Performance Enhancements

Updates made to our application code and plugins around performance resulted in 54% faster total page load times for meeting registrations in 2.7! This is only one area where we were able to quantify performance gains in this release. These improvements extend to every portal page and process, creating a much smoother portal user experience. Below are the updates we made to make our portal faster:

  • Delta data updates – updated code to only query or write changed data, resulting in faster overall performance.
  • More robust caching – improved caching for faster portal browsing.
  • Update plugins to use shared instance of entity instead of serializing/deserializing.

E-Commerce

New Wizards

  • Payment Wizard – in 2.7 we’ve retired the Apply Payment and Unapply Payment wizards and introduced the new Payment Wizard. The Payment Wizard leverages our new “smart wizard” concept, providing users with different actions based on different payment scenarios. Actions to be performed from the Payment Wizard include:
    • Apply (full or partial)
    • Unapply (full or partial)
    • Refund (full or partial)
    • Cancel
  • Credit Wizard – similar to the Payment Wizard, the Credit Wizard provides users with different actions related to applying credits to invoices. Actions to be performed from the Credit Wizard include:
    • Apply (full or partial)
    • Cancel
  • Write-off Wizard – the write-off wizard provides users with a mechanism for writing-off and recording bad debt and allowing for continuation of a process as though the order or invoice has been fulfilled. Two new General Ledger Account types were added to CRM to accommodate this functionality:
    • Bad Debt
    • Bad Debt Allowance

Invoice Remittance Updates

To make our e-commerce functionality more robust and allow for more granular functionality such as partial refunds, we fundamentally changed the way payments (and credits) are applied to invoices. We’ve created a new entity “Invoice Distribution” to track how much of a payment or credit is allocated to an individual line item. This granularity allows for partial refunds against individual line items.

Portal Coupon Redemption

Coupon redemption functionality has been added to every portal checkout process:

  • Cobalt Dynamics CRM Modules (Core)
    • Meeting Registration
    • Class Registration
    • Online Store
    • Subscriptions
  • Cobalt Engagement Dynamics
    • Membership Application
    • Dues Renewal
    • Initial Certification Application
    • Continuing Certification Application

Meetings, Events, and Education

Edit Meeting Registrations

  • Edit meeting registrations from the portal for meetings that you’ve registered yourself or others.
  • Adjust registration waitlist priorities for your registrants.
  • Update meeting registration orders and issue refunds.

Meeting Activities

  • Lightbox for meeting activity or session details from portal registration.
  • “Publish to Portal” flag on meeting activity fees to toggle fee availability from portal.
  • Waitlist and waitlist management functionality expanded to Meeting Activities so registrants can sign up to be waitlisted for individual meeting activities.

“My Meetings” & “My Classes”

New portal pages to display upcoming and historical meeting and class registrations for a portal user.

Portals

WYSIWYG HTML Editor

New WYSIWYG HTML editor can be added to fields on CRM forms for easy styling and formatting of text to be displayed on the portal or in CRM wizards.

Profile Setup/Password Reset

New profile setup process validates if a given email address exists in the system and guides the user through available options (create a new profile, login, or send forgot password email). As part of this update, security question/answer fields have been deprecated.

Bug Fixes

  • Order Summary report query expanded to return orders for accounts.
  • State and country picklists updated everywhere used on portal to exclude inactive records.
  • Portal validation added to display error message on page if file to upload size exceeds maximum file size in CRM. Note: The implemented solution relies on HTML5. Earlier browsers that do not support HTML5 will continue to operate in the same manner (the portal hits an exception error and throws a trace message).
  • Evaluate Application Requirements workflow converted to manual workflow. Application requirements evaluation was moved to plugins in a prior release and occurs synchronously when the status of the order changes. The workflow can be used to manually trigger this process.
  • Meeting Registration Wizard code optimized to prevent timeouts.

Upgrade Considerations

System Data

  • Default Bad Debt and Default Bad Debt Allowance GL Accounts – new GL Account types added during implementation of the Write-off Wizard. As part of your upgrade, 2 new GL Account records must be created: Default Bad Debt and Default Bad Debt Allowance. On these 2 records, set Default Bad Debt and Default Bad Debt Allowance flags to “Yes” respectively. Conversely, these new flags must be set to “No” on all other GL Account records (by default the value will be null).
  • New Invoice Distribution records for existing payment data – as part of the upgrade to 2.7, SQL scripts must be run to retroactively create the new invoice distribution records tying payments to line items in order for the new e-commerce functionality to work on existing payment data.

.NET Framework Update

  • 2.7 requires a .NET Framework update for version 4.5.2.