-edge ad hoc reporting and dashboards remains a key integration point and investment area for the reporting engine. Support for the latest version of JasperReports Server 6.2 in addition to enhancing and hardening the existing features have been added

Key enhancements include:

Upgrade to JasperReports Server 6.2

The latest version of JasperReports Server is now integrated and supported.

JasperReports Server plug-in to NexJ Studio

You can deploy Ad Hoc Reports by installing JasperReports Server 6.2.0 as a plug-in to NexJ Studio. The plug-in provides you with a user interface for installing JasperReports Server to Red Hat JBoss Application Server or NexJ Server rather than having to use install scripts.

Feature enhancement and hardening

Enhanced automated domain generation and preservation of existing customizations allows for fast upgrade to new product releases without the need to re-apply existing project customizations. Integrated support for JasperReports Server dashboards with NexJ portlets allows for greater user interface flexibility for presenting dashboards.

Performance optimization

Support for parallel processing of report filters significantly improves performance of very large reports with many filters. Performance of domain loading has also been optimized.

Business process forms and workflow

NexJ’s dynamic business forms and approval processes allow firms to adapt to changing business and regulatory conditions in real-time. NexJ business forms and workflows can be configured at runtime and seamlessly rolled out to users to share best practices across regions, offices, and users.

The business forms walk the user through the data capture process, while ensuring data already available never needs to be re-entered. Once the forms are completed, they are routed through an approval process, they can be integrated with other internal workflows, or NexJ can print a bundle of forms for signature.

The NexJ CRM business process forms and workflow functionality has been enhanced.

Node expansion and non-sequential page navigation

Users can now navigate between pages in a form created in the Business Processes tab on the Contacts workspace, even if there are some invalid answers or unanswered required questions. Users will still need to correct validation errors before submitting the form.

This functionality is only available if form administrators select the Enable Node Expansion option when creating or editing the form. This also allows users to choose to see all pages in the Pages list or to see pages only after a previous page has been completed.

Page level validation

Users can view a summary of all pages in a form with outstanding validation errors which must be completed prior to submission. A red dot  next to a page indicates to users that the page contains a question with a validation error. Users can now choose to view a filtered list of pages with outstanding validation errors which must be completed prior to submission. Users can select the Show only pages with missing or invalid answers option to identify pages with required questions that must be answered.

To require that end users answer all questions correctly before proceeding to the next page, form administrators can select the Block entry into this flow component until all prior validation has been resolved option.

Conditionally required questions

A question can become required if the user has given specific responses to certain previous questions.

Form administrators can use the new Required tab in the Add Question or Edit Question dialog to specify a formula that controls whether a question is always required or becomes required under certain question conditions.

Review page before submission

Users can verify their answers to key questions prior to submission and quickly correct any mistakes without having to navigate back through each page in a business process form.

Form administrators can create a Review page for a business process form, by adding a question of the Answers to Verify type to their form template. To specify which questions will be displayed in the page, form administrators select the Include in Verification option in the Edit Question or Add Question dialog.

Page hierarchy

Related pages can be grouped together in a visual hierarchy, which enables users to more easily locate a specific page.

Key enhancements

The following image shows some of the key enhancements:

NexJ Server

The new NexJ Server is now an alternative option to JBoss and WebSphere as a production application server for the NexJ Enterprise Application Platform (NEAP). Engineered as an extension of the industry leading Apache Tomcat, its tiny footprint contains all features needed to run the NEAP in a performant, reliable, and scalable manner. Designed specifically for the NEAP, the NexJ Server provides a significant reduction in operational and maintenance cost over JBoss and WebSphere.

All NexJ application development has relied on the integrated Model Server in NexJ Studio since NexJ's inception. A number of key features have been added to the NexJ Server which provide the ability for all customers to run their NexJ solutions in production and non-production environments.

Key features include:

Clustering support

The ability to cluster both vertically and horizontally without restrictions on the number of nodes in the cluster. The clustering is configured seamlessly via the environment file and provides the same full redundancy, high availability, and failover support as JBoss and WebSphere application servers.

Flexible authentication

Support for all third party Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions including SPNEGO with Kerberos.

Automated deployments

Automated deployment and configuration scripts allow standardized deployment patterns in all environments.

Transaction log manager enhancements

Persistent transaction log and recovery for the transaction manager across all nodes. Previously, this functionality was only available for single node developer instances of the Model Server in NexJ Studio.

NexJ Admin Console

New search capabilities for privileges and user options

A search field has been added to the following dialogs in NexJ Admin Console:

• Select Option dialog accessed from the User Options tab in the Personalization page
• Select Privileges dialog accessed from the Privileges zone in the Privileges Group tab for the User page

Reset performance statistics

Application administrators can now reset the JMX performance metrics in real-time from NexJ Admin Console. Statistics for a single or all attributes on a given node may be reset.

There are three new available commands for resetting statistics. Their availability depends on the statistics needed to be reset.

removeStale

Removes all statistics from nodes that are no longer available. This command can only be issued on the available node.

reset

Resets the statistics for a particular attribute of the current node.

resetAll

Resets all statistics for a given node.

Microsoft Exchange Server support enhancements

NexJ CRM's support for Microsoft Exchange Server has been expanded.

Updates to supported levels of Microsoft Exchange Server

Support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 has now been added to NexJ CRM.

Application development

The following enhancements will help increase the development speed and quality of your solutions.

URI reference enhancement

You can now invoke NexJ CRM workspaces from a third-party system using context values and the workspace name associated with the SysPortal container. When invoked, the application opens and navigates to the appropriate workspace and provides the context defined by the incoming request.

Developer velocity

As part of an on-going initiative to continually evolve the NexJ application development process and help improve developer velocity for all partner and client developers, the following new features have been added:

Facet support

Facets enable you to define custom properties on classes and class attributes. Facets are string-based and fully searchable within NexJ Studio. Facets are very powerful tools for designing new features or extending existing functionality. You can also access facets programmatically by using the Scheme language.

Business-centric data types

Date, currency, and percentage are now defined as primitive data types. This native support by the NexJ Enterprise Application Platform (NEAP) guarantees correctness for database persistence and user interface components without developer intervention to handle conversions programmatically.

Hard-deletion of class instances using object purge events

Support for full hard-deletion of class instances has been added. A new purge event will allow developers to hard-delete data from the database directly through the NexJ metadata. The use of this feature should always go through full architectural review to ensure that the existing NexJ auditing and soft-deletion framework is not bypassed except for use cases which directly require it.

Object queue improvements

Object Queues are an integral part of the NEAP and are used for many of the key function points. NexJ remains committed to continually evolve the object queue capabilities for optimal performance, stability, and reliability. Additionally, runtime administration, monitoring, and configuration remain a focus area for feature enhancements of object queues.
Object queues are continuously enhanced. In this release, new or improved object queue capabilities include the following:

Performance optimization

Optimized communication between the dispatcher node and worker nodes reduce latency. The rate of delivery of transient and persisted messages to non-dispatcher nodes is now comparable to the rate of delivery of the same on the dispatcher node. The message processing workload is better distributed across all nodes participating in the application cluster.

Monitoring introspection

New performance metrics for monitoring object queue performance, processing and throughput have been introduced. They will help with tuning optimal performance as well as provide better understanding of the state of the system during troubleshooting.

Queue distribution fairness

Enhancements to the dispatching algorithm increase fairness of delivery of pending messages from all queues. High priority queues with a large message depth no longer starve lower priority queues with a shallow message depth.

Audit performance improvements

Audit performance metrics for long-running queries associated with large collections have been improved.