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New features delivered in 8.6.0

The following features and enhancements were included as part of 8.6.0.

Business process forms and workflow enhancements

This release includes enhancements to process forms and workflow functionality, including adding time-based notifications to business process approvals.

Time-based notifications for business process approvals

Notifications support business process approvals for notifying users of approval assignment or for reminding users of overdue approvals. You can trigger notifications at a specific time and date for approvals in a business step. For example, you can create a notification to remind an approver two days before the due date of an approval step in an opportunity.

For more information, see Adding notification actions to steps.

Email management enhancements

This release includes enhancements to email management functionality, including several enhancements associated with batch email.

Send batch emails from a group mailbox

You can now send batch emails to clients from NexJ CRM using your own individual email account or a group mail account that you have access to. By default, all users are granted Send from Group Mailbox permissions, which enable users in a user group to send emails from the group's mailbox.

Administrators can provide email addresses for users and user groups from the NexJ Admin Console.

For more information, see Sending batch emails to contacts.

For more information, see Configuring user groups.

Categorize batch email records by priority

You can categorize your batch email records by priority. This information is used to help administrators find records in the email log, which is used to track sent emails in the activity journal.

Amend recipients from lists

Additional contacts can be added as recipients to a batch email from one or more saved lists.

Reporting enhancements

This release includes enhancements to reporting functionality, including the new predefined Opportunity Detail Report.

Opportunity Detail Report

Analyze your opportunities by running the out-of-the-box Opportunity Detail Report and exporting the output in either PDF or RTF formats. The report displays details about a Parent or Product opportunity. The report generates information from the Detail tab in the Opportunities workspace. You can run a report for a current opportunity selected on the list or the entire opportunity list

For more information, see Opportunity Detail Reports and Enabling application features.

Service request management enhancements

NexJ’s Service Request Management solution continues NexJ’s theme of an integrated view of the customer by enabling relationship managers and customer support teams to manage customer complaints and requests throughout the entire lifecycle – creation to resolution. Service request case resolution is simplified by enabling users to define, assign and prioritize cases; relationship managers and case managers are able to receive notifications when cases are due to ensure the work gets done on time to keep clients satisfied.

This release includes enhancements to service request management functionality, including the ability to manage service requests, create rules for service requests, and search for service request records.

Manage service requests in improved user interface

The Service Requests workspace has been revamped with a modern and user-friendly design in mind: the service request case list is wider, the service request banner is cleaner and more informative, and information is easier to find. The added real estate in the case list provides more valuable information to service request managers. Service request managers can keep track of who cases are for, when cases were created and are due, case priority, and case severity at a high level; all of this information can be filtered. At an individual case level, the banner now provides more critical information to case managers to help users make faster decisions.

In addition to managing and creating service requests in the Service Requests workspace, you can now:

  • Add service requests based on service request templates
  • Add new attribute values to service requests, including resolution comments
  • Search for service requests using advanced filtering, including user-defined filters
  • Add activities and notes to service requests
  • Provide notifications and rules for service requests
  • Monitor users actions on service requests in the audit trail,

For more information, see Managing service requests.

The following image shows some of the key enhancements:

Managing service requests

Create rules for service requests

Administrators can create rules in the Rules tab on the Customize workspace to automatically perform actions on service request records when a specified trigger occurs. For example, they can create a rule to automatically send a notification to a user when the user is assigned a service request.

Service request case workers can receive notifications once service requests are assigned to them; managers receive escalation notifications if those assigned cases are not completed within the set time or other custom-defined rules.

For more information, see Rule actions.

Include service request values in notification messages

When administrators add notification actions to business process steps on the Customize workspace, they can include tokens to display service request record values in notification messages and link to service request records from notification messages.

Search for service request records

To search for service requests records, you can click the Show Filter button  in the Contacts workspace and Service Requests workspace and provide service request parameters.

Search for contacts with service request attributes

To search for contacts who have service request records, you can create a filter in the Contacts workspace.

Configure service request templates

Instead of using NexJ Admin Console to configure service request templates, business administrators can configure them in the Service Request Management tab on the Customize workspace of NexJ CRM.

For more information, see Configuring service requests.

Work queues enhancements

This release includes enhancements to work queues functionality, including the ability to assign work queue tasks to other users.

Assign work queue tasks to other users

In the Work Queues workspace, you now have more flexibility when assigning tasks from work queues. You can assign tasks in work queues to other users.

Administrators can provide you with the WorkQueueItemBatchAssign privilege in NexJ Admin Console that allows you to assign multiple work queue tasks to yourself or to another user.

Application development enhancements

This release includes enhancements to application development functionality, including indenting for RESTful responses and channel integration logging.

Indentation option for JSON output

The NexJ platform has enhanced the readability of the JSON output by providing indentation. The following changes have been added:

  • JSON output can be retrieved in indented format on demand by specifying an additional request parameter $indent=true
  • JSON output can be configured to return in indented format globally

For more information, see Accessing JSON objects using a RESTful connection.

Integration logging

The NexJ platform now provides the ability to capture all inbound and outbound activity for each integration point configured for logging with various granularity options.

This feature is beneficial when troubleshooting errors, validating processing times, and identifying performance issues for third party applications or processes.

The logging is persisted to the database allowing for centralized lookups for activity across all cluster nodes. The following fields are captured:

User ID

The ID of the user sending or receiving the request.

Node ID

The ID of the node the request was sent or received on.

Channel

The name of the channel associated with the request.

Start

The time an outbound request was sent or an inbound request received.

Duration

Duration of the request in milliseconds.

Address

The address the request was sent to.

Serialized Request

A serialized text version of the request.

Serialized Response

A serialized text version of the response.

Severity Code

The logging level associating with a log entry.

Exception

The error code or exception of the request or response if any occurred.

Description

Optional notes associated with log entry.

Key capabilities include:

  • Multiple options for level of details persisted:

    Dump
    Detailed entry for all requests.
    Info
    Summary entry for all requests.
    Warn
    Detailed entry for requests that exceed warning timeout.
    Error
    Detailed entry for each request where an exception is encountered.

  • Warning timeout available for each integration channel.
  • Records can be purged from database at desired interval.
  • Runtime configuration is supported.

For more information, see Enabling integration logging.

Exchange Synchronization enhancements

This release includes enhancements to Exchange Synchronization functionality, including concurrent support of Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2016.

Concurrent support of Outlook 2010 and 2016

The Exchange Synchronization auto-discover now allows NexJ CRM to be used with Microsoft Exchange 2016 in an environment where some users have mailboxes on Microsoft Exchange 2010 and others have Microsoft Exchange 2016.

Technology enhancements

The following enhancements will improve application development.

New cluster discovery protocols

The NexJ platform now supports additional protocols for cluster communication . You can specify the protocol in the environment file.

  • UDP broadcast
  • UDP unicast
  • TCP/IP

The selected communication protocol will apply to every node in the cluster. Additionally, auto discovery is available for UDP unicast and TCP/IP.

For more information, Configuring the cluster discovery protocol.

Dynamic resource pooling for object queue and file channels

Dynamic resource pooling has been extended in the NexJ platform for object queues and file channels. These additions provide the ability to make key object queue and file adjustments without having to take the application server offline. They also further decouple the relationship between build and environment file, a key stepping stone in providing the ability to build once, deploy many deployments. The following items can now be dynamically configured in NexJ Admin Console:

  • Enable runtime configuration of max senders and receivers for object queues.
  • Enable runtime configuration of file channel properties.

Dynamic resource pools now support dynamic deployment for object queue and file channels.

For more information, see Monitoring statistics for NexJ applications.